In a Time of Burning Read online

  IN A TIME OF BURNING

  âK‰¶ ªè£‡®¼‚°‹ «ïó‹

  Published by Arc Publications

  Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

  www.arcpublications.co.uk

  Copyright in the poems © Cheran 2013

  Translation copyright © Lakshmi Holmström 2013

  Introduction copyright © Sascha Ebeling 2013

  Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2013

  Design by Tony Ward

  Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  978 1906570 32 3 (pbk)

  978 1906570 33 0 (hbk)

  978 1908376 49 7 (ebook)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The translator wishes to thank the poet Cheran for his endless patience and good humour. It has been a privilege to work with him for many years. Her thanks also go to Sascha Ebeling for useful discussions and for his introduction to this book, and to R. Pathmanabhan Iyer for providing several images of northern Sri Lanka, and for his support in other ways. She is especially grateful to the Arc team for their encouragement throughout this project.

  The publishers would like to thank Kannan Sundaram of Kalachuvadu Publications, Cheran’s publisher in Tamil, for providing the Tamil texts reproduced here, and Ben Styles for his painstaking laying out of this book.

  Some of the poems in this selection have appeared elsewhere: ‘Amma, Don’t Weep’ and ‘Midnight Mass’ in Chelva Kanaganayakam (ed.) Lutesong and Lament (Toronto: Tsar, 2001); ‘The Sea’ in Wake Magazine (Norwich: 2005); ‘I Could Forget All This’ in Modern Poetry in Translation 3, 6 (2006) and in Ravi Shankar et al. (eds), Language for a New Century (New York: 2008); ‘Amma, Don’t Weep’, ‘I Could Forget All This’, ‘Sunset’ and ‘Rajani’ in Lakshmi Holmström et al. (eds), The Rapids of a Great River (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009); ‘21 May 1986’ in Exiled Ink (Autumn / Winter 2009) and in Talisman (Summer / Autumn 2010); ‘A Second Sunrise’ and ‘Apocalypse’ in Haydens Ferry Review (Nov. 2010).

  A number of these poems also appeared in A Second Sunrise: Poems by Cheran, edited and translated by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling, (New Delhi: Navayana, 2012).

  Cover image: ‘Vavuniya Lake’ by Dr. Sivathas

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part, nor of the whole, of this book may take place in any form without the written permission of Arc Publications.

  Arc Publications ‘Visible Poets’ – Series Editor: Jean Boase-Beier

  CHERAN

  IN A TIME OF BURNING

  âK‰¶ ªè£‡®¼‚°‹ «ïó‹

  Translated by

  Lakshmi Holmström

  Introduced by

  Sascha Ebeling

  2013

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas.

  Each year, a dedicated committee of professionals selects books that are translated into English from a wide variety of foreign languages. We award grants to UK publishers to help translate, promote, market and champion these titles. Our aim is to celebrate books of outstanding literary quality, which have a clear link to the PEN charter and promote free speech and intercultural understanding.

  In 2011, Writers in Translation’s outstanding work and contribution to diversity in the UK literary scene was recognised by Arts Council England. English PEN was awarded a threefold increase in funding to develop its support for world writing in translation.

  www.englishpen.org

  CONTENTS

  Series Editor’s Note

  Translator’s Preface

  Introduction

  ñ¬ö

  •

  A Rainy Day

  èì™

  •

  The Sea

  HKî™

  •

  Parting

  è£ù™ õK

  •

  A Sea-Shore Song

  âù¶ Gô‹

  •

  My Land

  Þó‡ì£õ¶ ÅKò àîò‹

  •

  A Second Sunrise

  Üõ˜èœ Üõ¬ù„ ²†´‚ ªè£¡ø«ð£¶

  •

  When They Shot Him Dead

  ó£µõ ºè£IL¼‰¶ è®îƒèœ

  •

  Letters From an Army Camp

  â™ô£õŸ¬ø»‹ ñø‰¶Mìô£‹

  •

  I Could Forget All This

  ï£ƒèœ â¬î Þö‰«î£‹?

  •

  What Have We Lost?

