I have been reading an edited anthology of Kamala Das’s writings called Pranayakaalathinde Album (Season of Love: An Album) edited and with an introduction by Arshad Bathery (Calicut: Olive Publications, 2005).
These are short haiku like entries — not syllabically speaking — taken from Kamala’s stories, poems and non-fiction writings pertaining to love. An interesting idea, to be sure. Here are a few that I translated. Rough translations. They need a lot of work, but you can get a sense of the tradition in which she writes. Many of these with their insistence on the materiality of the body for memory ( and thus for writing) validate the comparison between Kamala and the great French writer Marguerite Duras. All of these are prose excerpts in the original Malayalam. But you almost feel like putting in line breaks. Enjambment seems natural in some others.
1.
Your eyes are wild streams.
They flow over me
leaving me cool and refreshed.
2.
Love carries an unknowable weight.
Lust
light like milkweed
blown by the wind.
3.
In the mysterious morning light
fused together
like an egg with its white and yellow dissolved
my fingers move towards your body
without hesitation and with right
to recognize
that we are destined to be mates
through innumerable past lives.
4.
For whose embrace is this body waiting
For whose kisses are these lips opening
This poor body these poor lips
that will soon turn into a corpse.
5.
Spring filled me.
Eternal, imperishable love.
When you entered me
this body became your home
this soul your bed chamber.
6.
God was a lover who could not get up to embrace me.
7.
At other moments
it became clear to me
that this body is a barrier to loving.
What will my lover love if there was no body?
What will he caress?
The unseen soul? The inaudible breaths?
The mournful dirge of the sea that lies underneath
the foam and froth of smiling?
8.
My love was his wine.
I saw with great tenderness
how he droned and flitted restlessly
from one tree branch to another
like a drunken blue beetle.
9.
What links the heart with love?
Love is thought, a brain thinking.
Do hearts think?
10.
You are the poem to end all poems.
A poem complete like a tombstone.
The Red Earth 