Translating poetry into brushstrokes

Hopscotch, A Ship Drowning, and Churning the Sea are some of the drawings that were displayed recently as part of an exhibition titled ‘Tribute to Ramanujan’, by eminent artist S G Vasudev. The line drawings created in response to several of AKR’s poems, trace the artistic association that emerged from conversations between them.

A K Ramanujan, as is well known, was an Indian poet, folklorist, translator and scholar of Indian literature and linguistics. It was in the 1960s that noted Kannada writer and playwright Girish Karnad introduced Vasudev to AKR who soon began designing book covers for the latter’s works.

Sometime in the early 1990s, when Ramanujan visited Vasudev’s studio, he was intrigued by the process of art making involved in the cover design, which comprised several iterations, unfinished drawings and even abandoned sketches. Vasudev recalls, “I told him the process was more or less the same as writing. You write, edit, and rewrite.” Ramanujan found this practice of chiselling akin to writing. He wondered if Vasudev could respond to a few of his poems and create a new series of drawings, and they could then have a reading of the poems along with the art exhibition.

The artist in Vasudev took it as a challenge to create form out of text. Ramanujan’s text is filled with complexity, is rich in irony and laced with meanings, and yet delivered in a terse, staccato style.

Vasudev ensured that he did not illustrate the verses, but reacted to them to construct a visual narrative. He read and reread several of Ramanujan’s poems till he began to see them in the form of images, and began sketching the series. Unfortunately, Ramanujan passed away soon after, and the project lay on the back burner for a while, before Vasudev revived it again and finally completed the series with 35 drawings that interpreted the poet’s original poems in English and Kannada, as well as translations from Tamil and Kannada. 

In addition, he drew two works that were his interpretation of Ramanujan’s persona and were a homage to him. One, where he is depicted as a Kathakali dancer, with several motifs around his head, and the other where he is portrayed as an avatar of Vishnu.

The drawings were first exhibited in 1995 in Bengaluru, where Karnad recited the poems. Since then, the exhibition has travelled to Chennai, New Delhi, London and Chicago, among other places.

What makes this exhibition special is the idea of a unique collaboration between the two creative personalities, and a convergence of two art forms — poetry and visual art. While Vasudev’s drawings are sparse and minimal, with lines that flow in lyrical movement, the poems they depict are equally austere.

For instance, Vasudev’s interpretation of ‘Self-Portrait’, one of AKR’s most famous poems, expressively captures the poet’s ambiguity in self-perception, the introspective tone, the play with identity and the laws of optics.

Vasudev’s drawings have remained minimal largely for most of his artistic career. Predisposed to leaving blank spaces, marked by assured lines in ink in fluid motion, there is an apparent simplicity in the linear compositions, where the emphasis is on the narrative content. This is evident in these works too.

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The author is a Bengaluru-based art consultant, curator and writer. She blogs at Art Scene India and can be reached at [e-mail]