Malayalam’s Ghazal – Jeet Thayyil

 

Jeet Thayyil (1959 - ) is a performance poet, journalist, writer, editor, and guitarist who has published four collections of poetry and fiction.  He has won many awards including DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) prize for South Asian Literature and Sahitya Academy award for English literature.  ‘Malayalam’s Ghazal’ is a poem taken from Jeet’s ‘Collected Poems’.  The poem depicts what is lost in translation.  As every language has its own identity and depth, the poet asks the readers to open the windows to the fresh air of their mother tongue.  The word ‘Malayalam,’ a palindrome is repeated at the end of all couplets in the poem. That adds beauty to this poem.

Symmetry refers to a sense of harmonious and beautiful proportion and balance in poetry.  So, it is very difficult to achieve in poetry.  But the name of the language of Kerala, ‘Malayalam’, we can find it.  Because Malayalam is the longest Palindrome, that can be read forward and backward.  The poet says that Malayalees won’t “despair” for anything as they don’t have a word in Malayalam to mean it and as they are optimistic.  Jeet always lived in foreign countries and so studied in English.  However, he developed a love for Malayalam because of the influence of his parents.  The poet feels Malayalam as a dynamic language, though it doesn’t have proper words for some English words.  So, he asks the reader to open the windows and get the fresh air of Malayalam, when they have to be too long in the rooms of English.  That will help to keep them optimistic and hopeful.

Actually, world literature comes to Malayalam through translations.  Translations always take away something or add something to the actual meaning of the word in the original language.  So, it fails to give effectiveness to the reader.  Actually, it happens when Malayalam gets translated into English too.  Though poetry has become the school of ‘lost tongue’, the poet has understood the identity and depth of both Malayalam and poetry.  So, he greets the ancestors, scholars and linguists of Malayalam, who really enriched it.  Here, he also remembers his father, who used to recite Baudelaire, the great French Poet, in Malayalam.  However, it seems challenging to Jeet, to write a couplet in Malayalam, as his father said.  That is why he has written this ‘Malayalam’s Ghazal’, a poem in a traditional rhyming couplet with the refrain 'Malayalam ', where each line has the same meter. Thus, Jeet has shaped a fine couplet on Malayalam.

----Thulasidharan