The Poetry of Penniya: the task of the translator

By Dr. Sumathy Sivamohan
-a summary of the talk given at the launch of Ithu Nathiyin Naal by Penniya (Sirahununi 2008) organized by WERC, Colombo, on 13th March, 2009.




Often when I read Tamil literature, I read as a translator. This is an involuntary act, not a self conscious one. As I read my mind begins to wonder/wander about how this could be translated into English. Thus, when I read Penniya’s poetry too in her most recent collection of poetry, Ithu Nathiyin Naal translated as This Day of the River, to a non-Tamil speaking audience, the translator in me was out there, working furiously. Why do I say this here? Is it to explain my own endeavour of translating her poetry? That is of course a part of it, but in stressing my role as translator, I want to point to the possibilities and politics of the act of reading and the act of translating. The possibilities of reading as a translator throws up the question of how one translates even within the boundaries of one language. For instance, when one reads, one translates not only from say Tamil to English, but also from Tamil to Tamil. I am not going to write about the political and theoretical implications of this, or even of my own reading of her work, but will just mark the introduction of her poems to an English speaking audience with the idea that her poetry, both in my own reading and in my translations, are marked by that encounter between her and me.

We both come with our own histories and cultural baggage. If I were to talk about my own history, as reader and translator, all that I can say is that, my familiarity with contemporary Tamil writing is not comprehensive. Nor is my understanding of Tamil literature located in a study of the poetic conventions of ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ poetry. My engagement with Tamil poetry and women’s writing in Tamil is centred largely on contemporary works that deal with the national question, the ethnic conflict, women’s issues etc. My ongoing translation of the novel mm by Shoba Shakthi, soon to be serialized on Sahasamvada, speaks to my ongoing engagement with contemporary Tamil literature. Contemporary writing in Tamil by Muslim and Tamil writers is persistently about the ethnic conflict and the ethnicisation of conflict, war, displacement and related happenings. They perform the nation in multiple ways, hegemonically, radically or subversively. Women’s poetry in Tamil has grown along this trajectory, parting ways at times, but nevertheless shaped and informed by the longings and subversions of the nation and of community. Women’s writing in other ways has been shaped by the internationalizing of women’s issues as well. These two trends have been the most persistent in shaping women’s writing in Tamil, most particularly those from the north and east. As my own familiarity with Tamil literature arises from this engagement, it’s through this prism that I seek out the meanings of a work. Penniya’s poetry emphasizes women’s issues, fashioning a distinctively female voice for poetry. Yet, her work is also quite distinctive from other writings in Tamil. When I first stumbled upon Penniya’s poetry, I was a little non-plussed. I know little about Penniya that is deeply biographical. I know that she is also M. I. Najeefa and is from Kathankudy, a Muslim town in the East. I have read her first collection of poetry, called, En Kavithaiku Ethirthal Endru Per which I have renamed in English, Call it defiance. The poetic conventions did suggest a close working with contemporary Tamil poetry that is avowedly feminist, but her voice is not that of protest, but of a critical stancing of herself. Her poetry is self consciously radical at times and at other times posits a shadowy female subjectivity. A stanza from the title poem of her first collection, which I found tellingly poignant is as follows:

Among the sons
of fathers, who have broken faith
with humanity,
I look for just one
to be loved, to love in return.
I see none. Yes,
I sever my ties
with this world
with its monstrousness
and its many dominations.

