3 Poems – K. Satchidanandan (Trans. from Malayalam, India)

In Memory of a Swedish Evening

(To Lars Lundqvist)

With steady hands
you went on pouring the
ruddy autumn in my goblet.

You read your poems
bright like the maple leaves,
filling the air like a Brahms symphony,
-sipping one mouthful for each line.

I translated your birds and trees into
my birds and trees.

Nouns revealed their core.
Verbs were inert.

There was a meadow
in your coat pocket.
I called out to the Western Ghats,
as if it were a hungry sheep.

The wind was turning
the pages of an apple tree.
I inhaled my childhood.

As I looked on
you turned into a green train.
I boarded it and  whistled like the rain.
We left behind the church of  the chill.
Words rubbed against words.

When beasts get into language
the dead burst into laughter.

2005
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I Can Talk To The Dead

I can talk to the dead:
dead men, trees, rivers.
Sometimes I see my ancestors:
My granny flies on proverbs,
my grandpa crosses rivers on riddles.
Some swing on quartrains and couplets,
some ride chessmen.
Some play in circles, ploughing fields,
some pluck the betel leaves of heaven.

Sometimes I come across my dead friends.
They have not changed much; only
their bodies have turned into glass.
We can see their hearts inside.
No, they have not stopped, they beat
faster than our hearts.
They cry in the voice of drizzles and
laugh softly like falling leaves.
they are not very different from us,
the so-called living; only sometimes
they choose to fly. Their desires, anxieties,
disappointments: everything is like our own.

Death is not the end of doubts;
questions still haunt them.
But they lost their language long ago.
Their sun rises like a skull in the east.
Mushrooms grow on their foreheads.

When I am talking to myself,
I am really talking to the dead.
When I am talking to you too.
Sun has set in our language.

1988

.

Misplaced Objects

In a flash I recall all the
misplaced objects of my life:
the ten lambent marbles
forgotten under the dry leaves
beneath the mango tree,
the umbrella left behind in Apu’s saloon
the day rain failed to turn up,
the pen that dived from the pocket
while climbing the cashewnut tree
on the way back from the village school,
the sky-blue shirt remaining
in a hotel wardrobe in Riga,
the long list of books lent, never returned,
some unredeemed debts, a few unrequited loves.

Forgetfulness alone never forgot me.
As I fell in love I began misplacing my heart,
metaphors as I began to scribble poetry.

Later, looking at the hills, I began to feel
the sky had misplaced them and
the clouds had misplaced the rainbow.

I have recently begun to suspect
this very earth with us on it
has been misplaced by God.
In the order He recalls, He claims back:
woods, rivers, us.

2006

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Translated from Malayalam by the author

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K. Satchidanandan (b.28 May 1946) is a major Indian poet writing in Malayalam, a critic writing in Malayalam as well as English, academic, editor, translator and playwright. Born in central Kerala, he was a Professor of English and Editor of Indian Literature, the journal of the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Literature) and the executive head of the Akademi for a decade (1996-2006) He has to his credit 22 collections of poetry besides many selections, 16 collections of translations of poetry and 19 collections of essays on literature, language and society-three of them in English- besides four plays and three travel narratives. He has 24 collections of his poetry in translation in 16 languages including Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, English, French, German and Italian. He has introduced several poets like Garcia Lorca, Alexander Block, Voznesensky, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Zbignew Herbert, Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai to Malayalam readers through translations and studies besides a lot of Black, Latin American and Indian poetry. He has also travelled widely, writing and lecturing.Satchidanandan has received sixteen literary awards besides many honours like the Knighthood of the Order of Merit from the Government of Italy and the Medallion of Friendship from the Government of Poland.

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