K. Siva Reddy

His translators, M. Sridhar and Alladi Uma, attempt to encapsulate the complexity of his poetic project in the following lines: “A village in the city, Sanskritic diction in modern Telugu free verse, a romantic strain in a revolutionary song, the folkloric, the oral and the song amidst the written word, the individual in the communitarian, the particular in the universal – that, in short, is K. Siva Reddy.”

In their book of English translations of Siva Reddy’s poems, Mohana! Oh Mohana!, they describe the recurrent themes in his poetry as “rural agricultural life and nature in all its variety, childhood, women, immense faith in man and life, oppression, exploitation and revolution, the collective strength and power of the word”. They point out that Siva Reddy “filled the void when there was no forceful second generation of revolutionary poetry in Telugu. He has even been credited, they write, “with releasing revolutionary poetry from its stereotypic and monotonous poetizing.”

In an engaging interview with his translators (conducted specially for this issue of PIW India), Siva Reddy himself describes himself as a Marxist poet whose approach to language has journeyed from an oratorical style to a quieter, more supple idiom where “the demarcation of the personal and the public gets erased”. “A poem now may begin on a very personal note, but it ends with a collective consciousness,” he says.

The trademarks of Siva Reddy’s style, say his translators, is “a poetic diction [that is] a combination of the commonplace and the ‘literary’ variety, a chain of poetic images and the inevitable force of repetition”. The result is the “heightened, intensified, emotional speech “ that the poet regards as the province of true poetry.

The five poems included in this edition are from a range of books: Ajeyam (1994), Varsham,  Varsham (1999), Antarjanam (2002) and Vrittalekhini (2003). They reveal a poetics of imagistic density and expansiveness that moves freely between domestic detail and metaphysical reflection. ‘Concerning a Room’ explores, for instance, the subtle atmospheric undertones of a certain moment: specifically, four-thirty in the afternoon, “an indecisive state in an in-between hour / an inexplicable dangerous state / when all storms turn inward”.

‘A Love Song between Two Generations’ offers a complex and associative weave of images and thoughts on the subject of the distance between parent and child, gradually unfolding into a rumination on the nature of intimacy. It takes a long and intense journey of reflection to arrive at the aphoristic finality of the last lines:

Love is only to journey
between people through people into people
infinitely.