Asian Heritage Month — May — opens with a review of In Our Translated World: Contemporary Global Tamil Poetry (TSAR, $24).
This volume of English translations of Tamil-language poets from Sri Lanka, India and worldwide, including Canada, introduces a corpus of literary gems. But it’s also an exemplary study of how beautiful poetry emerges despite painful politics.
The book is the brainchild of Chelva Kanaganayakam, who passed away Nov. 22, 2014, on the day of his induction into the Royal Society of Canada, a laurel honouring his stellar contributions to the study of post-colonial literature and the translation of Tamil works.
Tamil himself, Kanaganayakam also embraced a Canadian identity, resulting in an apolitical attentiveness to and ecumenical acceptance of poetry by Tamils of Hindu, Muslim and Christian backgrounds.
The rewards of editor Kanaganayakam’s cosmopolitan approach are richly evident in this text, midwifed into being by translators Anushiya Ramaswamy, Maithili Thayanithy and M.L. Thangappa.
In his intro, Kanaganayakam tells us “Tamils have endured, suffered and flourished in a translated world.” He finds “it is not time but space that shapes consciousness for Sri Lankan poets.”
In this sense, Tamil poets resemble Canadian poets, more concerned with geography, with locating a Just Society, than with historical givens.
However, this collection suggests that Tamil poets are less interested in metaphor than most Anglo-Canadian poets and more interested in rhetoric, which is often, wrongly, given a bad rap because of the term’s description of the hot-air speech of politicos.
Yet, poetry is, classically, a branch of rhetoric, and so it remains a pillar of the art, along with imagery (metaphor) and musicality (cadence and/or rhythm).
Tamil poets remind us of the awesome vitality of rhetoric, the linguistic texture of philosophy.
See, for instance, the last stanza of Alari’s poem: “… when someone is killed / what’s the big deal? / Apart from the fact that / Someone else will be murdered.”
The strength of the poem is not in metaphor but in juxtaposition.
When Tamil poets use metaphors, they do so sparingly, to stress ideas imminent in a poem’s syntax: “When the lover became my wife / and children appeared / time, now a gale, swept me asunder / like fish out of water.”
Mu. Ponnambalam’s grammar reveals, with compact force, the storm of time that overtakes us once autobiography becomes the fount of genealogy.
One poem that conjoins metaphor and rhetoric to great effect is Solaikili’s A Baby in Cap and Boots: “There will be a time / when babies will leap / out of wombs wearing … / Military caps, trousers, boots, moustaches / A knife at the hips.”
Moreover, “coconut trees will bear / bombs in bunches. …// If you planted watermelon / land mines will sprout.”
An apocalyptic vision of civil war and/or official oppression is given pastoral expression.
Isai’s philosophical verse exists as rhetoric, or vice versa: “Hunger is widely accepted / as sorrow number one. …/ It is the conflict between / one sorrow and another / we call history.”
Strangely — or not — Tamil verse has the same blunt elegance that constitutes classical Greek drama: “my brother stepped on (father’s corpse) / to reach for the light-switch.”
Kalapria also says — shades of Euripides and Sophocles — “It was convenient for mother. / She hid the money she had earned / in the lap of the corpse.”
Leena Manimekalai’s feminist poem is a pithy but universal condemnation of misogyny: “Maybe I was ten / when I first heard the word / whore. / I had no breasts then. …// When I returned late from school …, / when there was too much eyeshadow / on my eyes, / when in love I acquiesced / or rejected, / … when I became older, / many reasons / to be called a whore. / And now I am a whore / for writing poetry.”
The other side of rhetoric is wit, and Tamil poets have such in spades.
See Mukunth Nagarajan’s lyric Children Playing, which, despite its title, is not child’s play but adult-oriented.
Anthologies and translations enlarge the availability of good poets and poems. Kanaganayakam’s fine compilation accomplishes this aim.