THE EDITOR’S NOTE

Dr H.S. Venkateshamurthy, as we affectionately call him HSV, is a significant poet of modern Kannada literature.  His contribution to the Kannada literary and visual art fields is vast in terms of quality and quantity. Though HSV is most famous for his work on poetry, he is also a playwright, essayist, novelist, critic, children’s literature creator, scriptwriter, and moviemaker. He taught Kannada literature as a professor in a college in Bangalore, but that never limited him to mentor new writers. Most of us, contemporary Kannada writers, stay within the circle of his influence and have our stories personally associated with him.

HSV is a Bhava Kavi. The term, which is common in the Indian languages, can be loosely translated as – the poet of emotions. Though we may argue that the function of every art is nothing but the reflection of human emotions, poetry is champion of it because of its language power, and HSV is the poet who utilizes it to the full extent. A distinct and consistent attribute of his poems is how they appeal to our minds and hearts simultaneously and intertwine an emotion to a meaning. For him, the emotions go seamless, even across the worlds, like how a mother caresses the side fringes on the forehead of a sleeping child in the poem The Sleeping Child, the language called mother’s love gets its script from heaven.

In this world dominated by the reason-based mind and its nested logic,  HSV’s poems never seize to build bridges between the known and the unknown, logic and illogic, and the material and human emotions. Why illogic is necessary, as Rilke said, ‘only the very naïve are capable of thinking that the nature of man can be transformed into a purely logical one.’ HSV’s poems unseemingly utilize the power of traversing across the worlds of opposites to give birth to a meaning. For example, in the poem Why not the children be children forever?, the ever-hating Kauravas and Pandavas show empathy and warmth to each other when they are children but move to the opposite ends when they grow up. However, what claims HSV’s sympathy is not their deflection but the pain of their mothers – Kunthi and Gandhari. When the war was fought in Kurukshetra, the mothers beat their heads and wail in pain – ‘why not the children be children forever?’. The familiarity and strangeness of human nature converged to a point and were expressed as the mothers’ woes. The poem tries to prove the point that all humans are inherently good when they are children.

It is no secret that a significant influence on HSV’s poetic impression is by the ancient poets of Indian heritage, predominantly Valmiki, Vyasa, and Kalidasa. Evidently, the first poem of this collection and the title of this book were influenced by a verse from Valmiki from the Ramayana: Ruditanusari Kavi, the one who searches tears and stands with it is a poet. In the poem In Search of Tears, Valmiki unexpectedly encounters Sita, a character out of his epic, the Ramayana. Sita, now a pregnant woman, has been abandoned by Rama. Now the sage poet’s vanity is wounded. She asks a direct and unambiguous question to him:

Would Ramayana end when Rama is still there?

And so, Sita’s woes will go on until the end;

Crowning him king, how could you end the story?

It is then that the mockery of life begins.

The multi-dimensional and loaded meanings of these lines are intense. Here, Rama and Sita represent the men and women of the world across time, space, and race. Neither the Ramayana ends, nor does Sita’s woes. The implicit and powerful expression that carries us to a greater depth of sorrow is that the deceit she suffers is not just from Rama – the man of her life, but also from the poet – the creator. It reinforces the well-believed notion that we read literature not to learn about the characters there but to learn about our own personalities. 

HSV uses similar metaphorical transformations in the poem The Bow Festival in America. The poem intelligently relates Krishna’s journey from Vrindavana to Mathura after accepting the evil king Kamsa’s challenge to participate in the bow festival with the hidden intention of killing him, to the migration of our new generation to America and other developed countries. The strength of duality here is that the question – was it really Kamsa’s challenge or the material wealth of Mathura that attracted Krishna to leave Vrindavana – remains unanswered. Like the Roman God Janus with two faces, the strength of poetry is its duality. It can take you in between the lanes and diverge you to an unknown destination.

Reason makes us tolerate, whereas faith makes us pray. In the poem The Bird, a bird is flying over an ocean, probably on its intercontinental journey, and the poet’s heart prays for its safety. In the vast where the blues above and below, the bird is insignificantly a dot. But, faith beats reason here:

Save the bird first, O God!

It is not a bird … it is a heart … the heart of the sky!

Only a sensible poet can go beyond reason and see significant but minute things in the overly whelming vast. HSV has done that in every poem here.

The poem The Earth Too is a Sky deals in the exact reverse order the way it was in The Bird. Here, the vast converges to a dot to give us a metaphorical equivalent.

Stars and planets lie scattered over the sky.

We have drawn the map joining them in lines of relationship.

We have woven the internet and dreamt of cosmic families.

