Chandramohan Sathyanathan
THE MUSE IN THE MARKET PLACE
“I too am not a bit tamed,
I too am untranslatable.”
‘Song of Myself ’, Walt Whitman
In the Neo-liberal world
a dog with a collar crosses
the road at the zebra lines.
The vernacular was never its surrogate womb
This poem was not conceived with translation in mind
Will never let it be adopted
Or exported to worldwide markets
Nor will the metaphors mellow down
To make it amenable to translation
Into an alien tongue.
REPETITION is TRANSLATION
Repetition like the dawn at every time zone,
Another utterance at another longitude-
A new hemisphere annexed to the empire
With every new translation.
First Published in Love After Babel and Other Poems by Chandramohan S (Daraja Press, 2020). Published with permission from the author.