  å¼ Cƒè÷ˆ «î£N‚° â¿Fò¶

  •

  A Letter To a Sinhala Friend

  Ü‹ñ£ Üö£«î

  •

  Amma, Don’t Weep

  ♫ô£¬ó»‹ «ð£™ Ü‰î «ïóˆF™ c ÜöM™¬ô

  •

  You Didn’t Weep That Day

  21 «ñ 1986

  •

  21 May 1986

  âK‰¶ªè£‡®¼‚°‹ «ïó‹

  •

  In a Time of Burning

  ó£TQ

  •

  Rajani

  °ö‰¬îèœ

  •

  Children

  áN

  •

  Apocalypse

  ªð£¿¶ ꣌‰î¶

  •

  Sunset

  «èœ

  •

  Ask

  Gø‹

  •

  Colour

  ïœOó¾Š Ì¬ê

  •

  Midnight Mass

  ªê‹ñE

  •

  Chemmani

  ñ„꣜

  •

  Cousin

  ÝŸøƒè¬óJ™

  •

  On the Banks of the River

  åO ðó¾‹ ªð¼‹ ªð£¿¶

  •

  A Season of Pervading Light

  ªî£¬ô«ðC ܬöŠ¹

  •

  Telephone Call

  ï‰F‚èì™

  •

  Nandikadal

  ñí™ ªõO

  •

  A Stretch of Sand

  Þ¼œ

  •

  Darkness

  èìL¡ è¬î

  •

  The Sea’s Story

  áN‚°Š H¡

  •

  After Apocalypse

  F¬í ñò‚è‹

  •

  Merged Landscapes

  â¬î  àù‚°ˆ F¼ŠHˆ î¼õ¶?

  •

  What Shall I Return to You?

  èó®J¡ è¬î

  •

  About a Bear

  è£ì£ŸÁ

  •

  Forest-Healing

  Translator’s Notes

  Biographical Notes

  SERIES EDITOR’S NOTE

  The ‘Visible Poets’ series was established in 2000, and sets out to challenge the view that translated poetry could or should be read without regard to the process of translation it had undergone. Since then, things have moved on. Today there is more translated poetry available and more debate on its nature, its status, and its relation to its original. We know that translated poetry is neither English poetry that has mysteriously arisen from a hidden foreign source, nor is it foreign poetry that h
as silently rewritten itself in English. We are more aware that translation lies at the heart of all our cultural exchange; without it, we must remain artistically and intellectually insular.

  One of the aims of the series was, and still is, to enrich our poetry with the very best work that has appeared elsewhere in the world. And the poetry-reading public is now more aware than it was at the start of this century that translation cannot simply be done by anyone with two languages. The translation of poetry is a creative act, and translated poetry stands or falls on the strength of the poet-translator’s art. For this reason ‘Visible Poets’ publishes only the work of the best translators, and gives each of them space, in a Preface, to talk about the trials and pleasures of their work.

  From the start, ‘Visible Poets’ books have been bilingual. Many readers will not speak the languages of the original poetry but they, too, are invited to compare the look and shape of the English poems with the originals. Those who can are encouraged to read both. Translation and original are presented side-by-side because translations do not displace the originals; they shed new light on them and are in turn themselves illuminated by the presence of their source poems. By drawing the readers’ attention to the act of translation itself, it is the aim of these books to make the work of both the original poets and their translators more visible.

  Jean Boase-Beier

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  This anthology is a small selection of poems by Cheran, one of the most important poets writing in Tamil today. Cheran, a Sri Lankan by birth, began writing at a time when the ethnic conflict within the country was rapidly escalating into civil war. His poetry charts the narrative of that war of more than three decades, and its aftermath. The narrative gains poignancy because it is set against a landscape once idyllic, now devastated. Yet this is not the only narrative in his body of work. Woven through are love poems which are often, even in his earliest work, shadowed by uncertainty and loss. Yet another theme is that of displacement, exile, and the experience of diaspora. Within such a range, the translator must read each poem afresh, but also as part of a larger story.

  Cheran steadfastly refused to align himself with any of the political groups within the Tamil community. This has enabled him speak out against all atrocities committed, both by the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil militants. He sees his role as chronicler and witness: the poet is often present within the frame of the poem, watching, commenting, indicting. The ‘voice’ in the war poems is finely judged: to reflect it is one of the challenges facing a translator. The rhetoric is often that of direct address, close to oral delivery; public and personal at the same time. Such a voice is noticeable in the elegies to friends who were killed; they are poems of personal grief, but also of communal mourning; testimonies to friendships and humanity. Many poems are records of specific events, some of them brutal in the extreme, but the specific becomes also a comment on the Sri Lankan war as a whole. Because of these complexities, Cheran’s poetry is both a vivid and moving account of a particular war, whose horrors have not yet come to an end, and at the same time of profound relevance to us, our times and the world we live in.

  Similar to the shifts in the voice are the shifts in pace and rhythm within the poems. Many of the early poems are lyrical, with lilting rhythms and carefully placed refrains, the sea poems echoing the rocking of waves. Yet often there will be a surprise ending, with a change of pace as well as voice. There are fine variations of pace, rhythm and tone in many of the war poems. For example, in Tamil, the first three verses of ‘I Could Forget All This’ are all part of one long sentence enacting a headlong flight along a road in Colombo full of terrible sights and scattered body-parts. The pace is equally headlong; the long sentence strings together surreal and fragmented images as they flash past. The last verse, by contrast, is one single poignant memory: the pace slows down with the conjunction aanaal, “but”. That aanaal stands alone, as if the reader is invited to take a breath and start again. The intense irony with which each detail of the tragic last scene is remembered, and dwelt upon, is in stark contrast to the broken images earlier in the poem.

