Ramanujan, A. K.;
The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan
Oxford University Press 1997, 328 pages
ISBN 0195640683
topics: | poetry | india | single-author
You flip this onto any page, and the poem that greets you seems worthy of interest. While a unfettered sensuousness permeates much of Ramanujan's translation work (reflecting the spirit of the Tamil and Telugu originals), it is largely absent in his own poetry. Still another view of Grace (below) is a rare instance; it's a popular poem, possibly anthologized first in Subhash Saha's anthology of Indian love poetry (1976). One of my favourites is A river, one of his many poems with a darker, thoughtful side. The introduction (by Vijay Dharwadker) is focused mostly on the poems which collected after his death into the volume The Black Hen. The poems are collected from the books: * The Striders. London: Oxford University Press, 1966 * Relations. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 * Second Sight. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986 * The Black Hen (1996, posthumous), ed. Molly Daniels.
walking in museums of quartz
or the aisles of bookstacks
looking at their geometry
without curves
and the layers of transparency
that makes them opaque,
dwelling on the yellower vein
in the yellow amber
or touching a book that has gold
on its spine,
I think of snakes.
A basketful or ritual cobras
comes into the tame little house,
their brown-wheat glisten ringed with ripples.
They lick the room with their bodies, curves
uncurling, writing a sibilant alphabet of panic
on my floor. Mother gives them milk
in saucers. She watches them suck
and bare the black-line design
etched on the brass of the saucer.
The snakeman wreathes their writhing
around his neck
for father's smiling
money. But I scream.
'One two three four five
five fingers to a hand'
said the blind boy counting
but he found a sixth one
waiting like a cousin for a coin;
a budlike node complete with nail,
phalanx and mole
under the usual casual opposable thumb.
Said my granny, rolling her elephant's leg
like a log in a ruined mill:
'One two three four five
five princes in a forest
each one different like the fingers on a hand
and we always looked to find on her paw
just one finger left of five: a real thumb,
no longer usual, casual, or opposable after her husband's knifing temper
0ne sunday morning half a century ago.
I resemble everyone but myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows, despite the well-known laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by my father.
In Madurai, city of temples and poets, who sang of cities and temples, every summer a river dries to a trickle in the sand, baring the sand ribs, straw and women's hair clogging the watergates at the rusty bars under the bridges with patches of repair all over them the wet stones glistening like sleepy crocodiles, the dry ones shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun The poets only sang only of the floods. He was there for a day when they had the floods. People everywhere talked of the inches rising, of the precise number of cobbled steps run over by the water, rising on the bathing places, and the way it carried off three village houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda as usual. The new poets still quoted the old poets, but no one spoke in verse of the pregnant woman drowned, with perhaps twins in her, kicking at blank walls even before birth. He said: the river has water enough to be poetic about only once a year and then it carries away in the first half-hour three village houses, a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda and one pregnant woman expecting identical twins with no moles on their bodies, with different coloured diapers to tell them apart.
I burned and burned. But one day I turned and caught that thought by the screams of her hair and said: "Beware, Do not follow a gentleman's morals with that absurd determined air. Find a priest. Find any beast in the wind for a husband. He will give a houseful of legitimate sons. It is too late for sin. even for treason. And I have no reason to know your kind. Bred Brahmin among singers of shivering hymns I shudder to the bone at hungers that roam the street 'beycnd the constables beat'. But there she stood upon that dusty road on a nightlit april mind and gave me a look. Commandments crumbled in my father's past. Her tumbled hair suddenly known as silk in my angry hand. I shook a little and took her, behind the laws of my land.
Sky-man in a manhole with astronomy for dream, astrology for nightmare; fat man full of proverbs, the language of lean years, living in square after almanac square prefiguring the day of windfall and landslide through a calculus of good hours, clutching at the tear in his birthday shirt as at a hole in his mildewed horoscope, squinting at the parallax of black planets, his Tiger, his Hare moving in Sanskrit zodiacs, forever troubled by the fractions, the kidneys in his Tamil flesh, his body the Great Bear dipping for the honey, the woman-smell in the small curly hair down there.
Ramanujan has written about this poem in "Is there an Indian way of
thinking", an essay inspired by the contradictions embodied by his father:
The problem [of the Indian way of thinking] was posed for me personally at
the age of twenty in the image of my father. I had never taken a good look
at him till then. Didn't Mark Twain say, 'At seventeen, I thought my
father was ignorant; at twenty, I wondered how he learned so much in three
years?' Indeed, this essay was inspired by contemplation of him over the
years, and is dedicated to him.
