A Poem at the Right Moment

Veluri Venkateswara Rao

As we were growing up, my brother and I used to spend our Sankraanti and summer vacations in my maternal uncle’s village with our cousins. I have always enjoyed the Sankraanti break. Even today, I fondly cherish the post-dinner chit-chat sessions with my uncle. I look back and reminisce; the scene is idyllic and pastoral. By 6:00 p.m. it would become pitch dark, humming, and chilly; we kids collect a good supply of twigs, and make a small fire in the front yard. In the local dialect this fire is known as “negaDi,” and we all sit around it with my uncle ‘presiding.’ We warm up our palms, the palms warm up our face and the occasional sparks from a neem twig struggling to burn (‘neem’ twigs were no! no!) flying all over in competition with the lightning bugs!

My uncle would slowly recite a poem, a Telugu poem, line by line, and we repeat after him. The deal is simple: we learn a poem a day; the next evening all of us have to recite it back to him. The one who fails to recite will have to sit far away from the fire! A chilling punishment, indeed. Then, he will teach us another poem! Now when I close my eyes, I could still recall the entire scene after all these years.

My uncle used to add an anecdote or two, a little story, and I now strongly suspect that he had embellished the old stories with his own additions...to each and every poem he taught us. These stories, compelling as they were, pleasantly forced us to remember every poem, until today! My uncle was not formally educated, but I think he knows hundreds and hundreds of poems by heart; and so many of them are the so-called ‘stray’ or ‘isolated’ verses, or “caaTu,” poems from Telugu and Sanskrit! Some of the poems are crude, overly romantic, some you may not want to ever repeat in the company of girls and ladies, and some often times verge on the soft porn. But, they are all “charming utterances,” in deed!. And luckily for us, as kids we weren’t supposed to ask for the meanings! All we had to do is to repeat after him, remember and recite back.

I remembered almost all the poems, may be because of the stories woven around the poems!

In 1998, I got the book, “A Poem at the Right Moment,” by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, a definitive English translation of carefully ‘selected’ ‘caaTu’ poetry from Telugu, Sanskrit, and Tamil. Of course, the lion’s share was devoted to Telugu caaTus followed by Sanskrit. The moment I got the book, I eagerly scanned it with childlike enthusiasm for those verses I had learned as a pre-teen! I was thrilled to see most of them included in the collection!

As usual, I was ready to question the ‘original’ authorship of some pieces as ‘attributed’ by the present authors.

I would fight to kill with the authors! My uncle did not attribute the authorship of this caaTu to Allasaani Peddana (and his daughter!), the most venerated of the eight court poets (Ashtadiggajas) of Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagaram empire. He told us a slightly different version of the story. An unknown poet started to compose the poem and got stuck at the end of the third stanza! Which man wouldn’t? Men are, in general, ignoramuses and wouldn’t have a clue what a woman would feel/do after the act! It was this anonymous poet’s bright niece that completed the last stanza, which happened to be the most beautiful part of the poem! I like it better if it were niece rather than the daughter!

Any way, let us look at the translation:

Ravished?

She comes down sickened

off the soft bed,

hands tugging at her wild hair,

both eyes glowing red.

Tremors ripple through her waist, her face

is turned away.

She holds her sari

with her fingers, for the knot

has come undone,

as she staggers slightly

through the needle of light

from the diamond lamp

high on its stand

into the shadows below.

The translators’ clever usage, ‘through the needle of light .... into the shadows below,’ makes the poem sound as an original by itself.

The story surrounding a poem that bhaTTumoorti bought for an exorbitant price from NaMdi timmana’s (also known as mukku timmana!) favourite barber who obtained the poem as a gift from Timmana, and included it in his Vasucarita, happened to be the same I have learned from my uncle!

This poem with its preponderance of nasal sounds was a killer to remember! Now, as a grown up, I think it is one great poem where the sound of the words is raised to a level of importance equal to that of meaning!

Here is the translation:

An ode to the nose

In agony, the campaka blossom wondered

why bees enjoy the honey of so many flowers

but never come to her.

She fled to forest to do penance.

As a reward, she achieved the shape of a woman’s nose.

Now she takes in the perfumes

of all the flowers, and on both sides

she is honored by eyes

black as bees.

Isn’t it as beautiful as the original?

But then, does it really matter? Who wrote a particular poem, when, and under what circumstances? Or does it really matter if the literary quarrels (?) between Kaalidaasa (4th century), Bhavabhooti and Dandi (8th century) were true or a figment of some one’s fertile imagination? Did Kaalidaasa really say to Bhavabhooti that in all of his “Uttararaamacaritam,” one single nasal sound ‘m’, was in excess? Obviously, not. But, how sweet the story is! And, tons of such stories abound. The so-called disputes between Kalidaasa and Bhavabhooti; – ‘who is a beter poet?’ – with the king Bhoja as the agent provocateur, and finally the goddess Kaali intervening to settle the dispute by Her clever tricks? The point is that a whole rich cultural tradition that was built around the caaTu poetry should not be dismissed as figments of imagination or ridiculed and ignored for want of academic curiosity of ‘true’ authorship, absolute historicity and chronological authenticity! The western educated Indian elite fell into the traps devised by the western oriental scholars and for ages asked the wrong questions, the historicity of the caaTu poets, the kings and concubines and thorough missed to appreciate and understand the great living tradition that caaTu poetry as a whole has bestowed on a great culture!

Here I am reminded of the good old song by Bob Dylan:

“Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, fighting in the captain’s tower While calypso singers laugh at them, and fishermen hold flowers...” How true!

Narayana Rao and Shulman argue very effectively and convince us in their preface and in the long scholarly after-essay to the book, that ‘a poem exists in the memory or on the tongue of living connoisseurs,’ and caaTu poetry does fit the bill perfectly! A caaTu ‘is an integral part of a system of communicated and shared knowledge of a community.’ And, they elaborate on this community, as well. These poems have survived for eons and they still will! Surprisingly, the caaTu tradition is so strong, it continues even today!

I just wanted to introduce the book; not to really write a critical review on the selection of the verses, the translation and the after-essay. Of course, as a reader, I have a few complaints. The first line index at the end of the book should have been given for the original language of the poem; the index for the first lines of the English translation is almost useless as a reference! Much worse than that; there were too few verses. May be, A Poem at the Right Moment - II is in order.

I was lucky. And, I know people of my generation are very lucky; they grew up with an uncle or a grandfather, who in spite of (or because of?) no ‘formal education’ could recite lots of verses and told tons of stories surrounding the poems! Nephews and nieces in the USA and in India too need not be deprived of those great times we had! We now have a collection of selected verses, transliterated and translated into English, the translation at times reaching close to the lilting beauty of the original. We just don’t try to treasure this great oral tradition, we shall continue to live it.

Let me close this introduction with a Sanskrit caaTu which means

“naama roopaatmakaM visvaM dRSyatE yad idaM dvidhaa

tatradyasya kaveervEdhaa dviteeyasya caturmukhaah”

The world is really two, made of name and form.

One the poet creates.

The second comes from God. (From the After-Essay, page 147)

And, of course I second it.

[“A Poem at the Right Moment” by Velcheru Narayana Rao, Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and David Shulaman, Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, was published by the University of California Press in 1998. Oxford University Press of India has brought out an Indian edition in January 1999.]

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