K S Ramaswami Sastri, a retired district judge, used to sparkle at literary gatherings in Madras in the 1950s and 60s. He was one of the first to write a book in Tamil on Rabindranath Tagore. As a boy, Sastri is said to have been blessed by three extraordinary men, Bharati, Swami Vivekananda and Tagore himself.For nearly twenty years after Tagore won the Nobel Prize for a thematic book of poems, poets all over India desired their work also be rendered in English. If Tagore can, why can’t I? Now there is greater awareness about the limits of aspirations. But any Indian poet with a fair body of work would like to be known outside his or her language and English translations continue to be done.
In recent times, that indefatigable translator Dr K S Subramanian has succeeded in getting two anthologies of contemporary Tamil poets published by reputed institutions. He has also translated a whole book of poems of Sirpi Balasubramanian into English. S Vaidheeswaran has a very satisfying book of his poems translated into English — Fragrance of Rain. Bharati continues to be a cherished goal of translators. Reputed academics to laymen have tried their hand at the poet who breathed his last in 1921 under not very cheerful circumstances. Many of these translations make one feel the poet be left alone.
Bharati’s poems in English translation appear in the documentary by Amshan Kumar for an international audience. As long as he was alive, Dr Krishna Srinivas published English translations of poets from all over the world and Tamil was a language which appeared very frequently in his periodical The Poet. Not many know that Krishna Srinivas rendered in English a whole book of Perumkaviko Vaa Mu Sethuraman!
With few exceptions, poetry books in translation are selffinanced. A book is only the start of a long, uncertain journey. How to get the book seen by readers, let alone actually read by them? How to get critical attention? Once in a while, a sympathetic critic does pick up a book. It happened for the anthology edited by M S Ramaswamy. The Calcuttaprinted book was an embarrassment with an unbelievable number and kinds of misprints. All said and done, for any poet, merely being known to a handful of friends leaves an unsatisfactory feeling. The poet would like to be recognised as a poet by an unmotivated, impersonal reader. But the English periodicals of India with wide readership have no room for any original, creative work. They may thrive on literary gossip but a poem or a short story doesn’t interest them.
Under such circumstances, The Indian Literature of the Sahitya Akademi devoting a substantial portion of the issue to contemporary Tamil poetry is noteworthy. Again, The Indian Literature is not a generalinterest magazine. The readership is predictable. But this is one periodical in India that offers a forum for translations. Twentyfive years ago, editor Keshav Malik brought out a special issue of IL of substantial depth and weight — over 400 pages.
The current issue of The Indian Literature (No 254) features some 35 women poets, twenty of them representing Eelam, the land mass of Sri Lanka the Tamilspeaking population of the island feel as their own native land. Most of the Indian poets are familiar names. The works have been selected by Kutti Revathi and N Kalyan Raman. Kutti Revathi, in her introduction, says: “The poems have been selected giving importance to the politics they advance, bearing in mind the language used and the manner of animation.” Quite a few of the poems far exceed this objective and the Eelam poems offer a totally indescribable experience. Footnotes are generally weakening appendages to creative works but in the case of Aazhiyaal’s The Mannamperis they add to the horror of the experience. The poems stand as poems though they are translations. That is to the credit of the translator, Kalyan Raman.