Description
This new collection brings three decades of poetry by P Ahilan, leading Tamil poet from Sri Lanka, to Indian readers for the first time.
Featuring the original poems in Tamil alongside translations by Geetha Sukumaran, A Smile Drying on a Vine illuminates how history, mythology, visuality and the intimate experience of war shape language to give voice to the impact of conflict and trauma. Deeply visceral yet reflective, Ahilan’s masterful language moves from the clinical to the performative, seeking remembrance as resistance, amid the din of a war that has not ceased in its erasures.
The volume also features reflections, conversations and the original book covers, allowing multiple entryways into Ahilan’s poetry, and a glimpse of how ordinary lives endure in the face of unimaginable violence.
This is the first in a series of books envisaged as conversations on South Asia. Each will feature the work of one South Asian poet, and also put them in dialogue with another, exploring common threads in the life of the region. This book, and the books to follow, are an attempt to enter the poet’s realm through multiple conversations, narratives, entry points, and the lenses of lived experiences in different landscapes.
This volume concludes with a set of interviews and conversations, lending insight into the wounded world the poet inhabits. In this book, Ahilan’s verses and views are paired with Ashok Chattopadhyay, whose afterword and Bengali poems (translated into English by Mukherjee, P) speak to his experiences of brutality and violence pervasive during the Naxalbari Movement in West Bengal.
In translated works, the cover of the original is often set aside. But a cover is a narrative of its own, extending the book and the meanings it conveys and drawing in the reader. The covers of Ahilan’s poetry collections express as much as the poems contained within them. The book covers we present at the close of the book are dialogues with artists trying to make sense of the trauma of war, giving us a different way into the text and its meanings.
Packiyanathan Ahilan, born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, is a senior lecturer in Art History at the University of Jaffna. He received a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a master’s degree in art criticism from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He has also studied theatre. Ahilan writes critical essays on poetry, heritage, theatre and visual arts. A curator, performer, and visual engager of exhibitions and enactments, Ahilan writes poetry in Tamil and has to his credit several poetry collections. His poetry has been translated into many languages.
Geetha Sukumaran is a poet, writer and a bilingual translator. She has published Tharkolaikku parakkum panithuli (translations of Sylvia Plath’s poems into Tamil, 2013), the poetry collection Otrai pakadaiyil enchum nampikkai (The Hope Set in a Single Die, 2014), and an English translation of Ahilan’s selected poems titled Then There Were No Witnesses (2018). Her most recent book, Tea: A Concoction of Dissonance (2021), is a collaboration with poet Ahilan and artist Vaidheki. She received the SPARROW R Thyagarajan award for her poetry. Geetha is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough’s Culinaria Research Centre in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences where she works with the Feeding City Lab. She is the co-founder of Conflict and Food Studies at the York Center of Asian Research, York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include gender, conflict, memory, sustainability and food cultures. Geetha holds a PhD in Humanities specialising in Interdisciplinary Food Studies from York University.
