Where east, west colludes in verse
CHENNAI: Representing the generation of contemporary poets from the sliver of Kerala state on the west coast, Malayalam poets Veerankutty and Anitha Thampi were among the stalwarts invited for the Poets Translating Poets event by Goethe Institut recently. While Veerankutty is a prominent environmental poet who won the KSK Thalikkulam Award for his work, Thampi’s accolades include two works of poetry including Muttamadikumbol (Sweeping the Courtyard, 2004) which was widely acclaimed. CE caught up with them to know more on what was lost (or not) in translation.
“I belong to the generation of poets who started writing after the 1990s…after the concept of modernism rooted into literature,” explains Veerankutty. “Most poems used to be centred on humans. But now the concept is that even all things in nature have rights, a voice, and have a right to speak. It was always a challenge to write something different from the modernist vein of the 90s. But most poets were successful in doing so, albeit in small clusters. They used silence to counter noise, bringing in a meditative nature to their poetry.”
Veerankutty and Thampi worked in collaboration with German poets Nicolai Kobus, Ulf Stolterfoht and Hungarian-German poet Orsolya Kalasz. So how was it like to translate from a language they weren’t familiar with? “Nicolai hails from the same generation as ours, and it was easier to relate to his poetry,” says Thampi.
“But Orsolya hails from a very rooted Hungarian-German background, and had a deep emotional connect to it. It was a nice exercise for poets to converse between themselves with the help of someone who knows both languages since in poetry, it’s not the meaning but the syllable and sound that has more bearing.”
She states that Ulf’s work was the most challenging. “It went beyond translation and challenged us to understand the poet behind the poem. I don’t think there’s anyone who writes in Malayalam the way Ulf does!”
Veerankutty concurs, adding that the project itself helped widen the horizons of poetry and also the experience. “Though there were interlinear translators, poets themselves sit together and collaborate to share experience which brought out the respective poems so we minimise on what gets lost in translation. Every word used in a poem has different connotation,” he explains.
Thampi herself found Orsoyla’s works riveting. “Personally I feel that over the years, German poetry has become less lyrical and more matter-of-fact style. But I was surprised by Orsolya’s work; it has a large emotional component, which is surprising in a post-war poet. I found her works so captivating because she believes that Hungarian was a language of the heart, while German was the language of the mind,” she grins.
Both stalwarts believe in the evergreen nature of poetry. “Poetry will survive as long as there is language. If it still survived where the atom bomb fell, then it will continue to survive. It’s society’s purest form of expression,” smiles Thampi, while Veerankutty invokes poet Yevgeny Yevshenko as he says, “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all boundaries.”