Tag: Tamil

Of beggars and kings: The Abyss by Jeyamohan

This is not a novel that eases you in slowly, gradually revealing its excesses. Rather, the truth of the situation at hand is immediately on display. Grotesque and disturbing, the first few chapters can make for uncomfortable reading. It is not simply the event taking place, but the attitudes that surround it, the relationships and circumstances that are swiftly and bluntly made clear. In a hut above an expanse of rice paddies in Tamil Nadu, a woman is giving birth. She looks like a “strange life form,” a large misshapen creature with one good strong arm and leg on one side, shrivelled limbs on the other. Only one eye, holes for a nose, and a large mouth grace her bald, flattened head. This is Muthammai and the child, equally disfigured, will be her eighteenth, yet to Pothivelu Pandaram, her owner, she is nothing but an “item”—albeit an especially valuable one, a cash cow bred to produce offspring to add to the pool of beggars that are the staple of his trade. However, no matter how grim it may seem at the outset (and at some level always is), The Abyss by Tamil writer Jeyamohan is a profoundly human story filled with selfish motives , moral ambiguity,  and affectionate, if dark, humour.

Pandaram, the central protagonist projects the image of the successful middle class man. He has a devoted wife, three beautiful daughters, and is a faithful devotee of Murugan, the handsome Hindu God of war, patron of Tamil culture. But the unseemly source of his  income is an open secret—it rests in his stock of disfigured and disabled men, women, and children. It’s a business that places him in the company of some pretty disreputable characters, but his family, in so far as they are exposed to it, seem to be surprisingly at ease with it all. And when two of his friends joke with him at the local bathing pond he is quick to defend his trade on spiritual terms:

“Stop it, Kochu Pillai. It is no laughing matter. There are all kinds of souls, great and little. Now, we say Mahatma Gandhi, yes? What’s that? Maha-atma. A great soul. That’s because his atma was great. Ours, on the other hand, is a smaller soul, a smaller atma. We must respect other souls like ours. Love them. But there are souls even smaller than ours. Those we must protect. Look after. Now, take these crea­tures. These items. But for us, who do they have? The whole lot would be out on the streets, hungry and begging. They’d starve to death. But now they are under us, so they don’t need to worry about a thing. They get enough to eat, a roof over their heads, medicines if they are sick.” Pandaram took a dip in the pond and rose.

It sounds like a reasonable, if twisted, compassion at play, but it’s not. It’s a form of slavery. As he is shuffling his beggars off to a temple or festival, or deciding which one to sell or trade, Pandaram will remind himself—and others—that he is dealing with beings who have “no souls, no brains.” The question then becomes: Who are the “freaks” in this system? Whose humanity is deserving of consideration and value? As we witness the corruption, hypocrisy, and social demands of the world Pandaram frequents, while at the same time getting to know the beggars and the reality they create for themselves, it’s is not such a difficult matter to answer.

Although they vary in the extent of their infirmities and the degree to which they can engage and communicate, the beggars are no fools. And they are under no illusion about the precariousness of their existences, but they know how to “perform,” how to squirrel away coins to purchase snacks and beedis (thin, hand-rolled cigarettes), and even how to manipulate their minders when needed. Along with Muthammai and her infant son, there’s Mangandi Samy with his legless, one-armed body and small head who doesn’t speak but sings his own made-up songs of love and loss.  And there’s Ramappan, a Kannadiga leper, and Ahmedkutty, a literate Muslim with testicles grossly enlarged by elephantiasis, and an assorted cast of other fantastically distorted and disadvantaged folk. They spar with one another, joke, fret, and when one of them longs for a fancy feast, they conspire to arrange it for him. More than simply marginalized, the lives they live may be limited but their dreams are not, and they make the best of what they do have, commenting on their state—not to mention that of greater society—with wit and biting, black humour.

Away from the temple steps, cops seek bribes, priests and pilgrims play lip service to faith, and other dealers in the beggar breeding and bartering trade engage in unspeakable cruelty that far exceeds anything our protagonist will entertain. Yet, Pandaram is the complicated knot in this story. He is self-centred, caste conscious, proud, and dishonest, but there are anxieties that keep him on edge. His eldest daughter is overdue to be married, and the expenses and negotiations required to assure a suitable match (regardless of what the prospective bride and groom might want) are excessive. Meanwhile, his middle daughter is seeing a rebel on the sly. And his youngest, his favourite, demands favours he cannot refuse. His mood swings wildly from cocky confidence to tears of despair as he regularly runs to the temple to thank Murugan for his graces or beseech Him for relief. And as things start to really unravel, one can almost feel sorry for him. But not too much.

Translator Sucharita Ramachandran’s Note which closes out the novel—but probably would be best read first—sheds light on aspects of Jeymohan’s storytelling in this rich, multi-faceted tale that do not easily make the transition into English. The original, she tells us:

is a novel with a remarkable degree of polyphony. While the novel itself was written in a register that straddled Tamil and Malayalam, it uses other languages, registers and dialects to differentiate between various char­acters. For example, Ahmedkutty speaks a Tamil–Malayalam peculiar to Muslims. A minor character speaks only Kannada. Many of the characters lapse into English when they become class conscious. The characters liberally use puns, proverbs and film songs to communicate their thoughts and feelings, and sometimes switch between languages to make a point.

