{"id":166820,"date":"2016-08-25T12:16:39","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T06:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=166820"},"modified":"2016-09-01T02:29:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-31T20:59:08","slug":"lost-evenings-lost-lives-tamil-poems-of-the-sri-lankan-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/lost-evenings-lost-lives-tamil-poems-of-the-sri-lankan-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poems Of The Sri Lankan Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Prof.<\/a>

Prof. Charles Sarvan<\/p><\/div>\n

This bilingual anthology of fifty poems<\/span><\/a> is by the very nature of its subject (ethnic conflict) political, and yet it would be inaccurate and unfortunate to describe the volume as a political work. It is about the experience of politics: politics as experienced not by the makers of History but by those who endure it; politics not as an abstraction but as something personally felt by ordinary, sentient, human individuals. As several of these poems attest, whether we are interested or not in politics, it affects us. Indeed, tragically, often the victims of politics are the poor and the innocent; those with no knowledge of or interest in politics. I suggest that poets do not go searching for a theme: the subject chooses and compels them through personal experience. And \u201cexperience\u201d here includes what the poet has seen, been told or read. \u2018Tamil Poems\u2019 does not mean poems by Eelam<\/em> (see Endnote) poets only, and there are several works by Indian Tamil poets. Many chose to write under a nom de plume.<\/p>\n

\"Lost<\/a>

Lost Evenings, Lost Lives: Tamil Poems of the Sri Lankan Civil War -edited, translated and introduced by Lakshmi Holmstrom & Sascha Ebeling, UK, 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n

If of the three traditional genres of Literature (Poetry, Drama, Fiction), Poetry is the most literary, it is also the most difficult to translate. Apart from other qualities poetry, associated with song, is mnemonic: we remember lines from poetry and song but rarely from prose. In translation (particularly when, as with the present collection, it is into another language that is completely different) inevitably much is lost. And it is not only musicality; cadence and rhythm, but cultural connotation. Literature emerges from, and in turn reflects, a specific way of life, a culture; when translated (trans-ported) into a foreign language and culture, rich nuances of significance can be lost. (In Shakespeare\u2019s comedy, A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>, when a character is turned into an ass, it\u2019s exclaimed: \u201cThou art translated!\u201d)<\/p>\n

While a poem must stand on its own, background information can throw a different light, enhance appreciation. For example, in Nuhman\u2019s ironic poem, \u2018Buddha murdered\u2019 (p. 25), the Buddha and his teaching have to be obliterated in order to burn down the Jaffna Library. On 1 June 1981, the Library which housed well over 90,000 works, one of the biggest in Asia, was destroyed including irreplaceable ancient manuscripts and scrolls. Similarly, Rashmy\u2019s \u2018The inscription of defeat\u2019 (pp. 129-131) requires some knowledge of the history of the ethnic conflict, and of the LTTE leader. However, Lost Evenings<\/em>, dealing primarily with violence and its impact – death and destruction; sorrow, pain of body and soul \u2013 attempts to transcend specificity and be universally comprehensible. It must be admitted that, as George Orwell wrote in his essay \u2018Writers and Leviathan\u2019 (1948), though we have \u201can awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world\u201d, our response to literature can be coloured by loyalties which are non-literary.<\/p>\n

The translators give a brief outline of events during the course of nearly thirty years of war: the savage 1983 pogrom, \u201cthe brutal intervention of the Indian Peace Keeping Force\u201d, the increasing violence of the Tamil Tigers, and so to \u201cthe last terrible months of war\u201d (p. 9). The poems are given in chronological order of publication and so parallel; arise from, and reflect, this history.<\/p>\n

The irruption of brutality destroys what was once normality in Nuhman\u2019s poem, \u2018Last evening, this morning\u2019 (pp. 17-19). Last evening, we popped into a bookshop, idly watched the crowds at the bus terminal, took in a film and then cycled home. This morning, bullets pierce bodies, the terminal is deserted, the market shattered.<\/p>\n

