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Raymond
Queneau (1903Đ1976), Fraench novelist, poet, and co-founder of Oulipo, was
seriously comic, a friend of Surrealists, a flaneur of the unexpected,
playful with language, is of the past while being (I reckon) newly very
welcome again with this new translation. Cheran (b.1960), whose poems here
come from three decades of writing, is Tamil, away now from the unsettled and
unsettling Sri Lanka, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology
at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His mood and mode could hardly be
further from Queneau's: I hope yet again that the translation, as the Arc
books in particular might be, is a transposition for healing.
Both books are bilingual on facing pages. It will not be difficult for many
people to double-check Queneau's French; Cheran's Tamil is something else to
Western eyes. It is possible for me to see how his original poems, in
stanzas, are shaped, and that the translations are faithful to their
free-running, but (I suppose for most readers) that's about it. Cheran can be
heard on YouTube reading, and there is a black and white filmed interview
with Queneau, where someone has asked for sub-titles. He smiles as his poems
smile.
Two Queneau poems on the same page convey his wandering around Paris:
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Rue LinnŽ
The poor
animals behind the bars of their enclosure
hear all
manner of jabber
whether it's
in the Jardin des Plantes or the Vincennes zoo
what
balderdash they give ear to
the poor
animals behind the bars of their enclosure
deserve our
pity
for having to
tolerate so much hooey
but they go
on grazing with composure
the poor
animals in their enclosure
The translator has over-egged the end rhymes; his third line ends with the
named 'Zoo' and the fourth with 'pas comme propos idiots', neither rhyming
there or elsewhere. The translator's Introduction, though, embraces this
possibility, of engaging with the spirit of his poems, not always strict form
for form (but always neatly more or less), impossible anyway in carrying over
from one language to another, and it seems reasonable to say she has caught
his engaged eye and his lightheartedness. We are 'hearing' a life lived. And
the notion that poetry is news that stays news is applicable here, is of the
essence. And it isn't that he refers repeatedly to what a journalist would
call News, though there is that for us not least in how Paris has changed -
as in parallel with the poems one sees in old photographs - but that he
combines the observation as he passes by, on his way it seems to nowhere else
in particular, and indirectly here is History:
Jean-Girard
LacuŽe Count of Cessac
had the right
to a bit of street under Louis-Philippe
to a nice
avenue under Napoleon the Third
and finds
himself again under the Republic
with a modest road
otherwise
known as Terres Fortes
and so on. The originals throughout have no punctuation. I am not clear whether or not this is a book of the
highest poetic genius - I do know it is a book I am glad to have, is unlike
any other, and is one I shall treasure and return to.
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Cheran's
In a Time of Burning
looks back from exile. Again this is poetry as News, if we can hear it, if we
want to hear it; and News of a very different kind. A poem called 'Four
years':
Once, on a
dewy morning
walking along
the jasmine-strewn street
I stopped
short, hearing you cough:
that memory
will last to eternity
like the
parallel lines of our lives.
If I lived at
all, it was in those moments:
when the thin
clouds spread gradually
into the
evening's redness
and I lay on
the sand, my head in your lap,
the hair
curling about your earlobes,
a trace of
sadness in your eyes,
your body
yielding, your voice calling,
your eyelids
closing,
your
trembling hands tightening
about my shoulders.
In those
perfect moments.
But now I
stand in the cold
in the middle
of a long landscape:
a lone
palmyra tree.
The translator, Lakshmi Holmstršm, says in her brief Preface, that 'Cheran
steadfastly refused to align himself with any of the political groups within
the Tamil community. This has enabled him to speak out against all atrocities
committed, both by the Shri Lankan army and the Tamil militants. He sees his
role as chronicler and witness: the poet is often present within the frame of
the poem, watching, commentating, indicting.' They are powerful poems in
precisely that way, the being there or imagining being there. I can in truth
say these poems are for me compelling in translation, and he is our
contemporary, I should say that the book will stay with me, his poems are
news that is news now, Shri Lanka is in our News. But reading his and Raymond
Queneau's poems I see how culturally bound I am, where my sensibilities,
spontaneously, are positioned.
Cheran is in Canada now; here is a 2003 poem called 'Colour':
In the
street, dry now after a fall of snow,
beneath the
street-lamp with its dim light,
the tip of
his nose frozen and red,
a small
Canadian flag pinned carelessly
upon his
ragged, drooping overcoat,
centuries of
dirt and stains and beer-froth
on his long,
dense brown beard,
a forest-green
army cap on his head
now
shapeless,
buffetted by
snow, wind and rain,
with hunched
back, crooked nails and
long, curly,
tangled hair, he lies huddled,
his eyes
blinking frequently,
part sunken
in darkness
part crazed.
He begs for money
and thanks
those who fling him coins.
I refused.
'Fuck you,
Paki,' he said
turning his
face away.
It's a story with a punchline, and it's interesting to compare this streets
poem with any of Queneau's. 'Fuck you, Paki,' is, so italicised (and not so in the
translation), in English in the original. My impression of these two very
different books, as their authors look out at their world, is of Queneau
observing, engaged but from an emotional distance as well - or that his
emotion is in the walking itself, in the gaze - while Cheran is having a
battle of words with himself to get it clear, Shri Lanka's troubles and his
own in relation to them, whether there 'at home' or in exile.
©
David Hart 2013
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