Here is another ‘Hyderabad’ fragment ... this fragment is from K. V. Tirumalesh’s AVYAYA KAVYA ... an extended poetic creation in the form of a symphony, as Tirumalesh says. He goes on to say that, in a sense, Avyaya Kavya is a continuation of his earlier long poem Akshaya Kavya and more dramatic. I, for my part, read these long poems to see if I can pick out Hyderabadi pearls ... this fragment is one such Hyderabadi pearl ...
Just as Tirumalesh, the poet, uses poetic licence, I thought I’d experiment with ‘translator’s license’ ... I don’t know if there is one. In the fifth stanza, the poet mentions various vegetables ... he uses potato and tomato as English words to create rhyme and rhythm ... whereas potato has a Kannada counterpart, tomato doesn’t; tomato is tomato in Kannada, pronounced differently ... but for onion and garlic he uses their Kannada counterparts eeruLLi beLLuLLi to create rhythm. I decided to use ‘translator’s licence’ and have retained the Kannada words for onion and garlic in my English translation to retain the rhythm. And all other names of vegetables end in kaayi again creating rhythm. Bittergourdand snakegourd rhyme, but cucumber doesn’t rhyme with them. And out of the blue, he mentions pumpkin (white pumpkin) using its Telugu name gummadikaaya (vegetables in Telugu end in kaaya) and references a popular proverb in Kannada and Telugu, when loosely translated reads – ‘when somebody said ‘pumpkin thief,’ he checked his shoulder.’ An English counterpart would be ‘Guilty conscience pricks the mind’ and its Hindi variation – chor ke daaDi mein tinka.’ He then mentions the Kannada term for ‘pumpkin,’ so that the proverb is understood by Kannada readers. And it looks like the poet is doing all this to lighten the mood before the final two stanzas where the poem is taken to another level ... remarkable ... I have retained ‘chhatrapati’ in the penultimate stanza; it works in Kannada, but I didn’t want to let it go so that at least some people might make the connection ...
As you can see, Tirumalesh uses quite a few English words here, and an entire line in the second stanza is in English in Kannada script in the original. There is also Telugu ... I have italicised those parts that appear in English and Telugu ... and I have ‘bolded’ the words that I have retained in my translation ... all this to retain the multilingual intricateness of this fragment ...
Thank you all ... this experiment is mine alone, so blame me if you find this too much to handle ...
POET: K. V. Tirumalesh
KANNADA ORIGINAL: first line of the fragment: ಸಂಡೇ ಮಾರ್ಕೆಟ್
‘Sunday Market’ from AVYAYA KAVYA (2019)
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
Sunday market Monday market Tuesday market
Each day a different market
What we have is Sunday market
Every Sunday it rises up like magic
out of nothing really
on both sides of the wide road
opposite Gokul Mart
Its excitement is infectious
Those who go there once go there every week
Some are covered, some are bare, some on the ground
Some on pushcarts and some more on their imitations
Like Plato said no pushcart is real
The pushcart of truth is not here
On the earth and on the sky and
everything here are imitations
Among them us too
What’s real what’s an imitation
Why did we come here I don’t remember
We wander around or stand around
These busy ladies are perhaps Rambhas, Urvashis
and Tilottamas, celestial maidens, in disguise,
have come here tired of heaven or cursed by someone
This is a Goblin Market
Come here, come here, they call you
Whose shop do we go to, whose shop do we skip
We like all of them though
We haggle we appeal we cajole a bit
We remember the farmer who’s not here
potato tomato eeruLLi beLLuLLi
haagalakaayi padavalakaayi tender southekaayi
The gummadikaaya that reminds you of the thief of yore
I mean kumbaLakaayi
watermelon pineapple and papaya
The shops selling plastic toys that attract children
imitation jewellery cell-phone
a bear that laughs when you twist its ears
a cat that cries when you pull its tail
An old man used to sit on one side with a heap of lemons
An unfurled umbrella resting on his shoulder
as if he were a chhatrapati
He sat detached as if he had nothing to do with the lemons
Doesn’t call out to anyone doesn’t look at anyone
One day he was not to be seen
As if he had gone to Plato’s truth-world
Nobody asked where he was
That place remained vacant
On a Sunday subsequently, in that place
lemons were seen, the umbrella was seen
Under the umbrella an old woman was seen
She too was silent
More real than anyone else
*****
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