D. VINAYACHANDRAN - My Times, My Poetry -

Posting D Vinayachandran's Thunjan speech in 2011. When he asked me to translate the speech I was a bit diffident to take up the task... but he encouraged me and finally I did it and Vinayachandran Sir told me it was good...

My Times, My Poetry

-D. VINAYACHANDRAN 

Translated by K T Dinesh

My times and my poetry are unfamiliar to me with the unprejudiced metamorphosis and with the breaking of the boundaries of words. They become desolate monuments of silence and the unfinished rushes of the panorama of love. In the most material sense they cut across seven worlds, seven confessions and the spurt of mental process. Envisioning that the earth and the earthworm have poetry, ‘my poems and love are the dust that is resurrected after a quake; a few indistinct shoots are just sprouting up.’ It should recoup the butterflies and 'surumas' that are trapped in the dilapidated souls. My glass is sanguine. Ignorance of God is filled in it. In the mad rush of a nightclub we feed on a stranger. The ignorance of God becomes the ignorance of man. We fear not death; we begin to fear life.

I won’t be blind to the blank gazes of hunger, the tanned faces of war and the shipwreck of love. They are the ovens of poetry. Science says that time will end up before space and the cosmic rays that are as old as the big bang are spurting and so I have to refine my past to limit my future. Man has very limited information about his brain and even his genes. The ones who made loud declaration like ‘one world- great world’ are now prophesying multifarious universes. Among issue like dry water-taps, exploding bombs in the street and the whimper of the child who is forlorn amongst the mirage of the earth.... these anxious contemplations are poetry’s subtle nuances.

Here, because of time constrains and because of the evident multiplicity of poetry it is not possible to establish all these points. In the scorching summer we sit together with a fellow- traveller for a cup of Lissi. We walk to wilderness in the night hearing the cries of children deep dwelled in the earth before many a birth. We laugh seeing the bulldozers and the condoms blown up and flown by naughty children. We present a basket full of oranges to a lunatic.
What I should is to keep silence. Even if you are in hospital or in your garden turn to poetry. I who enact multiple faces on the street say only this:
Remember the treaty
Between the salt and the stars
Remember the betrothal
Between the seed and the rain
……………………………………
……………………………………

The sun will burn to ashes all that is devoid of love
The moon will drown all that is not a dream

There are hundreds of ways to write poetry in Malayalam. I cannot be a bonsai exhibition piece of imagism, which was once despised as a transitory ploy by our eminent critic M P Sankunni Nair. I need bit of a place. As in our land agriculture has to be recovered in words as well. The mangrove forest, ground water, the distance between heat and cold and the time between noise and silence have to be recovered. My poetry should be able to recover god, the dream that we missed in our hurry and it should also find refuge in the attempt to cure the ailing god. Poetry, after all, is not poetry alone.

Let me read out some of my short poems. As the shell does to the sea, as the tree sap to the woods, a fragrance that we alone distinguish… and as love....these are an invitation to my pains….