A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India.

• Author: Selby, Martha Ann
• Position: Book Review

A Poem at the Right Moment: Remembered Verses from Premodern South India. Edited and translated by VELCHERU NARAYANA RAO and DAVID SHULMAN. Voices from Asia, vol. 10. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1998. Pp. xiii + 211. $16.95.

This book is a delightful collection of catus--poems translated from Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil--that have, historically speaking, been liberated from manuscript and page, and that have lived on in memories, becoming parts of collective and personal repertoires in specific "moments" during mostly impromptu displays of wit, grief, lust, and despair, whenever good words are needed or required. More specifically, catus are poems that are, by definition, multivalent. In the world of the catu, the poem is all in the saying, and can be used to praise or ridicule "depending on context and tone" (p. 3). Rao and Shulman describe for us what amounts to a catu ontology, in which poets are omniscient beings with "divine gifts," fully capable of transforming reality with their words (pp. 16-17). This "reality" is also stubbornly transhistorical, a world in which poets from different centuries can meet, converse, and compete with each other (p. 23).

Without exception, each poem in this volume glows with a shimmering wit. The verses to which I felt myself the most drawn are those that reflect on the tactility of daily experience--there are plenty of poems on love, lust, and courtesans, but also quite funny, charming quatrains on bed lice (p. 112) and belligerent washermen (p. 113). The translations themselves have a Zenlike economy and are beautifully rendered. In some instances, certain idioms are not carried over into English, but this is a small and perhaps necessary concession. There are also occasional slight changes in idiom, when the authors chose to carry them over into English, which troubled me a little. Some of the translations are not quite "honest" in terms of the literal "word," but again, the feeling--the "punch" that each poem carries--is quite the same in the original and in the translation, and at times, the original poem is actually improved by the inspired English versions of the translators, who seem to have themselves become gleeful inhabitants of the catu world of composition. The...