My father's clothes represented his inner life very well. He was a south
Indian brahman gentleman. He wore neat white turbans, a Shri vaiShNava
caste mark (in his earlier pictures, a diamond earring), yet wore Tootal
ties, Kromentz buttons and collar studs, and donned English serge jackets
over his muslin dhotis which he wore draped in traditional brahman
style. He often wore tartan-patterned socks and silent wellpolished
leather shoes when he went to the university, but he carefullq took them
off before he entered the inner quarters of the house.
He was a matheniatician, an astronomer. But he was also a Sanskrit,
scholar, an expert astrologer. He had two kinds of exotic visitors:
American and English mathematicians who called on him when they
were on a visit to India, and local astrologers, orthodox pundits who
wore splendid gold-embroidered shawls dowered by the Maharajah. I
had just been converted by Russell to the 'scientific attitude'. I (and my
generation) was troubled by his holding together in one brain both
astronomy and astrology; I looked for consistency in him, a consistency
he didn't seem to care about, or even think about. When I asked him what
the discovery of Pluto and Neptune did to his archaic nine-planet astrology,
he said, 'You make the necessary corrections, that's all.' Or, in
answer to how he could read the Gita religiously having bathed and
painted on his forehead the red and white feet of Visnu, and later talk
appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and even Ingersoll, he said, 'The
Gita is part of one's hygiene. Besides, don't you know, the brain has two
lobes?'
[and then he cites the full poem above, saying: the following poem says
something about the way he and his friends appeared to me. read more of this
essay at Collected essays p. 37-38).
I know, you told me, your nightsoil and all your city's, goes still warm every morning in a government lorry, drippy (you said) but punctual, by special arrangement to the municipal gardnes to make the grass grow tall for the cows in the village, the rhino in the zoo, and the oranges plump and glow, till they are a preternatural orange. Good animal yet perfect citizen, you, you are biodegradable, you do return to nature: you will your body to the nearest hospital, changing death into small change and spare parts; dismantling, not de- composing like the rest of us. Eyes in an eye bank to blink some day for a stranger's brain, wait like mummy wheat in the singular company of single eyes, pickled, absolute. [...] But you know my tribe, incarnate unbelievers in bodies, ... they'll cremate me in Sanskrit and sandalwood, have me sterilized to a scatter of ash.
A naked Jaina monk ravaged by spring fever, the vigor of long celibacy lusting now as never before for the reek and sight of mango bud, now tight, now loosening into petal, stamen, and butterfly, his several mouths thirsting for breast, buttock, smells of finger, long hair, short hair, the wet places never dry, skin roused even by whips, self touching self, all philosophy slimed by its own saliva, cool Ganges turning sensual on him smeared by his own private untouchable Jaina body with honey thick and slow as pitch and stood continent at last on an anthill of red fire ants, crying his old formulaic cry; at every twinge, "Pleasure, pleasure, Great Pleasure!" -- no longer a formula in the million mouths of pleasure-in-pain as the ants climb, tattooing him, limb by limb and cover his body, once naked, once even intangible.
Yet like grandfather I bathe before the village crow the dry chlorine water my only Ganges the naked Chicago bulb a cousin of the Vedic sun slap soap on my back like father and think in proverbs like me I wipe myself dry with an unwashed Sears turkish towel like mother I hear faint morning song (though here it sounds Japanese) and three clear strings nextdoor through kitchen clatter like my little daughter I play shy hand over crotch my body not yet full of thoughts novels and children I hold my peepee like my little son play garden hose in and out the bathtub like my grandson I look up unborn at myself like my great great-grandson I am not yet may never be my future dependent on several people yet to come
... as I write I know I'm writing now on my head, now on my torso, my living hands moving on a dead one, a firm imagined body working with the transience of breathless real bodies.
A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993) was, arguably, modern Indias finest English-language poet. At the time of his death he was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, and recognized as the worlds most profound scholar of South Indian language and culture. During his lifetime he published three volumes of verse in English -- The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), and Second Sight (1986) -- and had completed work on a fourth volume, The Black Hen, which is published here for the first time. Ramanujan is best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into modern English. These translations permanently altered the perceptions of the Indian literary map in the West. Before him, ancient Indian literature was thought to be mainly Sanskritic. After he published The Interior Landscape: Poems of Love and War, and other volumes between the sixties and eighties it became apparent to modern poets and scholars that there was a wealth of poetry in other Indic traditions.Reflecting his lifelong interests in folklore, anthropology, structuralism, and biculturalism, this volume of his collected poems represents the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusual thought and feeling. It will be welcomed by all lovers of contemporary poetry.