But we also know the earth too is a sky and we the stars and planets.

The poem links the heavenly bodies of unimaginable sizes to our sense of existence, making isolation universal. Despite their mass, the celestial objects feel the way we humans feel – detached even after being part of a family and other organized structures.

Though India’s legendary epics and philosophies associated with them have their profound influence on HSV’s poetry, he, in the meantime, never stopped responding to the contemporary world. In the poem The Great Firework, the focus is on the misery of a commoner in a war-inflicted zone. The scene is the Gulf War when Saddam Hussain’s Iraqi forces and the allied forces led by America are engaged in a conflict. See the tone of irony and sarcasm the poem takes at the end:

Somewhere in the corner of a town, a baby is crying its heart out…

The matter is not so severe and doesn’t stop the game.

The baby’s woollen cap just got the flame.

What was heard – the desperate cry of a baby – never alters any equations for the big boys out there. Who cares for a baby’s cry when the world is engaging with its own cruel business? As a more calm-down attempt, in the poem With the Tree, HSV addresses how we are getting away from nature and prescribes what we should do.

To talk with a tree is not a bit difficult.

Just that, you should stand still, before it, like a tree.

In section two, we have two unique poems, though separate but conceptually linked by their theme and the subject. Uttarayana and Vaidehi are the two poems there. These poems are the collection of vignettes, the album of images, but eventually emerge as a single grand picture, the way zig-saw puzzle pieces fit together on the floor. Those who are close to HSV know well that the narrative experience of these two poems is deeply personal to him.

Uttarayana is a personal elegy characterized by the untimely death of the narrator’s wife. He goes through various stages of grief to comprehend the loss. The poem starts with a gloomy picture of the spiralling dark smoke looming from the burnt wick and sets in us the sad state of his. The wife took the departure when the husband never had the slightest clue, as if she had alighted at a stop when he in the next seat fell into a deep slumber. The world which started with her birth, later merged with his, now separated and disappeared forever. The word Uttarayana, though it generally means summer solstice, also means the latter half, as it goes with the narrator – the life without the beloved one. The death of his wife robs his life ruthlessly. But, the speciality of this poem is not the way it describes death, but the way the narrator finds his consolation in the philosophy of it. The narrator finds his peace in the verses he could rely upon. The poem finds its parallel in a verse from Chandogya Upanishad, which reads that being scared of death, gods take refuge in the Vedas. The poem, which starts on the personal loss, emerges eventually to take respite from death. The name of the Upanishad, Chandogya, is actually derived from the Sanskrit word Chandas, which literally means “the poetic metre.”

Vaidehi, phase two of Uttarayana, which he wrote after four years, finds a solution to handle grief in its unique way. Vaidehi is another name for Sita and also means liberated from the body. In this poem, the narrator addresses the dismay of his wife’s death by making a poignant mental image of her, an immersed idol in the mind, In that very image he saw her the first time, beneath the temple tree with beautiful flowers on the hill of Ramagiri near her maternal home. It may not be just random if you get the picture of the Yaksha of Megaduta, who sends love messages to his wife from the hills of Ramagiri.

Be an epic my love, the unblinking eye under densest of lids,

Focus on me alone and look at me,

Flower that withers not, body warmth that sweats not,

Never erring, body-less beloved of my mind.

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you,’ said Rumi. The poem Vaidehi exhibits it. Also, no surprise if the brevity of the short stanzas reminds you of the love poems of Neruda, in structure as well in meaning.

As the last part of this note, I would like to express a few words on poetry translation. No two languages in this world are equal in their evolution, heritage, and written and colloquial usages of words and sounds. It is much like comparing apples to oranges. The differences are much more distinctive when the original bases of the languages are not the same, as in our case, Kannada and English. Though the essential elements of poetry – meter, rhyme, rhythm, sound, and form – remain the same in their concept shape across, yet the bricks they are made of come from the mud of the locale. Despite the contrary, the only way we transport the literary richness of one language to another is through translation. That is how Rilke and Neruda reach us, and Kalidasa and Rumi reach the west. Yang Wanli, the Chinese poet, quoted 900 years ago, “get rid of words, and get rid of meaning, and still, there is poetry.” When trust, like a delicate holy thread, is established between a reader and a poem, the language disappears from the equation.

My delight at this task of editing and compiling these poems was the opportunity to read and re-read these lovely poems, discuss them with brilliant translators, and more, discuss with HSV, the poet. I am much thankful to all of them. I want to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. T.P. Ashok for a profound foreword, which in no doubt introduces HSV and his poetry in-depth, further enhances the reading experience of this collection.

M R Dattathri