PRIYA SARUKKAI CHABRIA

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is an award-winning poet, writer, translator and curator of eleven books that include four poetry collections, two SF novels, translations from Classical Tamil, literary nonfiction, a novel, and edited two poetry anthologies Winner, Muse India Translation Prize, Kitaab Experimental Story Award, Best Reads from Feminist Press and awarded for Outstanding Contribution to Literature by the Indian government. Residencies / presentations include Writer’s Centre, Norwich, Sun Yat-sen International Writers Program, Guangzhou, Commonwealth Literature Conference, Innsbruck, Alphabet City, Canada, Frankfurt Book Fair, UCLA, JLF, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, etc. She has curated seminars for Sahitya Akademi, Raza Foundation-PIC. Priya collaborates with photographers, dancers and filmmakers and channels Sanskrit aesthetics and Tamil Sangam poetics into her work. Anthologies publications include Another English Poems from Around the World, Asymptote, Consequence Forum, Kenyon Review, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, PEN International, Post Road, PR & TA, Reliquiae, South Asian Review, The British Journal of Literary Translation, The Literary Review (USA), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction I &II, Voyages of Body and Soul etc. Priya is on the Advisory Council of G100, India, and WrICE Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange, Australia. She is Founding Editor, Poetry at Sangam. www.priyasarukkaichabria.com

Translator’s Reflections

In 2008 I began my immersion into Tamil Sangam poetics (roughly 3 BCE-3CE) on which Tamil bhakti poetry drew. I commenced translating the extraordinary, intense and often erotic sacred compositions of Andal, the Vaishnava teen-goddess and mystic poet. My journey with Manikkavacagar, who name means ‘whose words are rubies’, started in 2016 in sessions with renowned scholar Dr S Raghuraman-Pulavar.

Writing in cen / Classical Tamil, the Saiva mystic largely followed rules laid down in the Tolkaappiyam, a Sangam-era treatise on prosody and grammar. A highly allusive system, this encourages, in akam love poetry, three levels of generative interpretation: literal, parallel or hidden / ullurai, and the inset or implied metonym eraichi. The latter two need to be prised out by the translator. I found this tantalizing. However, Southern Saivism is not without dogma and dense gnostic systems which demand study. Further, such poetry often relies on the device of maraiporul / veiled meaning where the sacral interpretation is placed–-rather like a luminous, floating shadow–-beneath the flow of a seemingly secular verse.

To me, such inventive and bountiful poetic play calls for multiple strategies of translation within the same corpus of compositions to bring out some connections within the same song, and those in dialogue with each other.

When the poem demands it, I use two different fonts, the lighter one suggesting its hidden significance.

At all times, to remain at the prismatic crystal heart of these songs I leapt over the barrier of footnotes–-sometimes by using the commentarial mode, at other times by weaving my own poems into Manikkavacagar’s, as offering and lens, both these modes are italicized.

Occasionally, I add my name to the inserted poems in the tradition of the bhakti poets of medieval India. Importantly, the addition of my name emphasizes not possession but its opposite: release. It suggests other versions wait to be discovered in the sanctum of the sacred which is too large, mysterious and intensely loving to be claimed by any one translator.

Tamil words inserted in the translations are, I hope, like stepping stone across a stream: calling attention to the leaps one has to make yet helping by their very ‘foreignness’ to cross into another’s language and thought. I hope it also alludes to the vast horizon of bhakti where all cannot be known or exhausted.

Siva is said to manifest as the fifth element akasha / etheric space in the Chidambaram temple where Manikkavacagar composed most of his songs. Shobhana, in her Translator’s Reflections, beautifully expands on the theme. For me, it runs like this: A dark, cave-like room garlanded with a single string of golden leaves seems empty, but isn’t. It throbs with unseen energy. This is the temple’s rahasya / mystery. This secret space and the cosmic grandeur associated with Siva possibly led to the ‘floating-ness’ of my translations: I see the word and the space around it as a composite; also the longer I soak in his verse, I envision my understanding of Manikkavacagar’s work expanding. Therefore, I hope the floating aspect of my translations transfers into the spatiotemporal dimension as well. But I can’t be sure. Nor can I dare to claim to decipher the full meaning of a mystic’s verses. Language is perhaps our best bridge to the sacred, but it hangs, half-built. The rest is experiential–-if one is graced.

Shobhana and I offer possible pathways for you to make your own.