by Cheran
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ABOUT A BEAR [2009]
(èó®J¡ è¬î)
I told my son the tale
of a bear that arrived one morning,
an uninvited guest,
to drink tea with us.
A big fellow
with black spots mixed into
a white coat.
He walked up,
friendly, affable, surrounded
by flowers of gentleness.
His stride scarcely dislodged
even the breeze.
Sparrows and ring-necked doves
took one look and burst into laughter,
honey bees went into exile.
“Well, do I get any tea?” asked the bear.
What a question!
Just what we’re waiting for,
my son told him.
Scorching hot tea, wasn’t it?
We had to drink it slowly, slowly.
“What a miracle, water becoming tea,”
the bear laughed.
A gale arose from that laughter,
cooling our tea.
In one gulp, the bear
finished his tea and said
with a sigh,
“All that is left in my cup
is emptiness. What
shall we do with it?”
Leaving the question to squat
between us, like a stone,
the bear retreated
into its forest.
I asked my three-year-old son,
“What shall we do
with emptiness?”
“Leave it under a rock, Appa,”
the boy said.
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(FOREST-HEALING)
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FOREST-HEALING [2010]
(è£ì£ŸÁ)
We set out to heal
the still smouldering forest
not a bird in sight.
an empty sky
above
the sparrow’s flight-path
no one knows how
to gather the bones, scattered
on the ash-covered landless land
stretching to the far horizon
yet
what else can we do now
when an alien people
celebrate and dance
mocking our flowing tears
as we pour out the healing milk?
There is nothing now
to quench the heart’s fire
no witness
to the drop of blood
not yet dry
there is neither sea nor wind
for us to dissolve the ashes
proclaim an end
and close our eyes.
When will there be
a forest-healing?
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
‘A Second Sunrise’: In 1981, the Sri Lankan police burnt down the market area of Jaffna, including the public library with almost 95,000 books in Tamil, some of them rare.
‘Letters From an Army Camp’: This incident happened in 1983. The thirteen soldiers were taken to Kanatte, the main cemetery in Colombo, and that marked the beginning of the island-wide anti-Tamil pogroms that turned the conflict into civil war.
Yama is the god of death and is also known as Kala (Time), and Dharmaraja (King of Justice).
‘I Could Forget All This’: One of the worst pogroms targeting Tamils began in Colombo in 1983 and spread elsewhere around the country.
‘What Have We Lost?’: Ketheeswaran was a close friend of the poet; they had been fellow students at the University of Jaffna. He was shot dead by soldiers of the Sri Lankan army, and his body was burnt immediately.
‘A Letter to a Sinhala Friend’: Aadi is the fourth month in the Tamil calendar, mid-July to mid-August.
‘Amma, Don’t Weep’: A tali is a gold pendant symbolizing marriage. The “Pandyan king” is Nedunchezhiyan of the old Tamil epic Silappadikaaram, who accused Kovalan of stealing the queen’s pearl-filled anklet. When his wife, Kannagi, broke her own anklet, spurting rubies to demonstrate her husband’s innocence, the king realized his error and died immediately.
‘Rajani’: Rajani Thiranagama, a lecturer at Jaffna University, was shot dead in 1989, by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam).
‘Apocalypse’: Sivaramani, a gifted young poet, committed suicide in 1990, after burning all her work.
‘Chemmani’: Chemmani, a village located at the entrance to the city of Jaffna, contains a crematorium and cemetery used by Sri Lankan soldiers for executions and extra-judicial killings of Tamils. Hundreds of people who ‘disappeared’ were later found buried there.
‘Telephone Call’: In the final days of the war, a few of the LTTE leaders, along with their wives and children, were prepared to surrender. They waited for a promised telephone call from Sri Lankan government leaders, but it did not come. They walked forward with hoisted white flags, and were massacred.
‘Nandikadal’: Nandikadal was where the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the LTTE. Thousands of Tamil civilians were herded into a narrow spit of land by the sea, supposedly a no-fire zone, where a great many were shot down.
‘Merged Landscapes’: Early Tamil poetics classifies all the subject matter of poetry into two world-views, giving us two main genres, akam and puram. Akam refers to the inner world, and is, effectively, love poetry. Puram refers to the outer world and consists of public poetry, including poems about war and the death of warriors. Both akam and puram are further divided into five main types, each associated with a particular landscape, a technique known as tinai. The poetics also allowed, in some cases, for tinai mayakkam, the harmonious movement, within the poem, as one landscape merges into another.
