Two Tamil Poems— Mounan Yathrika

TRANSLATED FROM THE TAMIL BY SHERWIN RODRIGUEZ

POEM 1
Even if, prevailing over all seasons,
Summer stands tall over the land,
the forest does not know how to run dry.
Its waterness is of a thousand forms.
Below the simmering rock,
there is moisture enough for an insect.
At the roots of dried grass,
a wild torrent comes together in a tuber.
From the wet inner flesh of trees,
cold air descends through leaf-shorn branches.
From cracks on the ground
it is never hot air that rises.
Dried leaves have lost colour, not moisture.
Elay Pangali ¹,
know, with the wisdom of a worm,
the forest will never allow us to die of hunger or thirst.

POEM 2
While cooking an animal over fire,
Do not disturb the bones.
In them, the forest’s history persists.
They say that the bones which remain
after flesh falls, sinew snaps, and colour drains,
are filled with an entire forest.
For those that come here later to write
about the name of the hunted animal,
the arrows that pounced on it,
and the wood that they were made of,
and that the tongue of our clan-totem which accompanied us on our hunts
was like the flesh of an aloe,
The bones we throw away are evidence.
Elay Pangali,
as the taste of cooked meat climbs our tongues,
what we hold in our hands,
are not just bones,
but the stories and memories of the forest.

1 ”Elay” is a term used to call out to people, roughly equivalent to “hey”, and “Pangali” is a term
used to refer to family members, and also people who lay claim to a share of property.

Also, Read Any Day Now, Syeda by Abhijit Sen, translated from The Bengali by Sarban Bandyopadhyay and published in The Antonym: