A poem and an error
Vishnu Narayanan Namboodiri, a Malayalam poet and a professor in English Literature, often wore just a dhoti, and a thorth (traditional coarse cotton towel from Kerala) thrown across his chest, over his left shoulder. The sartorial simplicity appealed to the cynical Malayalee; yet in full view was Vishnu Narayanan’s sacred thread, the tradition, which he could not but honour but was not quite correct in India-outraged.
On February 25, Vishnu Narayanan, 81, died at his home in Kerala. He had come a long way since graduating in Mathematics
and Physics (he continued to be interested in science throughout his life, and wrote poems like Einstein’s Guest. Also adept at the scriptures, Vishnu Narayanan believed the Vaisheshika school of Vedic thought anticipated Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, that perception changed reality. Heisenberg is the ‘guest’ in the Einstein poem). Vishnu Narayanan switched from science and took his Master’s degree in English Literature before becoming a professor in the early 1960s, when he also started writing poetry.
Modern Malayalam poetry came into its own in the early 20th century with Vallathol Narayana Menon, Ulloor Parameshwara Iyer, and Kumaran
Asan. From the 1930s, shaped by the freedom struggle, the Communist Party, and other progressive movements led by men like Narayana Guru, in close to 100 years, Malayalam has produced a crop of great poets. Vishnu Narayanan, like some of his contemporaries, the late Vylopillil Shreedhara Menon, Akkitham Narayanan Namboodiri, and Sugatha Kumari (the last two died recently) found a way to sing new songs in old cadences.
Ezra Pound said poetry should never stray far from music. In the best of Malayalam poetry, some of which Vishnu Narayanan wrote (for example, The Nights and Days in Ujjain: an invocation of the spirit of Kalidasa’s Meghasandesh; a prayer for rain on parched earth), the meaning is nothing without the music. This is one reason why translating poetry is often a lost cause. Much of great Malayalam poetry is so inextricably entwined with native culture, symbols, and tropes that an attempt at translation is an act that may wrest simpering suicide from what began as raucous murder.
Existence is absurd, Albert Camus said, because Man must make sense of a universe indifferent to that enterprise. It is against this hard, unforgiving fact that the poet must build his fiction. This was possibly why Vishnu Narayanan found an ally in Hindu traditions, besides his birth and upbringing in a brahmin family. And it summoned