Have you ever slept with your eyes open? In the Kannada verses of Jayant Kaikini, what might seem like a curse is re-conceived as a gift: in the strange spectacle of people who sleep with their eyes open and unblinking, the speaker of the poem finds a symbol of the slow, deliberate attention we might bring to every second of our waking lives, missing nothing, finding something holy in every mundane thing, “every plant, pillar, post.” Writes translator Carol Blaizy D’Souza, “I have tried to pay special attention to the play woven into his poetry, to preserve the tenderness, the supple freshness of the narrator’s gaze.” Read on!
Their Eyes are Like That
People who are asleep with half-open eyes
Do not wake them up just in jest; their eyes are like that
Like a looted marketplace
From an eye open like a door, a dull ray
issues forth; catching, pinioning, and toppling
every plant, pillar, post, and cycle
Tireless, open palms that bless are also
caught. It might behead the flowers, beware
Bend them down like that
The sun too moves around
avoiding their callused feet. Tear clouds from the subcontinent
darken soundlessly around their head
People who are done with their tea and snacks, please spread and stand
Look this way. Everything can be seen
in the eyes that do not blink, even in the drumming salty rain
The market at dawn rubs out a night with its feet
There, in neat rows, climbing the blue police van,
having pledged their breasts somewhere,
are somebody’s sisters, somebody’s kin
Translated from the Kannada by Carol Blaizy D’Souza
Jayant Kaikini is a Kannada poet, short-story writer, columnist, and playwright—with six poetry collections, seven short story volumes, five essay volumes, and four plays to his credit. He is a recipient of the Karnataka Sahitya Academy book award (1974, 1982, 1989, 1996), the Katha National award (1996), the Kusumagraj National award (2010), the Filmfare award for best lyrics (2008, 2009, 2016, 2017, 2022), and the DSC Prize for Best South Asian Literature for No Presents Please: Selected Mumbai Stories, which was translated to English by Tejaswini Niranjana in 2018. A sequel, Mithun Number Two, was released in 2024. “Their Eyes are Like That” appears in the collection Ondu Jilebi (Ankita Pustaka, 2008)
Carol Blaizy D’Souza is a poet, translator and researcher living in Chennai, India. A collation of her work can be found at linktr.ee/cblaizd.
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