FLEETING INFINITY - Vol I HOW THIS VOLUME HAPPENED?

FLEETING INFINITY - Vol I

HOW THIS VOLUME HAPPENED?

_ Latha Ramakrishnan

  

When I opened a Facebook account in mid-June2016, I was a little apprehensive about it. For, I am not an interactive person. I prefer to remain in my ‘nutshell’ world. Then, what will I be doing there….? But, soon I got friends from far and wide many of whom have been writing poems in Tamil. And, they have been uploading their own poems (as well as the poems of their friends and favourite poets) in their Timelines. Their poems uploaded in their Timelines proved genuine, and unassuming, having socio-political and psychological depth and range.

I started translating into English some of these poems which I chanced to read and found solace in, admiring their style and content. When I uploaded these poems – the original poems as well as my English translations of them, the way my Facebook Friends welcomed this initiative of mine proved overwhelming. Whether their poems are translated or not they whole-heartedly appreciated the poems translated and congratulated those fellow-poets. This is something which proved and proves a redeeming and reenergizing factor which enthused me to translate more and more poems. Thus I have translated 500 to 600 poems and each time I come across a powerful and poignant poem I crave to translate it with what little knowledge of English I have, by way of thanksgiving. ( I have  around 100 poems selected by me from my friends’ timelines for translation and this number keeps increasing! Aided by the poet, reader and translator in me I set forth to translate. Of course they may be imperfect and my translation may not be doing full justice to the original poem. Yet, I dared ( and dare) to go on for the sheer joy it gives me and to my facebook friends.

By way of expressing my heartfelt thanks to my facebook friends for their poignant poems and their genuine appreciation of poetry, I wanted to bring forth a volume comprising my translation of their poems along with the original ones. When I expressed this wish in my Timeline they unanimously supported it. After significant delay due to want of time and financial constraint at last I have managed to compile and publish this volume captioned Fleeting Infinity, comprising one poem each of 139 poets. This include veteran poets, poets who have earned a place for themselves in the field of contemporary Tamil poetry, poets who have won awards, poets who have several poem-collections to their credit, poets who are also doing well in other genres of literary writing, budding poets, poets who have written a sizeable number of poignant poems but are yet to publish their first collection of poems, poets who keep writing and publishing poems in their Timelines alone….. I thank them all from the depth of my heart for giving me blanket permission to translate any of their poems and to include in this volume any one of their poems translated by me.

I regret my inability to include the brief profiles of the poets in this volume. Hope to do so in the next volume.

I sincerely thank fellow poet Tharmini for offering me valuable suggestions in reaching out to the poets and for teaching me how to ’tag’ the poets included in this volume. Also, she was the first one to send me Rs.4000 as her contribution to my initiative. I thank fellow poet Selvaraj Jagadeesan for his contribution of Rs.5000. and, I thank Dr.K.S.Subramanian, a renowned translator who has three volumes of contemporary Tamil poems rendered in English by him and a volume of Sangam poems penned by women of that era and also more than 50 percent of Bharathiar’s poems rendered in English, to his credit for his timely contribution of Rs.20,000 towards this initiative. 

I thank Facebook for the fantastic space it provides us. I would like to send a complimentary copy of this volume to Facebook but don’t know how to do it. Hope my facebook friends would help me in this.

I thank Mr.Thiru for his timely help in finetuning the layout of this volume and its front and back wrappers, within a short span of time.

I call this volume FLEETING INFINITY – Vol 1 for I hope to compile more such volumes in the days to come. I wish to publish small introductory volumes of significant individual poets comprising minimum ten poems of the respective poets along with their English translations of them, with a brief profile of the poet, a brief face-to-face session with the poet or the poet’s brief musings on why he/she reads and writes poetry and how does a poem come to be in his or her mind – things like that.

I am reminded of the proverb or quotable quote - - Where there is a will there is a way. I think I have the will and I hope to find the way.

Thanks once again

Latha Ramakrishnan

28.01.2019