Is it more than that or is it only my love of words/when his photos move and words cry/ and the coffee house acts as the centre stage where folks make love eating apple pie/and his absent presence defines silence that speaks.

This is one of the poems I wrote while trying to come to terms with A K Ramanujan’s sudden, shocking death on 13 July 1993. His ‘absent presence’ continues to define silence. And he taught me to listen when  silence speaks.

Thirteen years later, Manohara Granthamala has brought out his Collected Works in Kannada (686 pages, Rs 500).

That’s almost 10 years after his Collected Works and Unpublished Works was released in English. In 2003, poet and close friend of AKR, Aravind Krishna Mehrotra, explored Looking for A K Ramanujan in the book A History of Indian Literature in English.

I remember sharing with Mehrotra that with AKR, there is NO language divide; his poems, writings, translations in English and Kannada are one continuous thread and some ideas first taking birth in one language, then take form in another language. Just as some thoughts stayed with him through time and one can see him pondering over it, again and again, and finally coming to a totally different conclusion.  In fact, it gives me a sense of freedom to pick up a thought from my Kannada poem and present it in a totally different dimension in English.

Never a translation
When they ask me at poets’ meets to name the ‘original’ Kannada poem whose translation I am reading, I feel at a loss because it is not a ‘straight’ translation of the Kannada poem but something totally new. AKR’s poems are like that. For instance, if he is talking about a Jain monk in a Kannada poem, in English he would present it in a different manner. It can never be termed a translation.

Hence, the Collected Works of A K Ramanujan should include English and Kannada works, where they speak to one another, reflect, support or start a dialogue of sorts. That is how he wanted a collection to be. He had once told me to “arrange the poems in a collection where the poems engage in a dialogue and each page is a continuation of the previous one even though they carried different poems. The different poems are nothing but pauses in a conversation.”

We wrote letters to each other in poems. Those were the pre-internet, pre-satellite phone era and after writing a letter and posting it, one had to wait for seven days for it to reach and another seven days to get a reply. If he was travelling, it would take another couple of weeks more. The pauses were longer than the conversations. But they were definitely intense.

Way ahead
Reading AKR now would make many a younger poet feel he was way ahead of his time in terms of thought, style, structure and use of language.  That is precisely why the Collected Works is much needed. His collections were sold out so quickly that even in those days, one had to look for a copy and came away disappointed many times. There was nothing flashy about his books. They were just like him – simple and elegant.  His Hokkulalli Hoovilla (No Flower in the Lotus), Mattu itara kategalu (And Other Poems),  Kuntobille (Hopscotch) and a novella Mattobbana Atma Charitre (Someone Else’s Autobiography) were not bulky in size but massive in content.

They called him ‘the hyphen in the phrase Indo-American.’ His colleague Walter Hauser described AKR as ‘a man of rare gentleness, of a deep and sensitive humanity.’  It is just one accurate description. There are several others.  Professor U R Ananthamurthy always refers to AKR as his ‘Guru’.  AKR invited Chandrashekhar Kambar to Chicago.

Right start
Once he read a poem of mine which was published in a Deepavali special edition,  much appreciated by others, and pointing his finger somewhere after 10 lines, he said, “Your poem starts here!”

In his last letter, he had written a poem about death. He wondered “who knew the electricity would go just as we were beginning to look into each other’s faces.”  We are still grouping in the dark.

Collected Works : A K Ramanujan will be launched in the first week of July in Bangalore by Manohara Granthamala

source: http://www.bangaloremirror.com / by Prathibha Nandakumar / Lounge / Fri Jun 24th, 2011