Beside the dargah sits this man - Translation of ದರ್ಗದ ಬದಿಗೆ ಇದ್ದಾನೆ ಒಬ್ಬ 'dargada badi iddane obba'

Dear friends ... here is a Hyderabadi ‘fragment’ from eminent Kannada modernist Prof. K. V. Tirumalesh’s Sahitya Akademi award winning AKSHAYA KAVYA. AKSHAYA KAVYA is a series of untitled monologues, if I may say so, that touch upon a wide range of topics.   There is no continuous link, so it is not ‘epical’ in that sense.  As the poet himself says, Akshaya Kavya is a poetic experiment that violates more norms than it obeys.  In my continuing engagement with Tirumalesh’s poems and search for his reflections on Hyderabad in his poems, I came upon a series of fragments on Hyderabad in Akshaya Kavya.  I was delighted, of course ... and this marks the beginning of the second phase of my ‘Hyderabad Project’ of translating Prof. Tirumalesh’s Hyderabad ‘fragments’ from ‘Akshaya Kavya’ into English ... Caesurae and Muse India were kind enough to publish two sets of my English translations of Tirumalesh’s Hyderabad poems from his early collections Mukhamukhi and Avadha.  

 

I wish to thank a lot of my friends here who supported and responded to my first phase of this ‘Hyderabad Project’ ... and hope to receive the same kind of love for this phase too ...           

 

Since these are untitled fragments, it would be improper, I thought, to force-fit titles to these fragments.   Let me try an experiment of my own, I thought, and borrowed this idea from the German poet, Ulrike Almut Sandig, who, instead of a ‘titling’ a poem, ‘bolds’ a word or phrase or line in the poem that would serve as the central idea.  For this fragment, I have chosen the obvious and less risky option.  Friends are welcome to offer their suggestions.   

       

 

POET: K. V. Tirumalesh

KANNADA ORIGINAL: 

first line of the fragment: ದರ್ಗದ ಬದಿಗೆ ಇದ್ದಾನೆ ಒಬ್ಬ  

‘dargada badige iddane obba’ from AKSHAYA KAVYA

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao

 

 

Beside the dargah sits this man

stroking his long beard,

despite the sun falling on his head

and spilling on to the road.

 

The neem tree is kind; after noon it will 

pour its dense shadow on the dargah. 

 

Buses and trucks belching smoke

ply by close to the dargah,

he peers through thick lenses

to see if anything can be seen.

 

Nobody comes to him

I thought as I watched him for long, 

enveloped in beedi smoke

like he knew the world’s secret.

 

A sympathetic smile

 

The power of the amulet alone 

beckons those sinners,

nobody has any sense of time

this is something that belongs to another time.

 

What is going to happen is 

the same that happens every day  

 

There is always a secret hidden in 

his unsaid prediction, unasked by us,  

like a veil over the mind, invisible to all,

however much you search, unseen.

 

So many people running around 

to escape from disappearing

into Hussain Sagar or

under the Charminar.

 

As the sun goes down 

he too gets up and goes away.

 

(Hyderabad, 18 March 2022) 

 

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