Kannada original: Padyada Maatu Be:re ಪದ್ಯದ ಮಾತು ಬೇರೆ
Poet: A. K. Ramanujan
Translated into
English by: S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
WITH A POEM IT’S DIFFERENT
I don’t write replies to
letters.
Even if I would write, I wouldn’t
post them.
Even if I would post them,
many a time they wouldn’t reach
the addressees.
Even if the letters would reach,
they wouldn’t read them fully, they would have
all kinds
of work.
Even if they would read,
I would have said something, they would have
grasped something else. Needless ill-will due to this.
When I too get letters from others,
it’s the same story. That’s why I don’t write
replies to letters.
With a poem it’s different.
When it succeeds especially,
even if it is misread
it’s a kind of reading, one’d feel,
if in a poem one locates sense in what is
meaningless and useless,
all these are but various ruses to strain out meanings
unearthed from the pointless mines of stone and
sand.
Everything is acceptable. Even lies are real.
The word itself is its sense.
In its soil, specks of gold.
In its stone, a vein of silver.
Even in its mire, dim yellow eyes,
a gemstone waiting to be chiseled.
How did Lanka burn? “Like this!” showed Tenali
Rama,
by setting fire to the homes of those who questioned
history,
and amid the smoke, the ashes, and the uproar,
“look here, this is the real Ramayana,” didn’t
he show them?
Like that.
*****
