An open window in a country house –, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke This one is for all of us whose love cannot survive into the day, whose love does not meet the approval of the world.ĩ. My translation of the ancient Sangam Tamil poem. Dawn descended, a flashy sword, Tearing apart lovers locked in embrace. Poem 157 of the Kuruntogai by Allur Nanmullaiyar I am going to leave you with the brooding heartbreak built into these exquisite lines.Ĩ. Kamala Das writes about love like no other poet, and I had a difficult time picking up the one I liked best. Oh yes, getting A man to love is easy, but living Without him afterwards may have to be Faced. Not with that other tongue.” The more English becomes the language into which I default with my lovers, the more I find myself yearning for love that feels close to the skin, for a love that does not require translation. I love this poem by Sandra Cisneros because of the way it invokes the intimacy of a shared language. I want to know that I knew you even before I knew you. Love for me is not merely a heteronormative man-woman couple caught up only in their universe, but something that opens up to the existence of complexities.ĭetail from the Stoclet Frieze by Gustav Klimt. And what adds so much sexual tension to their encounter is the knowledge and acknowledgment of other lovers, and the guest’s studied indifference which is seductive on its own. The stranger in Anna Akhmatova’s poem is unnerving: he is not into the conventional happily-ever, he wants to follow her to hell. “Tell me how men kiss you, Tell me how you kiss men.” Oh, I know: his delight Is the tense and passionate knowledge That he needs nothing, That I can refuse him nothing. When I read this poem by Ilya Kaminsky, I read this (among a dozen other readings) as a celebration of the routine, the rut that lovers fall into, a world into which access is special. Hearing your lover count, watching them silently fold their clothes at the end of a day, that sort of thing. Sometimes, I’ve felt this visceral need to push back against these expressions of love, and simply to soak in the mundane. The extreme commodification of love into an industry under late capitalism – cards, date nights, flowers, wine, the seduction routine – means that we have come to think of love as a spectacle, as curated moments that are perfectly choreographed in order to be properly cherished. You can fuck anyone – but with whom can you sit in water? While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses by Ilya Kaminsky Watch how with every word she slowly, silently smuggles in the terror of a possible separation? Sometimes, our only strength is our vulnerability – and this poem sings with this realisation.Ĥ. This one by Tishani Doshi holds me in its thrall. What is a love poem that is not about loss, I often think. So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling? Brown writes about love and desire with such insight – and what I especially admire about this particular poem is the way in which it combines the inner world of the lovers with the external strife-ridden world that discriminates against Black people, against queer people.Įither way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something. This mesmerising poem blends the world of the romantic and the radical together in the most endearing manner. Flies from one side of a nation to the outside Of our world. My lover leaves me with words I wish To write. What are you when you leave your man Wanting? What am I now that I think so fondly Of airplanes? What’s my name, whose is it, while we Make love. Which of us has ever loved without suffering a heartbreak, which of us has loved without realising that our love was a story concocted in our mind? This poem has seen me through many an emotional crash-landing, so here I’m sharing the wisdom. I’m putting this at the top of the list because it is my favourite poem by my favourite poet. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. And like all love poetry, the translation started in a moment of being deeply in love, and lacking the solid support of a shared mother-tongue.ġ. My new translation of the Kāmattu-p-pāl of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, The Book of Desire, reflects this. It is a didactic text in its first two books (Morality, Materialism) – but the society it envisioned would hold itself together only by radical, life-affirming love, rapturously celebrated in the third book. This informed my readings, and rereadings of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, the 2,000-year-old collection of verses that remains a central part of Tamil literature and thought.
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