Three Tamil poems for February — உலக காதலர்களுக்கு, என்னவள் யாரோ, நண்பா நண்பா
Three short Tamil pieces from this month. One for the world's lovers, one for whoever my own happens to be, one for a friend. Putting them up together because they came out the same week and they're all asking some version of the same question.
A short month and three pieces. Putting them up together because they came out the same week, and reading them in sequence I can see they are all circling the same question — what does it mean to belong to someone, and how many shapes does that take? — from three different distances.
Today is February 14, which is as good a day as any for the first one.
உலக காதலர்களுக்கு (To the world’s lovers)
A small piece for everyone in the world who happens to be in love today. Not specifically about romantic love, though that’s the lens the calendar is asking for — about the wider thing, the kind of love that makes you rearrange your week to keep someone in it.
If Tamil poetry has a quiet specialty, it is this register — the not-quite-confessional address to a generic “you” that lets the writer say more than they would dare say to a specific person. The Sangam-era poets did this twenty-one centuries ago. We are still doing it.
என்னவள் யாரோ (Who is my beloved?)
The next piece, written a couple of days later and at a more specific distance. Title is a question on the surface, but the question is rhetorical — every Tamil reader hears the echo of yaaro (யாரோ) as the half-question, half-acknowledgment that the speaker already knows.
If the first piece was for everybody, this one was for one specific somebody. I’ll let the lines do their own work.
நண்பா நண்பா (Friend, friend)
The third piece is for the person who is neither a stranger nor a lover — the friend who fills the largest, oldest, most unceremonial slot in your life. The vocative nanba (நண்பா), repeated, is the casual register that close friends in Tamil actually use to address each other. The poem leans into that register because the pretense of formality between old friends is the thing the poem is gently arguing against.
Three pieces. One week. One question with three frames around it. Posting them together because reading them apart loses something that reading them together restores.
If you read Tamil, the lines themselves are on the post pages. If you don’t — the titles above will give you the shape, and yaaro probably echoes for you too even without the script.
— Karthik