For Cheran, tinai is more than landscape; it stands for a whole genre. Here, in this series, entitled ‘Tinai Mayakkam’, (Merged Landscapes), he is also drawing on the medieval Karnatic devotional music tradition, where the poet-singer leaves his muttirai, signature, in the last line of the lyric.
‘Forest-Healing’: Kaadatru means, literally, forest-healing, and is the ritual performed on the third day following a cremation, when the kinsfolk of the dead go to the cremation ground (often located in the forest) and make libations of milk and other foods, in order to heal the forest.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
CHERAN, one of the best known and widely influential of Tamil poets, was born in 1960 in the sea-side village of Alaveddy, near Jaffna, in Sri Lanka. His father, T. Rudhramurthy, (1927-71) known widely as ‘Mahakavi’, the Great Poet, was one of the leading literary figures in modern Tamil writing from Sri Lanka. Cheran grew up with a grounding in the Tamil classics, but from his early years, he also became fa
miliar with the works of the younger, left-leaning poets who frequented their house. He graduated from Jaffna University with a degree in Biological Sciences. These were the years when ethnic conflict and civil unrest in Sri Lanka spread alarmingly. The Tamil people were outraged when Sinhala policemen set fire to the Jaffna Public Library in 1981 destroying over 95,000 books, some of them irreplaceable; but what followed was possibly even worse. In July 1983 one of the worst pogroms against the Tamils began in Colombo and spread all over Sri Lanka. After this there were acts of violence and atrocities which were experienced daily by the Tamils.
In 1984 Cheran joined the staff of the Saturday Review, an English language weekly that was known for its stand on press freedom, and fundamental rights and justice for minorities. As a poet and a political journalist, Cheran refused to align himself with any of the several Tamil militant groups that were active in Jaffna at the time. As a result he was harassed both by the Sri Lankan army and, later, by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He left for the Netherlands in 1987 where he completed a Masters degree in Development Studies. Returning to Colombo two and a half years later, he helped to start the Tamil newspaper, Sarinihar, published by the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality. He was advised to leave the country yet again, in 1993. Cheran went to Toronto, Canada where he completed his PhD. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. His academic interests focus on the study of ethnicity, identity, migration and international development. Side by side with his academic career, he has continued to write his poetry and to contribute to literary and political journals.
Cheran’s early poems, 1975-2000 were collected under the title Nii Ippozhudhu Irangum Aaru (The River into Which You Now Descend) (Nagercoil: Kalcchuvadu, 2000). This was followed by Miindum Kadalukku (Once Again the Sea) (Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu, 2004) and Kaadaatru (Forest-Healing) (Nagercoil: Kalachuvadu, 2011). In addition to these books, he co-edited, along with three others, a landmark anthology of Tamil political poetry, Maranatthul Vaazhvoom (We Will Live Amidst Death) (Coimbatore: Vidiyal, 1985). Some of his most recent academic publications include The Sixth Genre: Memory, History and the Tamil Diaspora Imagination (Colombo: Marga Institute, 2001); History and the Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context, co-edited with Darshan Ambalavanar and Chelva Kanaganayakam (Toronto: TSAR publications, 2007); New Demarcations: Essays in Tamil Studies, co-edited with Darshan Ambalavanar and Chelva Kanaganayakam (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2008) and Pathways of Dissent: Tamil Nationalism in Sri Lanka (ed.) (New Delhi: Sage, 2009).
LAKSHMI HOLMSTRÖM is a writer and translator. She has translated short stories, novels and poetry by the major contemporary writers in Tamil. Her most recent books are Fish in a Dwindling Lake, a translation of short stories by Ambai (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2012); A Second Sunrise: Poems by Cheran, translated and edited by Lakshmi Holmström & Sascha Ebeling (New Delhi: Navayana, 2012); The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2009), of which she is a co-editor; and The Hour Past Midnight (New Dehli: Zubaan, 2009), a translation of a novel by Salma. Her translations of poetry by Tamil women, Wild Girls, Wicked Words, is forthcoming. In 2000 she received the Crossword Book Award for her translation of Karukku by Bama (2nd edn. New Dahli: OUP, 2012); in 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai’s short stories, In a Forest, a Deer (New Dehli: OUP, 2006); and she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada, in 2008. She is one of the founding trustees of SALIDAA (South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive).
