Editor's Note
Chitrakonda Gangadhar’s unique, rash voice flashed briefly in some Telugu journals, and disappeared mysteriously. Unselfconscious, sometimes incoherent, the images and phenomena of his poems belong to inner reality and are yet tangible, and the angst seems generated by the doomed world the poet inhabits.
This is the first ever translation into any language of Gangadhar’s poetry.
— Mani Rao
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Translator's Note
Gangadhar was writing at a time when massive changes were taking place. The old world of the Cold War, revolution, people’s movements, utopias, etc., was coming to a definitive end to be replaced by a new world of Coca-Cola, disaster capitalism, and micro-realities. It was at this juncture that Gangadhar found himself writing poems. He moved from his birth-village to the city to earn his livelihood, working at construction sites as a labourer.
His poems take place in a world that is perpetually wintry. Reality is violent in his poems. The poems smell of dead leaves. He is a vagabond lost in a cycle of arrivals and departures. He describes the precarious insect-like life of menial workers of the neo-liberal era. The mother figure in his poems never understands her son.
When I first read his poems six years ago, I was not aware of his biographical background. As I skimmed through his book of poems at random, just as I would flick through any book of poems in a bookstore or a library, a poem suddenly stood out. The poems I read that day had a shock-circuit-like effect. Only someone acquainted with deep contradictions in society could produce such an effect. I learned more about him as time went by and translated his work every now and then, whenever I could.
–Rohith
Prisoner
In this city, only the madman
is truly content
From the cement moon to the streets
I possess it all
Death
A train charges at me
from my mother’s face
Half the bogies, hammocks
The other half, laden with salty tears,
run past me
As the last bogie crosses
with the sound of a chop-saw,
I push my paper boat
into an ocean of burning thunder
to welcome death
From the Other Side
Some dead man washes clothes
beating them against a boulder on the riverbank
in the middle of the night
A lone clock sits on the rocks
Who will enter me now?
Traveling on the last train,
sitting by a dark window, I
There’s poison in my pocket
preserved in the dry world-flower
From this side to that, frantic,
Someone with hands in unbuttoned cuffs
waves a flag, a red one
. He is headless
. Signal!
Tonight will be shattered
Unreachable Hand
I hang with those who departed long ago
In the shade of trees that die years after my passing, I sit
I romance with those who burn me in a graveyard
I wander through the mango grove under the heart beat of a bird in mid-air
I witness the flowers leaning against the dying radiance of skin
. May you find your end
. in sorrow
. in longing
. still breathing
. in the realm of unending melancholy
Death hasn’t promised anything yet
Gazing into the eyes of an infant
Trying to reach for its hands
It became a lone, white swan and waddling around, forgot itself
Toddy and Toil
Like a black storm-cloud lid over the fields
of white grass-flowers swaying
in a tender green forest
an urge for death enters the heart
The head of youth melts
and falls off like candle wax
When I leave the drunken room,
my heart breezy bamboo
Streetlights light the night street
harbouring an unknown grief
on this barbaric planet
Corpses
Trees deprived of light keep walking
Death is the only way to witness them
In the shade of a petrified tree
where the legs of a ladder are hitched
A sallow octopus eats an apple
No music audible from the trees
No lips visible
Upon the surface of the city
covered in leaden snow
A leaf green water drop faints
and falls with its aged hands
Acknowledgments
Image Details:
© Akshay Mahajan. Man On The Train.
Akshay’s photos always tell a story.
Author | CHITRAKONDA GANGADHAR
Chitrakonda Gangadhar (1974 – 2011) wrote poems in Telugu from 1995 to 2003, while working as a daily wage labourer in different cities. His poems appeared in Telugu literary magazines of this period. He took his own life in 2011 by drowning in the pond of his birth village. The news of his death reached his literary friends in Hyderabad much later, in 2017. His friends gathered his handwritten manuscripts of poems and published them posthumously with the publishing house Premalekha Prachuranalu. His poetry collection is titled Atmahatya Sadrusha Desha Dimmari Aakhari Korika (2018). His unfinished novel titled Mrutha Nagaram Lo was published by his friend Ajay Prasad in 2020 through Pallavi Publications.
Translator | ROHITH
Rohith is a poet and translator from Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh. After completing his MBBS, he pursued a PG diploma course in Literary Translations offered by Ahmedabad University. He is currently working as a doctor at the Palliative Care Centre in Puttaparthi.