SUDDALA ASHOK TEJA LYRICS Visalaandhra Publishing House Suddala Ashok Teja Lyrics Publication No. : 2350/481 No. of Copies : 1000 First Edition : December, 2013 (2013 Visalaandhra Publishing House Diamond Jubilee Year) Price: ` 200/- The contribution of every purchase of this book will go to Suddala Foundation For Copies: SUDDALA FOUNDATION Suddala Hanumantu Janakamma Janapada Kala Peetham ‘Paatakuteeram’, 2-11-127/4/E/1, Srinagar Colony, Uppal Hyderabad-500 039. Mobile: +91 9618442424 Email: [email protected] | www.suddalafoundation.org VISALAANDHRA BOOK HOUSE Abids, Sultan Bazar & Bandlaguda (Nagole), Hyderabad, Vijayawada,Visakhapatnam, Guntur, Anantapur, Hanmakonda, Tirupathi, Kakinada, Karimnagar, Ongole, Srikakulam, Nalgonda. and other major Book Stores © Suddala Ashok Teja Warning: All rights are reserved. No Part of this Publication may be reprodued in any form or by any means without Prior written permission of the publishers & Copyright holder. Cover Design: Lordly Digital Parthu Photography: S. Haragopal Printing: Pragati Offset Pvt. Ltd., India. www.pragati.com ii | Suddala Ashok Teja Lyrics I Welcome I feel happy to stand at the threshold of a collection some of the best songs written by Ashok Teja Suddala. I welcome the readers from near and far lands. They will find here one of the finest song makers of contemporary Telugu Literature. Here is a poet who inherited the spirit of poetry along with the spirit of social protest from his father, Hanmanthu Suddala, who was a legend in his lifetime and still remains an immortal balladeer in public memory. Since Hanmanthu had to live in the days of utter darkness, his songs sang of darkness, as Breht hoped. But Ashok Teja sang not only about the suffering of life, but also of its spirit too. While his father made poems out of flames Ashok weaved poetry out of dust. He tinged his poetry with the green of the land and grey of the times. His is a journey in identifying his self, asserting himself amidst a sea of hurdles and breaking into a song with all the reveling of a butterfly and the energy of a fountain. He had to make a living as a boy, salesman, volunteer and a teacher and like Gorky he made the best of every opportunity that life offered him. He has seen the length and breadth of contemporary strife and sickness. Had it been a lesser mortal he would have succumbed to either sorcery or cursing. But Ashok wanted to become a poet and make living as a poet. After years of agony in wilderness he returned as a poet with the cheerfulness of a child and the simplicity of a saint. 2 There is something in his poetry that makes you to go back to your roots. Listening to him I often take off on a voyage into the distant recesses of my childhood. Like the singing of Nasrat Fateh Alikhan his voice reminds you of the villages, the drums and dances of the fairs and festivals and the songs of the transplantations and the harvests. One theme that consistently runs through his poetry is his reverence and deep felt gratitude to the woman - woman as a mother, a companion, a worker and a fellow worker. Often he wonders at the kind of sacrifice that woman could offer for sustenance of mankind. His every song unfailingly ends into a salutation to woman as his source of inspiration. For him the land is woman personified, life is woman manifest! It added another dimension to Ashok Teja’s poetry when he started writing for films. Telugu is primarily a musical language. If a poet could grasp the lyrical nature of Telugu language he would be successful as a film lyricist also. Ashok Teja knows the secret of this musicality. Once writing on the poetry of Gurazada, Sri Sri said, Gurajada’s poetry hisses like a serpent and roars like a lion. One can make a similar observation on Suddala Ashok Teja Lyrics | iii the songs of Ashok Teja. They are soft and vigorous at the same time. His vocabulary drawn from everyday speech undergoes a metamorphosis with the imagery drawn out from his varied experience and acquires a timbre of a symphony. One finds this much more articulate in his film lyrics. They made his heart an open gallery where every listener could find his own mirror images. As a second generation poet of modern Telangana, he sang about his society that passed through a transition from a feudal order to a democratic process. Unlike earlier generation poets, he can no longer sing in isolation nor like a martyr in a prison. He is aware that he is neither distinct nor different from any other man of his times. He had to live with them and in their midst only, as any other normal human being lives. This awareness to normality made his poetry exceptional. The same ordinariness when tuned into film songs sounds extraordinary. 