Atoor Ravi Varma is one of the foremost contemporary Malayalam poets. His poems bear testimony to how tradition and modernity can be converted in genuine poetry. Excerpts from an interview.
When was it that you realised there is a poet in you and what led you to that realisation?
I’d say it just happened. Basically, I’m a villager from a traditional Hindu family. I can’t boast of any literary or poetic lineage, but there was a literary atmosphere in my family. Keeping with tradition, my mother used to read classics like Thunchanth Ezhuthachan’s Adhyatma Ramayana and the Mahabharata . So, I grew up listening to traditional verses. Also, in those days, there used to be performances of Kathakali, Oattamthullal and Thayampaka, and orchestras of various indigenous percussion instruments. It might be from this background that I imbibed my rhythm and metre.
What was your first poem about and how did it happen?
Strangely, my first poem was about Julius Caesar, which I wrote in school. We had to study Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the teacher who taught us was highly talented. Just out of curiosity, or might be playfully, I tried to render Caesar’s pathos into traditional Malayalam metres. I showed it to my mother; she appreciated it.
In his introduction to your first poetry collection, historian and critic Dr. M. Gangadharan says you were a rebellious student when he first met you.
I don’t know. All I can say is that I have always been a sceptic. I had a feeling that the values passed down by tradition were bleak and depressing. I could only see darkness all around. And, a disquieting yearning for openness, freedom, and transparency sprang up in me. Like many of my contemporaries, I was attracted by Communist ideology and became active in the leftist student organisation and the progressive literary movement.
You would have written poems in those days, expressing your convictions. But you didn’t include them in any of your collections. Why?
Because I didn’t find them worthy. My outlook on poetry underwent many changes in the meantime. Poetry is not simply versifying some social and political themes. One must refine ones vocabulary, structure of speech, images and symbols in order to express the changing reality with directness and lucidity. None of my previously published poems, I found, satisfied me in this respect.
You are an admirer of classical music, both Carnatic and Hindustani, and every year you travel to Thanjavur and Gwalior to listen to the masters. But you never embellish your poems with music or mellifluous words. How do you explain this contradiction in your taste?
I don’t think there’s a contradiction. Poetry and music are totally different forms of expressions, each having its own independent domain. There’s no similitude between the music in poetry and the real music that we enjoy when a singer sings. Poetry is an art of internalising into its matrix what otherwise appears to be external, through language. Music does it through sounds.
You have translated modern Tamil writers like Sundara Ramaswamy, Puthumaipithan, Manushyaputhran, Salma, Devadevan and Jayamohan as well as classical works like the Kamba Ramayanam into Malayalam. What led you to Tamil?
Tamil and Malayalam share a common past. But the cultural and literary gap between these languages is getting widened. We are familiar with the contemporary literature of Europe and Latin America. At the same time, we don’t know who the most promising writers in Tamil and Kannada are. And, basically I have a tempting infatuation with Tamil for which I owe much to M. Govindan, the visionary poet in Malayalam. So, I learned Tamil and began translating from it.
Your output, compared to other poets of your generation, is not voluminous. Why?
I prefer silence. My poems are born out of silence. I’m practising silence. That might be the reason why you ask me this question. Silence is my language.
