Dear friends ... here is another Hyderabad ‘fragment’ from eminent Kannada Prof. K. V. Tirumalesh’s Sahitya Akademi award winning AKSHAYA KAVYA. The Hyderabad location is not mentioned in the poem, in the final analysis the location is just a hook for Tirumalesh anyway, but from the description, it is the Sunday Book Market, the Sunday ‘footpath’ second-hand book market, at Abids ...
Since these are untitled fragments, it would be improper, I thought, to force-fit titles to these fragments. I have 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. Here, on FB, I have used quotes. Friends are welcome to offer their suggestions.
POET: K. V. Tirumalesh
KANNADA ORIGINAL:
first line of the fragment: ಪುಸ್ತಕ ಸಂಗ್ರಾಹಕನೆ
‘pustaka sangraahakane’ from AKSHAYA KAVYA
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
O’ book collector!
One day the books will fall on your head
and you’ll die, get this!
Don’t accumulate so many books
It doesn’t matter how death happens
let it happen through letters
“Like every writer the reader too
ends life as a book”
or begins
Today I have to journey along the Sunday footpaths
That’s my destiny
Book heaps call out to me
Opening each book opens out
unreachable worlds before me
I sit and read
I stand and read
I become a bookworm
I bore
a tunnel
from earth to heaven
When nobody is watching
Russia Poland Yugoslavia
I alter the maps
Like dried leaves it crumbles to touch
Century-old paper
Magic on the first page in the letters
a name written with great love
Below that the date of gifting
The year the first world war began
Wishing a thousand years of happy life
From my hands too this will escape
back to the footpath again
This my half-clouded moment
will return one day again
Another similar evening it will land in
another person’s hands
and perplex him too
after that an arduous two-thousand-mile journey
Forbidden City Lhasa
*****
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