SASCHA EBELING is Associate Professor of Tamil and South Indian Studies in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, USA. Before moving to Chicago, he taught at the Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, from which he also holds a PhD in Tamil literature. He is the author of Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in Nineteenth-Century South India (New York: SUNY Press, 2010) and essays on pre-modern and modern Tamil literature. He is currently writing a book on contemporary Tamil literature from a global perspective.
Also available in the Arc Publications
‘VISIBLE POETS’ SERIES (Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier)
No. 1 – MIKLÓS RADNÓTI (Hungary)
Camp Notebook
Translated by Francis Jones, introduced by George Szirtes
No. 2 – BARTOLO CATTAFI (Italy)
Anthracite
Translated by Brian Cole, introduced by Peter Dale (Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation)
No. 3 – MICHAEL STRUNGE (Denmark)
A Virgin from a Chilly Decade
Translated by Bente Elsworth, introduced by John Fletcher
No. 4 – TADEUSZ RÓZEWICZ (Poland)
recycling
Translated by Barbara Bogoczek (Plebanek) & Tony Howard, introduced by Adam Czerniawski
No. 5 – CLAUDE DE BURINE (France)
Words Have Frozen Over
Translated by Martin Sorrell, introduced by Susan Wicks
No. 6 – CEVAT ÇAPAN (Turkey)
Where Are You, Susie Petschek?
Translated by Cevat Çapan & Michael Hulse, introduced by A. S. Byatt
No. 7 – JEAN CASSOU (France)
33 Sonnets of the Resistance
With an original introduction by Louis Aragon. Translated by Timothy Adès, introduced by Alistair Elliot
No. 8 – ARJEN DUINKER (Holland)
The Sublime Song of a Maybe
Translated by Willem Groenewegen, introduced by Jeffrey Wainwright
No. 9 – MILA HAUGOVÁ (Slovakia)
Scent of the Unseen
Translated by James & Viera Sutherland-Smith, introduced by Fiona Sampson
No. 10 – ERNST MEISTER (Germany)
Between Nothing and Nothing
Translated by Jean Boase-Beier, introduced by John Hartley Williams
No. 11 – YANNIS KONDOS (Greece)
Absurd Athlete
Translated by David Connolly, introduced by David Constantine
No. 12 – BEJAN MATUR (Turkey)
In the Temple of a Patient God
Translated by Ruth Christie, introduced by Maureen Freely
No. 13 – GABRIEL FERRATER (Catalonia / Spain)
Women and Days
Translated by Arthur Terry, introduced by Seamus Heaney
No. 14 – INNA LISNIANSKAYA (Russia)
Far from Sodom
Translated by Daniel Weissbort, introduced by Elaine Feinstein (Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation)
No. 15 – SABINE LANGE (Germany)
The Fishermen Sleep
Translated by Jenny Williams, introduced by Mary O’Donnell
No. 16 – TAKAHASHI MUTSUO (Japan)
We of Zipangu
Translated by James Kirkup & Tamaki Makoto, introduced by Glyn Pursglove
No. 17 – JURIS KRONBERGS (Latvia)
Wolf One-Eye
Translated by Mara Rozitis, introduced by Jaan Kaplinski
No. 18 – REMCO CAMPERT (Holland)
I Dreamed in the Cities at Night
Translated by Donald Gardner, introduced by Paul Vincent
No. 19 – DOROTHEA ROSA HERLIANY (Indonesia)
Kill the Radio
Translated by Harry Aveling, introduced by Linda France
No. 20 – SOLEÏMAN ADEL GUÉMAR (Algeria)
State of Emergency
Translated by Tom Cheesman & John Goodby, introduced by Lisa Appignanesi (PEN Translation Award)
No. 21 – ELI TOLARETXIPI (Spain / Basque)
Still Life with Loops
Translated by Philip Jenkins, introduced by Robert Crawford
No. 22 – FERNANDO KOFMAN (Argentina)
The Flights of Zarza
Translated by Ian Taylor, introduced by Andrew Graham Yooll
No. 23 – LARISSA MILLER (Rus
sia)
Guests of Eternity
Translated by Richard McKane, introduced by Sasha Dugdale (Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation)
No. 24 – ANISE KOLTZ (Luxembourg)
At the Edge of Night
Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, introduced by Caroline Price