Dear friends ... here is my English translation of the poem BERCHAPPA ಬೆರ್ಚಪ್ಪ by the Kannada poet S. MANJUNATH ... Sri Manjunath passed away five years ago ... I was not aware of this until a few days ago when I requested my friend Kamalakar Bhat to respond to my English translation of BERCHAPPA, and when I asked him if Manjunath was on FB, he told me this ... reading Kamalakar's translations of Manjunath's poems here regularly, I thought Manjunath was amongst us ...
I had bought his collection of poems MAGALU SRJISIDA SAMUDRA ಮಗಳು ಸೃಜಿಸಿದ ಸಮುದ್ರ last year and was struck by a number of poems there ... I liked BERCHAPPA a lot and wanted to translate it into English ... thank you Kamalakar for your inputs that helped me sort out a couple of doubts ...
I have retained the Kannada title for my English translation too ... 'Scarecrow' is the English counterpart of the Kannada 'berchappa' ... but the 'berchappa' described here is a Kannada 'berchappa', especially the 'pot'head ... so, I didn't want to 'alienate' our 'berchappa' ... here it is ...
Kannada original: BERCHAPPA ಬೆರ್ಚಪ್ಪ
Poet: S. MANJUNATH ಎಸ್. ಮಂಜುನಾಥ್
Translated into English by S. Jayasrinivasa Rao
BERCHAPPA
On the moonlit night
Berchappa descends from
his diurnal vigil on the cross
Inside the straw-stuffed shirt and pants
he sees his body and limbs filling out
His shoulders stretched
across lakes trees hills
He lowered them rubbed them
His eyes tired
gazing at the horizon
He closes his eyelids in relief
He calls out to far-flown
sparrows and parrots,
(they did heed his call!)
He shelled pearls,
knelt down, fed
the birds with his hands
He chats with the crows
sitting in a row on his shoulders
A curse, not a penance
he says, as he sings his pain
The cows were alarmed,
the fence too collapsed
The stream slithered hesitantly
The millet spikes jiggled their wings
and leapt up like a swarm of locusts
The haystack blazed in the
sizzling downpour of cinders
Oh! What magic!
The stream, the tree, the cows
were themselves
It was he who was possessed
he realised
Round eyes, grinning mouth,
hideous moustache – all chalked;
He beheld the earthen pot
that tricked the whole world and smiled
It will be light soon
He took into his eyes the field’s expanse,
his own he felt
Into his chest he took a fill of the night air
*****
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