But what is really remarkable in her and that puts her in the same category as that of Sivaramani in some ways, whose subversion of the nation is to this day unequalled in Tamil poetry, is her boldness of approach in speaking about filial, marital and sexual relations. It can be seen in the poem the poem ‘Nihalthal’ (Happening or Event) most expressively. Her poetry adopts a clinical and critical perspective, but not one without emotion, paradoxical as it may sound. Her greatest strength is her conceptualization of the woman as the radical opposite of man. Her conceptualization of man and woman within heterosexual relations locates this radical difference within the family. The poem ‘Kulanthaihal’ (Children/babies/progeny) I would see as almost foundational in this respect. It leads to a description of the family as necessarily fraught and problematic. Her poems are at times like parables, distanced and narrative, like the ‘Messenger’, ‘Nighttime Worker’and the poem written in the tradition of her-stories, ‘Unwritten Histories’ and at other times, subjective like the remarkable poem ‘The Colour Purple.’ In translating her work I was also prompted to ask questions, questions about the enforced limits that Penniya places upon herself. When I first read the deceptively simple ‘Night time worker’ (‘Iravu Nerath Thollilai’), I was intrigued by the fact that the first time she mentions labour (not women’s work, but the worker as a generic term) she casts him as a male. This troubled me a great deal, for in teasing out the possible meanings in her work, the metaphor of night time work, prompted me to ask the question, who actually works at night? For me the figure of the prosititute (or in more politically correct terminology, sex worker) is irrevocable here. The sexual and political implications of night time work cannot be wished away easily.
At night, he is once more,
a night time worker,

The subversion of middle class womanhood, encircled by its assumptions nevertheless, points to the contradictions in Penniya’s poetry that I hope she seeks to unravel as she continues to speak for herself and of women. These are the questions I feel that inform my translations as well, some of which I present here, representing here the range in her poetic sensibility, though some of her more radical work is yet to be translated. In reading and translating her work and other people’s work, I hope I can engage with the politics of production of Tamil literature today nationally, internationally and transnationally interactively as a dialogue.



1.
Unwritten Histories

Histories
etched in blood and sweat
are not read by men, nor
written by them.
they are written on the walls
of bedrooms and cooking rooms, by
phantoms that work like robots,
for posterity, not to be destroyed.
They speak volumes of history,
but they do not know that.

Their lives are bounded
by performing ceaseless tasks
spreading creaseless beds
and inventing novelties
in the kitchen for consumption.
Glass bangles jingle; they
gossip of their achievements-proud.
High rising walls
blind their sight;
yet these eyes,
shaped like fish,
do not know that.

The modesty of the bowed head;
What lies beneath its order?
What is its politics? I do not know
for how long, for how many more decades
the weight of the broad shoulders
and sinewy arms
of mankind will be borne by
the beauty extolled
in the bowed heads of
doe-eyed women.

2.
The Messenger

On a dark night,
when the clouds had covered
the brightness of the moon,
He, Messenger, arrived,
in a blaze of brilliant light.

He looked at the sad
shrunken face of the woman,
the Goddess, offered her a drink
of glad water, and carried her
off to the world below.

She liked what she saw
in that world.
It held her up.
She floated high.
Messenger,
lay her on his lap, lulling her
to sleep and sung to her
a song she said she liked.

When the Goddess
opened her eyes,
she saw by her side.
the Messenger.
He was still singing; flinging at her
a string of abuse.

Dog!
Wretch! Curse on you,
You ill-omened hag!

3.
Night time Worker

He gets up at night
to do his part,
this night time worker
fells trees
prepares food, for himself
and for others—for no call
no wages.

At other times,
he is the laundry man.
And again, for a few moments,
he is among children,
and like them, becomes a child.

In the breaks between
the breathless hours of work,
he makes tea, for all and sundry,
serving with a smile, by
nature enforc’d.

At night, he is once more,
a night time worker.

I wonder,
Why does he, this worker,
toil in the dark,
He, who does not serve himself ?




4.
The colour purple

On the day I wore
purple and was beautiful,
I filled myself with thoughts of love,
and its subtle beauty, bounded
by a boundless dreaming
of a life to come, to happen;
a day crowned with dreams of love
and a prince who gives the lie to
all my dreaming
take possession of the vast expanse
of my life.
I wore purple.
When I saw its colour,
the scent of burning incense and the smell of his body
the recurring lines of a song I knew,
spread
the deep-sown seeds of love, of slavery,
in the wind.

Today,
purple is the colour of hate.
Lovely thoughts of love
could never fill the void
spreading through the
timespace of my life.
It did not know all this before.
Today,
shades of mauve seep illegibly through
the empty pages of
lifescapes, blurring words,
erasing meaning,
like those words
written before, on life’s spaces,
bereft of meaning.

These days, purple is the
colour of hate and my gown
slowly crumbles,
in the blowing wind.