She tries to preserve as much of the linguistic nuances as possible through a variety of means that read unobtrusively in translation and I was pleased to note that, apart from some very specific terms included in a brief glossary, South Indian place names, food items, and other customary features were not unnecessarily explained. This enhances the very distinctive atmosphere of this exceptional novel (and, of course, there’s always Google if you’re curious).

The Abyss by Jeyamohan is translated from the Tamil by Sucharita Ramachandran and published by Transit Books.

 

 

The landscapes that shape us, the landscapes we carry with us: Tamil Terrains, Edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran

Raging winds howl to the vakai trees as their pods tremble in fear.
A land cloaked with countless peaks
yet not an ounce of soul.
It was this cold grim path that he,
the ruler of my heart, chose
over lying in my tender embrace.

“What the Heroine Said” – Avvaiyat (translation by Gobiga Nada)

The second in trace press’ translating [x] series, Tamil Terrains, arises from a series of online workshops conducted over six weeks in Autumn of 2022 and Spring of 2023. Editors Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran invited poets and translators from India, Malaysia, Singapore, Ilankai (Sri Lanka), and Canada to explore classical and modern Tamil poetry and enter into conversation about “what it means to translate in anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial ways.” With a history that extends back over two thousand years, Tamil is a language that is deeply entwined with its indigenous landscapes—mountain, forest, field, desert, and coast. But this relationship to land has long been troubled by conflict, colonization, and displacement, so this project also seeks to ask how a connection to these terrains, with its layers and accumulated losses, can be understood in traditional Tamil speaking communities in South and Southeast Asia and throughout the diaspora.

As both Nedra and Geetha, and a number of the participants in the workshops, live in Takaronto (so-called Toronto, Canada), the workshop discussions opened with the question of how diasporic translators “who occupy Indigenous lands as refugee and immigrant settlers, might critically engage with, and contest, ongoing erasures carried out on the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.” This raises a perspective often ignored, or at best simply addressed with rote land acknowledgements, but one that has deeper, and in our present day, significant implications. In recognition, then, of the ways in which translation has been employed to dismiss the cultures and peoples of Turtle Island, this book opens with Tamil translations of work from two Indigenous poets—Mi’kmaw poet shalan joudry and Michi Saagiig and Nishnaabeg poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. The volume closes with an essay by Thamilini Jothilingam, whose family was forced to flee civil war in Jaffna when she was a small child. She reflects on the two places where she feels most at home—her current home in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and the Vanni region of northern Sri Lanka. Both places carry a legacy of colonial violence.

Another distinctive feature of this project and the collection that emerged from it, is the desire of the facilitators to gather people who identify as Tamil, regardless of individual fluency, thus opening a point of connection and collaboration to those who may have grown up away from their ancestral homelands. As a result, the approach to translation explored in the workshops and reflected in Tamil Terrains is varied and creative. Participants are encouraged to engage in retelling, re-creation, expansion and commentary, especially with ancient and classical poetry and traditional folk songs. Nedra Rodrigo describes the decision to differentiate types of translation for the workshops—Root, Branch, and Driftwood:

Root as a direct translation from the source text; Branch as a translation supported by a bridge translation; and Driftwood as a transcreation that was inspired by the source text or that archived some aspect of the text.

The invaluable nature of this approach is clearly reflected in the work selected for publication.

The original texts are presented Tamil script, with a few exceptions where the original poem was written in English or where the decision made to use transliteration. At times, several translations of a single poem may follow, perhaps by translators from different geographical areas, or employing different approaches. Sometimes a translation or transcreation may also be accompanied by a reflection that allows the translator to express the thoughts, experiences, and emotions guiding their personal approach to the piece. Such insights are particularly interesting and add another layer to the process of translating or re-imagining a poem or song.

Finally, translation is also recognized as an act of resistance, speaking to the dislocation from homelands due colonial actions, war, and migration, and the displacements of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. The poetry selected for the workshops from more recent and contemporary Tamil poets, much of it touched with a measure of darkness and grief, was chosen to encourage exploration of these concerns, understanding that “(r)esistance here does not mean shutting out but opening up to each other, to allow each other the chance to dwell in our imaginations.”

I remember
the Saamiyadi resting after his trance
swatches of vermillion scattered
all over the entrance.
Withered betel leaf, with shrunken veins.
Everyone standing in the dark smoke
yearning for something
enchanted by the words of the Saamiyadi.

I remember
we were no further than an arm’s reach.
Even so
between us the distance widened
like these ones on one street
and those ones on another.

From “Tree with Broken Shade” by S. Bose (translation by Yalini Jothilimgam)

This volume, reflective of the collaborative spirit of the workshops that led to it, offers an opportunity to appreciate the many complex ways Tamil speaking people, and their descendants who may be spread far and wide, can maintain a connection to the landscapes, traditions, and histories of their respective homelands through poetry and other cultural elements such as art and film. Reaching from the Sangam era (300BCE – 300CE) to the present day, the translations, transcreations, and reflections gathered here combine to make reading this book a very dynamic and moving experience.

Tamil Terrains is edited by Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran and published by trace press.

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.