The Poetry of Penniya: the task of the translato

By Sumathy

(March 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) My intention here is not to talk about my translations of Penniya’s poetry, but rather to introduce her most recent collection of poetry, Ithu Nathiyin Naal translated as This Day of the River, to a non-Tamil speaking audience. This is her second collection of poetry and marks the emergence of a distinctive voice in Tamil poetry and women’s poetry in Tamil.

Penniya which is the pseudonym of Najeefa hails from the east and her poetry is part of a corpus of contemporary women’s writing in Tamil that emphasizes women’s issues, fashioning a distinctively female voice for poetry. Yet, her work is also quite distinctive from other writings in Tamil. 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 largely centred on contemporary works that deal with the national question, the ethnic conflict, women’s issues etc. Of course 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. When I first stumbled upon Penniya’s poetry, I was a little non-plussed. The poetic conventions did suggest a close working with contemporary Tamil poetry that is avowedly feminist, but her voice was 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. 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 adopts a clinical and critical perspective, but not one without emotion, paradoxical as it may sound. Here I reproduce translations of some of her poems that I see as representing the range in her poetic sensibility from her latest work, though some of her more radical work is yet to be translated. Her poems are at times like parables, distanced and narrative, like the "Messenger", the deceptively simple "Nighttime Worker" and the poem written in the tradition of herstories, ‘Unwritten Histories’ and at other times, extremely subjective like the remarkable poem ‘The Colour Purple." This Day of the River is to be launched by the Women’s Education and Research Centre on Friday, 13th of March.

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. -Sri Lanka Guardian