  In his most recent work, the poems about the final events of the ethnic war, the carnage that took place in Nandikadal in the Northeast and the devastation of a land and its people, Cheran’s language and images are pared down as if his earlier tropes and forms are no longer adequate to deal with so great a change. His earliest published poem, ‘The Sea’, presents an almost visionary landscape in which the poet delights. By contrast, in these recent poems, even the sea shrinks, vanishes, drains away; the land is denuded and silenced. Cheran finds a wonderful trope to suggest the endless mourning of an entire people: the ritual of kaadaattru, “forest-healing” or appeasement, normally observed by the kinsfolk of the dead on the third day following a cremation. But now there is no healing of the land nor its people; there is no ritual of closure, there cannot be a kaadaattru.

  Cheran’s work is at the cutting edge of modern Tamil poetry, and his is a modern sensibility. But at the same time, there are resonances and echoes which connect him to a long poetic tradition that reaches back for two thousand years. There are many allusions and references to classical texts, almost in passing, throughout the poems. More importantly, there is a particular technique, a way of perceiving the landscape, often with the focus on a minute detail, or a single image which is at once real and symbolic. This attribute places him within an old poetics of landscape and natural imagery. Similarly, many of his war poems grow out of specific incidents and have the immediacy almost of reportage, of being aware of history in the making. At the same time, they are shadowed by the ancient elegies on dead warriors. The poet, scholar and translator, A. K. Ramanujan, recalls speaking to students at Jaffna University in 1983, and stopping, in the middle of a presentation on classical war poetry, at the thought of the recent dead. The ancient elegies, he realized, could have been written for them, now. Ramanujan writes, “…the past does not pass. It keeps providing paradigms and ironies for the present, or at least, that’s the way it seems.”

  Lakshmi Holmström

  INTRODUCTION

  We read of fire everywhere in Cheran’s poetry, but at the beginning there was water.1 Cheran’s earliest poems, written when he was still in his teens, reflect his continual fascination with the ocean, the singular and intriguing landscape of his childhood only a short distance from his village in the northernmost part of Sri Lanka. Together with his friends, he used to ride his bicycle to the sea shore at Keerimalai to spend the afternoons there, sitting on a bench under the huge old portia tree and chatting about anything under the sun. Or he would go to buy fish, the first catch, when the boats returned in the morning. As he himself remembers: “In the place where I was born, we had no rivers, no mountains, we only had the sea. So what defined my imagination when I grew up and when I became a writer and poet was the sea.”2 Cheran’s earliest published poem, which appeared in 1977 in an issue of the avant-garde literary magazine aptly named Alai (The Wave) bore a simple title: ‘The Sea’. Decades later, he reflects on his long-lasting relationship with the sea in his poem ‘The Sea’s Story’. To both poetry and the sea there is no end, he asserts, despite many of his verses that would suggest otherwise, his many visions of Sri Lanka’s war.

  Poetry was a natural form of expression for the young man, since he grew up in a house full of literature. Cheran’s father T. Rudhramoorthy (1927-1971) was employed as a senior government official, but he is remembered today as one of Sri Lanka’s most important modern poets and playwrights, a man known to all as Mahaakavi (The Great Poet). Cheran would listen to the gatherings of Tamil literati in his home discussing the latest developments of literature in Tamil as well as currents in world literature. No wonder then that Cheran read avidly, studied with passion the Tamil literary classics alongside Tolstoy, Walter Scott, Melville, Pushkin, and Hermann Hesse – all in Tamil translation.

  Soon Cheran’s seascapes came to be pervaded by the theme of roma
ntic love. Poems like ‘A Rainy Day’ and ‘Parting’ show the young heart searching for ways to come to terms with the mutability of relationships. To this day, Cheran’s poetry has retained a space for commenting on love and passion, both found and lost. His love poems are often tender and subtle, full of the realizations of vulnerability, where the poetic self is most at danger. And it is this subtlety of feeling lost and bewildered rather than anger that shines through, even when the words seem to become harsher, as in ‘What Shall I Return to You?’.

  And then, too soon, the fire started. Sri Lanka’s ethnic violence, Sinhalese fighting against Tamils, became ever more palpable from the late 1970s onwards. On the night of 1 June 1981, Sinhalese policemen set the Jaffna Public Library on fire. The fire destroyed over 95,000 Tamil books including many irreplaceable treasures and palm leaf manuscripts. As the famous Tamil historian and literary critic Karthigesu Sivathamby has explained: “In the Tamil psyche, the burning of the Jaffna public library in 1981 constitutes a major symbol of what was aimed at them – the total annihilation of all their intellectual resources. […] The burning of the library mobilized the entire population against the oppressive actions of the State.”3 Cheran captured this moment of cultural destruction in his poem ‘A Second Sunrise’. After the island-wide anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983, ethnic violence turned into a civil war. Poems like ‘When They Shot Him Dead’ and ‘I Could Forget All This’ record random acts of violence. The latter depicts the fate of a female worker on the tea plantations in the highlands who is raped and killed – with her children watching. The outbreak of the war is captured in the haunting lines of ‘Letters From an Army Camp’.