Magically Cheran
Themes of love and war are powerfully yoked together in fine lyrical verse. K. Srilata
K. SRILATA May 6, 2012
A Second Sunrise, Poems by Cheran (Edited and translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling).
It is a book I didn't want to get to the end of. Because I wanted to taste the poems slowly, word by word. The Sri Lankan Tamil poet Rudhramoorthy Cheran writes with tenderness and precision about love, the sea, war, loss and devastation. Brilliantly translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström and Sascha Ebeling, A Second Sunrise contains some of Cheran's finest, most lyrical poems. The poems are like mini-bombs set to blow a hole through your heart. They bear witness to the tragedy of the Sri Lankan civil war, a war that Cheran describes as an “apocalypse” in a poem of the same name: “We have all gone away; / there is no one to tell our story./ Now there is left/ only a great land wounded.” And yet Cheran is telling us that story.
As Sascha Ebeling points out in his afterword, there is hope in the story that Cheran tells us, hope in the fact that writing survives even in a wounded land. Words must bear witness where nothing else can. “I could forget all this,” Cheran says, proceeding to list half a dozen gruesome war sights. The poems conclude by gesturing gently towards the rape and killing of an upcountry Tamil woman, a tea estate worker who was cooking rice in a pot even as her children sat hidden beneath the tea bushes. “How shall I forget the broken shards/ and the scattered rice/ lying parched upon the earth?”
