This poem of exile comes from the ‘little magazine’ culture of the 1980s and 90s, and it is likely that the poet and his audience, living then in France, would all have been known to each other, as would the circumstances described in the poem. As such, knowing it talks of real people, we wanted to retain Hari’s additional notes for the poem to provide readers with that historical context. The translation group involved several Tamil speakers, and we had particularly interesting discussions around the differences between “learning” and “studying”, and the institutional denial of education. Despite being in free verse, the poem has a clear structure which we maintained: five couplets, then a more urgent sprawling stanza of nine lines. The colloquial tone of the first half of the poem (mostly in spoken dialogue) then changes into something more descriptive, that becomes more dramatic and carries a sense of real violence. It underscores the poem’s theme of oppression through the denial of language and education. We struggled at first with the title, which in the Tamil is written in a more literary or poetic register than the rest of the poem, but through a quick discussion that bounced around many different ideas, the final line suddenly leapt out and felt like a satisfying solution to all.
Chrissy Williams, Poet-facilitator
A Note on Sugan’s Poetry
Sugan’s poems respond to war and exilic abandonment. Constructed in a rushed every-day cadence interlaced with hexes, riddles, laments and pithy aphorisms, his poetry reports on the general absurdity of the situation many found themselves in after feeling the violence back home. Operating against the grain of canonical diaspora lyricism that summons a long-distance national identity, belonging and nostalgia, Sugan’s poetry is largely irreverent, absurd, and riddle-like in its indirect critique of these poetic ambitions. Borne out of the fratricidal contradictions of the Tamil liberation struggle for a homeland, Sugan’s speaker is a guilty and complicitous figure. He does not sing of freedom. He is remarkably silent on liberation. The poetry here is a witness to not only the monstrous excesses of state power but also the violent cul-de-sacs of revolutionary militancy.
Sugan’s work in the 90’s enjoyed limited circulation and acclaim within the small but active ‘little magazine’ print culture among the exiled Sri Lankan Tamil literati in Canada and Europe. Most of them previously partook in the Tamil liberation struggle as young combatants belonging to various militant groups. This exiled scene was a complicated environment of ex-combatant fatigue, criticality and deconstruction. Their literary production at that time was heavily influenced by newly available Tamil translations from the French poststructuralist school. This created an environment of greater permissibility that encouraged subversive and counter-canonical expressions. Oppressed caste, class and gender expressions began to find avenues for their expression in the new milieu. Sugan’s voice comes to us from this very specific time and place.
While the urgency and immediacy of his voice found active readership among the 90s little magazine print and colloquium culture, the disjointed and rushed constructions struggled to find their way into the more conservative literary canon. The war came to its brutal end in 2009. The post-war period that followed is still reckoning with a difficult and complicated (and dispersed) archive. Reading and translating Sugan in this context is an exercise in listening to the minor figure in history.
Hari Rajaledchumy, Guest-translator
