Translated from the Tamil by R. Parthasarathy
The Son Complains to His Mother
You said, Don’t you ever go near girls, son,
Or your ears will be bitten off.
If you are wicked,
God will surely put your eyes out.
Stop pestering me for candies:
They’ll upset your stomach.
Remember, I had bough you
For a winnow of bran.
The lies you had told me, Mother,
When I was young!
Why have you stopped
Telling them now?
Incorrigible as you are, don’t tell me
You have lost interest.
Or, do you suppose I can now
Do without your lies?
Perhaps, you believe, only the government
Can tell lies to grown-ups.
Mother, you have stopped feeding me,
But please don’t stop lying.
For if you do, to whom
Will your son turn
To be smothered with lies?
Dog
The Brahmin in the house opposite ours
Eats late, and tosses
His leaf on the street.
For that scrap,
Two dogs tear each other apart
In the deserted street. Their howls
Wake up dogs sleeping elsewhere
In town. Others in distant streets
Follow. Even dogs in the outskirts
Jump into the fray. The noise travels –
Beyond the rice-fields and orchards.
Dogs in the next town take it up.
It’s an endless chain. However,
If one were to stop and ask
The last dog the cause of it all,
I wonder what he would have to say.
(*In South India, orthodox Brahmins eat off plantain leaves, not plates)
About the Poet
Gnanakoothan ( R. Ranganathan) ( 1938 – 2016) was an acclaimed modern Tamil poet. He was one of the founder-editors of the little magazine Kacatathapara along with N. Krishnamurthy, Sa. Kandasamy, and N. Muthusamy. His works are known for their social satire
About the Translator
R. Parthasarathy (1934-2026), burst upon the Indian literary scene with his first volume of English poems, Rough Passage (1977). He decided in 1982 at the age of 48 to resign the job he had held as an editor at the Oxford University Press, at first in Chennai and then in Delhi, and to go and reinvent himself radically. At the encouragement of Raja Rao, the novelist who taught Indian philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, Parthasarathy undertook a PhD at that university which involved translating the great Tamil epic Cilappatikaram by Ilanko Atikal into English as The Tale of an Anklet. This triumphant translation was published in 1993, and marked an epic makeover for both that text and its translator.
More about him : click here