And this was how<\/p>\n

we lost our evenings<\/p>\n

we lost this life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s when we fall ill that we realize how wonderful it is to be free from pain and disability \u2013 a normality otherwise taken for granted. And so it is that when violence irrupts into an otherwise placid pattern of life. (I recall many years ago being asked in Jaffna by a man in genuine puzzlement: \u201cAll we want is to be allowed to lead our lives as we want. Sir, why don\u2019t they leave us alone?\u201d He thought it was a simple wish and, therefore, a fair question.) Jesurasa\u2019s poem, \u2018Under New Shoes\u2019 is a \u2018meditation\u2019 based on Jaffna\u2019s old Dutch fort. Three hundred years have passed since the imperialist, occupying, Dutch left; colour (now not white) and language (now not Dutch) have changed but for Tamils \u201cthe same rule of oppression\u201d (p. 21) continues.<\/p>\n

The compulsion to communicate with a loved one makes the persona of Urvasi\u2019s poem, \u2018Do you understand?\u2019 (pp. 29-31) write a letter though there isn\u2019t an address to send it to. (A poignant work, it recalls Ezra Pound\u2019s beautiful rendering of the Chinese poem, \u2018The River-Merchant\u2019s Wife: A Letter\u2019, available on Google.) Urvasi\u2019s poetic persona includes in her letter what one could call home details: the jasmine is in bloom; the small puppy runs in circles, its tail raised; I dust your books. But a different reality (menace) throbs beneath the lines: they haven\u2019t come to \u201cinterrogate\u201d me \u2013 as yet!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018I Could Forget All This\u2019 by Cheran (pp. 33-4), a post-1983 poem, remembers ghastly sights such as a thigh-bone protruding from an upturned, burnt-out car; a socket empty of its eye, and a pregnant (Sinhalese) woman carrying off a cradle from a burning Tamil house. One thinks of what has been described as the shortest story ever written in English. It consists of six words: \u201cFor sale, baby shoes. Never worn.\u201d (The story is attributed, though without evidence, to Hemingway.) Cheran concludes with a powerful use of symbolism. But<\/p>\n

How shall I forget the broken shards<\/p>\n

and the scattered rice<\/p>\n

lying parched upon the earth?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A related poem is \u2018Oppressed by Nights of War\u2019 by Sivaramani (pp. 45-6) showing what happens to children in a time of protracted and \u201ctotal\u201d war: children, with their childhood destroyed. Biographical information heightens our response to Captain Vanathi\u2019s \u2018My Unwritten Poem\u2019, a work that repeatedly urges the addressee to complete what she couldn\u2019t accomplish. Vanathi was killed in action shortly afterwards, and this is her last poem. The year is 1991, and there is still the belief that all their suffering and sacrifice will not be in vain: As you walk freely in an independent Tamileelam<\/em>, I and the thousands of other martyrs will smile with joy (p. 57): her poem will then have been written. Metaphorically, freedom is the poem that must be \u2018written\u2019 (achieved). It is indeed very strange, to read these lines in the present context.<\/p>\n

The editorial note to Aazhiyaal\u2019s poem, \u2018Mannamperis\u2019, explains that Tamil Koneswari Selvakumar was gang-raped by soldiers who then blew her to bits by exploding a grenade in her vagina (p. 75). But the poem, broadening outward \u2013 hence the plural Mannamperis – encompasses other instances of \u201cman\u2019s inhumanity to man\u201d; more particularly, man\u2019s inhumanity to women. During what in Sri Lanka is known as the Insurgency (the violent uprising of Left-leaning young men and women against the government) Padmini Mannamperi, a Sinhalese beauty-queen, was raped and killed by members of the Sri Lankan army (April 1971). The editorial note does not elaborate that, in an avowedly Buddhist and conservative country, Padmini was stripped naked and forced to walk down the street; that she was buried even before she was dead. One thinks, for example, of William McGowan\u2019s Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka<\/em> (New York, 1992). It may be added that, whatever the sins and crimes of the Tamil Tigers (and they were several and grievous; destructive and, as History shows, finally fatal) I have not read of them indulging in rape or in the sexual humiliation of women. On the contrary, women seem to have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of emancipation; of equality. See for example:<\/p>\n