3 It is very difficult for a non – native reader to appreciate the beauty of this poetry in translation. All of us are responsible for this collectively. We chose to stay away from introducing our poets and our poetry to the readers of neighbor and distant languages. It is not as if our poetry had not been translated into English. There have been translations. This may not be the context to evaluate the quality of those translations. But what I would impress upon is that we are not really keen on recreating our poems into English consistently as a number of other language speakers do. One reason for this diffidence could be that the task of translating a Telugu padyam or a gitam into English is often very demanding and yet at the same time a dissuading effort. By its very nature, prosody of English can never comprehend the nuances of prosody of Telugu. For that matter, no two prosodies are commensurable. Yet, lovers of poetry all over the world have not given up amusing themselves in translating a Japanese Haiku, an Urdu Gazal or a Greek Ode into their own languages however extremely dissimilar they may be. There is something in poetry that is beyond language. Herself a competent translator and co editor of ‘World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time’ (W.W.Norton& Co.,1997), Katharine Washburne, wrote in her intro to the anthology that “Robert Frost’s dismissive remark that ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’ is famous, less celebrated is Octavio Paz’s response that ‘poetry is what gets translated”. I can never forget this sentence. As an avid student of poetry, after years of struggle to locate the ‘poetry’ within a poem, I realized that poetry is the current that passes along the language rather than through it, iv | Suddala Ashok Teja Lyrics as electricity passes along the copper wire. If the poet weaves his poem from out of the burning flame of his heart, the warmth does not fail to reach whoever comes across that, whatever language he may speak. There language can no longer stand as a barrier. We can cite any number of examples. Readers in America who are strangers to Persian have no difficulty in feeling Jalaluddin Rumi as their own. People who do not know how to make out an Egyptian hieroglyph have been least relenting in constantly pursuing the Pyramid Texts. A reader like me from India, who can not decipher even a single Chinese character , has faced no limitation in subscribing his whole time to reading and rereading translations of Li-Bai and Du-Fu in different versions in English. We know that a poem grows. It is true for translation also. Translation is a dynamic process. The same poet when translated again and again into a particular language appears as if he is scaling new heights and plunging into new depths with every fresh translation. Compare the translations of the poetry of Rilke into English. The latest translations of Edward Snow bring out a new Rilke whom we find altogether different from the one that we have seen in the early translations of last century. The same magic is felt in reading Rumi in different translations from that of Nicholson to those contemporary renderings by American masters like Coleman Barks and Robert Bly. I assure myself that this is the first generation translation of Ashok Teja into English. I congratulate the translator for having taken up such an endeavor. She broke the ice. I hope these poems would allure readers across the globe to demand for more and more translations of Ashok Teja’s poetry. In years to come, I hope readers from continents and countries as distant as Africa or Peru would find a poet akin to them, as we find their poets such as a Senghor or a Vallejo. Hyderabad Vadrevu Chinaveerabhadrudu Suddala Ashok Teja Lyrics | v Enchanting Poems of Suddala Ashok Teja SUDDALA ASHOK TEJA is a well-known Telugu Poet, Lyricist and Singer. His lyrics which are down to earth reflect myriad aspects of life. He speaks for the poor and the downtrodden. He reveres the earth, loves the soil, caresses the crops, cares for villages, respects tradition, sustains culture, pays tributes to martyrs, laments over the plundering of nature, depicts pastoral life, worries over human conflicts, seeks peace, respects women and pleads for their rights and rightful place. One who reads Ashok Teja’s poems reads life itself – large, too complex but enchanting and overwhelming. One cannot ignore the underlying melancholy. Over and above there is an optimist who gives hope of new life and new dawn. Suddala Ashok Teja’s poems are rooted to soil.