Mantis 19 (Spring 2020)
Translation
Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
translated from the French by Hrishikesh Srinivas
Zahana
Ce n’est pas au jeu vain de nos vieux amoureux
qui s’écrivaient, jadis, sur tes feuilles naissantes
et, se rendant le soir en ton sein ténébreux,
saccageaient les rosiers sauvages de nos sentes,
ni même à la saveur de tes fruits succulents
où jutent les soleils de notre terre chaude,
que ton nom inconnu se doit d’être en mes chants
et d’y répandre tes pures frissons d’émeraude!
Mais, exilé des lieux d’où nous somme natifs,
tu n’as plus dans nos champs que des jets maladifs
qu’une terre inclémente et stérile harasse!
Comme le mien ton front n’offre plus au matin
que les dernières fleurs d’un arbre qui s’éteint,
et ta défaite est sœur de celle de ma race!
Zahana
Not in the vain game of our old lovers
who were inscribed, once, on your budding leaves
and, going into night under your darkling cover,
devastating the untamed rosebushes of our ways,
nor even in savoring your succulent fruits
running days of our sunned land in their juice,
should your unknown name so be in my songs
then ripple your pure shivers of emerald!
Yet, exiled from elsewheres we are native to,
you’ve no longer in our fields but sickly shoots
harassed by a country barren and unforgiving!
Like mine your face no longer shows up to morning
but the last flowers of a tree dying,
and the loss of you is sister to that of my people!
* Zahana is the Malagasy name for the important native plant Phyllarthron madagascariensis.
JEAN-JOSEPH RABEARIVELO (1903-1937) was born Joseph-Casimir Rabearivelo in Ambatofotsy, north of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, where he lived all his life. Growing up under French colonial rule, he became the island’s eminent literary figure and maintained correspondences with diverse francophone writers worldwide while cultivating his own prodigious body of narrative historical, dramatic, critical and poetic works in the Malagasy and French languages. His poetry, at once rooted in his country’s literary traditions while bearing distinctly romantic, modernist and surrealist influences, established his leading stature among post-colonial African writers.
HRISHIKESH SRINIVAS is a graduate student in electrical engineering at Stanford University from Sydney, Australia. He was born in Chennai, India, and lived in Gaborone, Botswana during his early childhood years. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, with poems having appeared in UNSWeetened Literary Journal, Otoliths, and Mantis. He was awarded the Dorothea Mackellar National Poetry Award in 2011, and the Nillumbik Ekphrasis Poetry Youth Award in 2013, also being included in the Laughing Waters Road: Art, Landscape and Memory in Eltham 2016 exhibition catalogue.