a few poems by Ismail
Hi friends. Two months back, my friend asked me to translate some poems and stories from Telugu to English. I am very slow at this work, and not very good either…but it’s okay. It’s just for her, and for people reading this now.
Ismail (1928-2003) is known in Telugu literature for his Anubhuti poetry (‘poetry of experience’). In his own words, his poetry “aims at an expression of the most personal kind of experience, an authentic statement of what he sees and knows, suffers and loves, his responses to the things, relationships and heightened instances of his life. He takes some object of everyday nature – a tree, a bird or a flower – as the central image around which to organize a poem meant to illustrate some fact of human experience.”
He grew up in East Godavari with his maternal grandfather Dr. Qasim Khan, who was a Telugu and Sanskrit scholar. His grandfather was friends with one of the Telugu literary giants - Chellapilla Venkata Sastry, who often conducted recitals at Qasim Khan’s house. Soon, like many Telugu men of that generation, he ran away from home for a few years. He ended up in Calcutta and studied for a bit at Shantiniketan before returning home.
Telugu poetry’s biggest muse in the 20th century was communism. Poets like Sri Sri, Siva Reddi, and others had formed the Revolutionary Writers Association. Poets like Sivasagar, Gaddar, and Goreti Venkanna were known for their radical folk songs and performances. Even when different schools of poetry emerged, they did so partly in reaction to the dominance of revolutionary poetry. Ismail too had a brief tryst with the Communist Party but soon became disillusioned. His comments on Feminist Poetry are also predictably juvenile. Although he praised the poetry of some of these writers, he felt that the drive to write ‘revolutionary poetry’ was killing the poetic image.
In the beginning, there were a few poems about some social issues. Although they are good, they lack the power and the feeling that makes such poems truly stay with a person. Over the years, much of his poetry reduced in scope and length - brief and serene lines centered around one image, and the feeling it awakened in him. I have tried to translate a few. They are from a series of haikus. When you read them, you can almost imagine Ismail taking a walk around his neighborhood during the monsoon season, and noticing the light, the animals, the little children. I found it very difficult to capture the simple beauty of his Telugu - his usage of sounds especially. But I hope you can enjoy them.
The crow is an eternal optimist
Even before the sun rises,
She welcomes the morning.
The sky sieves
the sunlight,
the birdcalls.
They are both happy:
The people on the beach by the sea
The sea on the beach by the people.
Sounds of the frogs gurgling -
it feels like
Rain
Where there is a window
There is
The Sky.
Come here during the monsoon
There is a shawl made of clouds, edged with lightning
That I will wrap around you.
Even among the frogs
There are political parties
Each with their slogan!
This crow
Comes to our house daily:
I do not ask for her name.
Looking at me, the dog
wagged her tail with love
It would be nice to have a tail to wag.
After sunset:
Buffaloes in the yard
Melt into the darkness
The rain has turned the day upside down
The road glimmers now,
And the sky - it’s black!
Note: For two of these haikus, I’ve had to shuffle the order of the lines because Telugu does not follow the Subject-Verb-Object structure of a sentence. Sorry!