On watching Il Postino

Barely recovering from watching Il Postino... what a tribute to poets and poetry...
It will take time for me to recover from this film enough to write about it.

THE STORY

For those who have not seen the film... The Poet Pablo Neruda is in exile and takes off from his native country, Chile, to stay in an italian island until the ban on his entry is lifted. Most of the people in the island are illiterate and so a postman is needed to serve the mailing needs of just the poet and his wife. The villagers, especially the postman and the post master are excited that so famous a man should be staying in their village.

Slowly a relationship develops between the postman and the poet. Infected by the poet's love for imagery, the postman starts writing poetry. He befriends the poet, who also helps him in his budding romance with the village belle. Interspersed with the story of their romance is that of a right-wing politician who is trying to win over the villagers from their affinity for the communists.

The postman gets married and Neruda is his best man. Soon, exile over, Neruda has to go back to his hometown and a year passes by. There is a demonstration and the postman is killed in the firing on the communists. Some years later, Neruda visits the village hoping to meet his old friends, but the postman is no more. He has to make do with meeting his wife and child.

The film ends with Neruda walking on the shore of the beach, remembering the days he spent with his friend and a poem of his flashes on the screen. The poem is about How Poetry came to him...It could be written by the postman himself...



SOME COMMENTS

Somewhere deep the postman touches you with his poetry and idealistic ambitions. Still I can't forgive the director for killing off the postman at the end. Or is it that poetry can never be born without a death happening inside you at the very least.

Pablo Neruda's poem appearing at the end of the story makes you feel that like in Borges' story, where the writer meets himself from a time in the future - his future self, here too, the postman was Neruda too, and the older self came to him to waken him to poetry.... Well. it must be good to have your future self come in and tell you to buck up or else you will miss the nobel prize!

Well that was a happy way to see the death of the postman, but the line on the video cover still beats me - it says "Romantic Comedy" ... WTH????

Cat Island Pictures in Today's Hindu

Today (22 April 2011). There are two photographs of Cat island in the pages of the Hindu. they look like the before and after pictures in a VLCC advert, only reversed! The before is a lush green lake area with many winged visitors, egrets, pond herons etc, the after is the aftermath of a oil slick wash up. A pathetic grey dirty landscape more sickening for its monotony of texture than absence of birds or grass. When is Chennai going to hear this wake up call to protect its vanishing green cover?

Yesterday's post on my blog had some pictures of the Pallikaranai marsh that resembled the Cat island pictures very closely, happily they looked like the healthy one. But already troughs are being dug around the edges, how long before the concrete overtakes and buries the reeds of the marsh?

In March 2011, there was a fire in fifteen places on the marsh that destroyed a lot of the bird life and greenery. Will the government take steps to protect the marsh. One organisation that is involved in protecting this marsh is Care Earth. Care Earth represented in this case by Ranjith Daniels, is an organisation involved in educating and training tribals around TN in matters of conservation. In the case of the Pallikaranai Marsh, they work with the TN Pollution control board.

Birds of Pallikaranai Marsh -April 2011

A swift look at our feathered friends on a summer evening. We were lucky to catch sight of Egrets, Herons, and Moorhens flaunting their summer plumage and gathered in groups enjoying the greenery. Some summer flowers add life to our balcony...! Too bad the birds flew away when I got close... I had to make haste and shootthem when it was still possible, which explains why some pics are blurred!

SIGN - an art show

Sign, an art show conducted by a group of fourteen young artists at Indigo and Laburnum art galleries in Cholamandalam Artists Village, Chennai... draws to a close today.

The artists have taken a fresh approach to conveying the signs of conflict in life today. Predominantly influenced by the metro and its intrusion into our minds, the artists have tried to capture in images this very intrusion using new media and mixing techniques.

The tip of a cigarette smokes away in the room corner - an illusion caught on red board and cottonwool.

swimming figures from an installation, a pool with dying fish, fashioned out of a log...

You copied my tree of life! is a painting that causes the viewer to reflect on ownership and possession...

The sculpture of matchsticks reflects on post-retirement blues... a bizarre state of mind heaping on the floor charred matchsticks...

A painter searches for peace within the leaves of a forest tree...

Experience is just baggage - is the visual claim of one artist who displays an installation of a bag laden with bits of coloured paper...

An artist has the role of stirring the minds of a civilization and making them stop in their blind hurtling rush towards development. Sign - has the impact of the artists' effort.

The media is being kept on its toes now. What with the Fukushima disaster just about setting new standards of what can be called a disaster, totally displacing the media from the scams and the election manifestos, walked in Anna Hazare completely captivating media and websites with his fast for the Lok Pal bill. Very soon it is predicted that they will drift towards the cricket fever. Not even the world cup would have been as much fun we are assured, and the IPL sweeps over us, drowning us in a euphoria of challenges and betting and not even the elections are going to detract the media from this fever.
One struggles weakly to grapple with the speed at which events take over from one another. Is the news then really news or is it just another heavy dose of reality TV? Smaller bits of news like Saibaaba's ill health and the demise of yester year star - Sujatha - really failed to hit the headlines but were rather like small players in a world of big business...

Riders in the Storm

Workout in my friend's gym - music playing loud - mixture of rock songs from the 1980s... one song that I have not heard in over ten years goes.. 'Riders on the Storm... There's a Killer on the Road' and the whole mood is that of a traveller driving down a highway in the dark of the night with a swirling rain storm raging...


I was marvelling at how the words conjure up an image of darkness and thrilling chilling suspense, while the music paints in the background of the rain and thunder... Poetry should be like that - combining the mood of the words with the rhythm of the metre... How I wish I could write like that with abandon and passion...


Neruda seems to be a master at this...

Notice these lines from The Wars -

`...Toy of the Asians, doll
scorched by aerial murderers,
show your blank eyes
far from the waist of the child
who fled when you burst into flame
as every wall blazed
and death held the rice-fields...'


There is something inviolate about the Child. However abnormal the situation. We know of many stories where childhood ended at three even. Not just in warlike or other such dramatic conditions, but even in the most ordinary everyday situations like the case of nomadic labourers...

Thinking about Translation and Politics

I collapsed after my attempt at translating the Hollow Men. It was a poem that affected me deeply when I first read it many years ago and I wanted to see how it sounded in Tamil. At first it was a great thrill to form the phrases in Tamil, look for a way to represent the imagery and ask friends for their critical comments, but later it has thrown open a whole branch of thought. Should anyone at all translate into their mother tongue from English?

The question was thrown open by an editor I listen to, 'why translate from other languages into English'?

A fair question since Tamil literature is just now freeing itself from the shackles of authority and the dictates of caste and class forces. It is taking on forms more and more representative of lesser heard voices, suppressed clamour and ignored angles. In every sense, form structure etc there is a climate of experimentation and one does not want to be retro and wean away the audience from this.

But... the fact remains problems that need solutions - from the personal expressions of women and sexual minorities upto global crises of the misappropriation of science and technology and all resources, - still remains a universal need.

The solutions could be micro and perhaps even highly individualistic, but one can't deny that the problems are not new to us. Poems and Art trigger off thoughts that can release one to oneself and it is in that hope that I read "any origin" literature and translate into Tamil in the hope that readers who feel the same may enjoy the same contact sensation