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
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