by Rashmy
Translated from Tamil by Nedra Rodrigo
[PEN Translates x SALT Award 2024]
ISBN: 9781069370426
Poetry | Translation | Tamil
NEW RELEASE DATE: SEPTEMBER 2026 | OPEN FOR PRE-ORDERS
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Book Description
Where does seawater mingled with ashes stratify into rock?
How will the final cry, pleading for life, gather strength?
Rashmy writes poetry in a Tamil unique to the East Coast of Sri Lanka, embedded in its ecologies and heavily influenced by its folklore, centuries of trade, and echoes of Qur'anic cadence. His work is both archive and testimony, making him one of the most significant contemporary poets of in the Tamil language.
In அடைவுகாலத்தின்பாடல்கள் | Songs in a Time of Confinement, Rashmy reveals the pandemic to be a time of recollection for survivors of other catastrophes like war and exile. Counting time through a hundred and one poems, the poet unravels memories of homeland, love, desire, war, faith, hauntings, and isolation – recalling youthful passions and separations, confinement during wartime, and the uncertainties of sudden and uncontrollable change.
Displaced by war and haunted by the landscape he treasures, the poet insists on the work of memory to resist the erasures of violence and time.
Presented here in Nedra Rodrigo's elegant and perceptive translation, this bilingual Tamil/English edition includes Rashmy's original artwork, offering a vital contribution to archives of Tamil Ilankai war-related poetry and the literature of exile and displacement.
BIOGRAPHIES
Rashmy [Mohamed Rashmy Ahamed] is a journalist, poet, writer and artist. Born in Akkaraipattu on the east coast of Sri Lanka, he moved into exile in the UK in [x]. Rashmy has published four acclaimed collections of poetry in Tamil and is recognized as one of the most vital contemporary poets from the island.
Nedra Rodrigo is a literary scholar, writer, editor, translator, and curator. Her publications include her translations of Devakanthan's quintet, and numerous essays and translations in various journals. She is the co-editor of Tamil Terrains, a bilingual anthology of Tamil poetry and prose. Her work on Songs in a Time of Confinement for trace press received the PEN Translates x SALT 2024 award from English PEN.
PRAISE
Rashmy's world of poetry is a wondrous confluence of art, landscape, pain, suffering and resilience. I have been closely reading his poetry for many years and the new poetic grammar he employs has drastically changed the pathways of Tamil poetry. Nedra Rodrigo's translation of his poetry into English is a creative work and an act of solidarity while adhering to the high ethical demands of minority voices.
R. CHERAN author of In a Time of Burning, A Second Sunrise, & Lost Evenings, Lost Lives.
Reading Rashmy’s hundred and one poems in a time of revolutionary action in North America and South Asia, I am brought to what Édouard Glissant writes in his Poetic Intention: “I build my language from rocks.” Each of these poems is a rock carried by Rashmy, as sensuous memories, as stories of kinship, as myth and fantasy, from the Indian Ocean to the North Sea. To read him is to rebuild our own liberation from his generous quarry, mined from the darker times. In a hundred and one ways, we are brought to the intimate witness of longing, between the paddy field and the coconut grove, between the lover’s breasts, between the lands we have left behind and the one that confines us. Rashmy’s sharp attention to daily life during confinement—a metaphor for displacement after the Sri Lankan Civil War and a material condition of a global pandemic—offers us life-affirming insistence on the continuity and survival of Tamil aesthetics in the diaspora: constitutionally rebellious, resolutely nonconformist, assertively beautiful. In Nedra Rodrigo’s translation from the Tamil, the pounding rhythms, unflinching insights, and stark drama of his poems find swift passage and safe destination. This is an urgent, necessary collection brought to the Anglophone world. It will galvanize, embrace, and console kin who live in exile, in solidarity with Eelam siblings across our diaspora.
DIVYA VICTOR author of Kith, Curb, & forthcoming Kin: Essays on Reckless Devotion
Against those out “to fabricate a history / to revise ancient chronicles / to erase memories,” Rashmy records experiences of terror, and also of beauty so extreme that one feels challenged by one’s own astonishment to live and to remember with an equal fearlessness. Gently, with indeed the lightest and least mechanical of touches, he sifts a mingled debris at once personal and political, domestic and national, observing with equal keenness how “rust blooms on the curved fish knife” and “anchored ships bloom rust / in every port.” The thoughts floating in lockdown into and through the poet’s head like “kolams of smoke” include the ached-for body of his lover as well as the “white, sunburned bodies” ignorant of “headless bodies” washed ashore. Even the most apparently free-floating perception is, in Sri Lanka, saturated with history. Yet what is affirmed and reaffirmed, from poem to poem, is the moment of possibility in which Rashmy writes poems in Tamil, and in which Nedra Rodrigo squarely and adroitly translates each word; the transformative moment in which, I hope, you read this book."
VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN author of The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here & Avidya