T’karonto (Toronto) gathers refugees and displaced humans from all over the Global South. For so many of us, translation is both a mode and a metaphor of being. As we live in translation, can reading and writing poetry help us bridge the lands of our hearts and the Indigenous lands that shelter us?
Tamil Terrains, a new poetry collection published by trace press, attends to just this question, asking: “What happens when a two-thousand-year-old language, rooted in a classical poetics of land, is moved, along with its peoples, through colonial and postcolonial upheavals, war and forced or voluntary migrations?”
The editors, Nedra Rodrigo and Geetha Sukumaran have selected iconic and contemporary Tamil poems to create a workshop with translators from Tamil communities across Turtle Island (North America), Europe, Asia, India and Sri Lanka. The book is the result of this workshop process. Emerging and established Toronto Tamil poets Regini David, Subhanya Sivajothy, Abi Jeyaratnam, Cheran and Gobiga Nadanarajah are highlighted.
Tamil Terrains opens with translations into Tamil of poems by Anishinaabe poet Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Mi’kmaw poet shalan joudry. The very first translated lines are Joudry’s address to furred and feathered beings: “I’ve been an accomplice to your poverty, I’ve settled land that was your territory.”
The collection reveals themes common to Tamil and Turtle Island Indigenous poets: complicity versus resistance to occupation and land theft, the trauma of language loss and the work of poetry in reclamation and liberation. The Tamil language is haunted by a particular experience of loss in diaspora. We can relate to Joudry’s struggle with Mi’kmaw language to “…make scaffolding out of language / to hold up a nation once beaten into submission / and to go on.”
Short essays and reflections contextualize the poems. The editors introduce arboreal imagery of root, branch and driftwood to contrast an original poem, a translation, and even transformation or “transcreation.” Roots also refer to the oldest elements of the literary canon, sangam poems in which landscape elements convey specific emotions and relations for Tamil people. Roots tether land and heart. In contrast, a “transcreation” is adrift from its origin, bereft, but also free, on a new journey carrying traces of its origin or root.
Multiple translations and transcreations, stemming from a single poem, are placed in conversation. This welcome strategy works against the shame of language loss and towards the joy of exploration and creation. Repetitions and variations also evoke labour songs and revolutionary songs, such as Barathi’s No Fear!, being taken up and transformed by one voice after another, in protest.
The collection ends with translations of post-war Vanni poet Nillanthan, in which “the jungle river slashes through abandoned guard posts.” The river begins to resist its occupation. Translator Thamilini Jothilingam reflects on nature’s resurgence in the occupied lands of the Fraser Valley where she now lives, and in her Vanni homeland where Nillanthan writes, in her provocative final essay. The comparison is timely, as recent flooding in both these territories reveals the long-term consequences of extractive colonial terraforming coupled with climate change in Tamil heartlands and on Turtle Island.
This thoughtful book unspools a thousand-year-long lyrical thread connecting Tamil bodies and lands. It will resonate well beyond the Tamil diaspora, particularly because it attends to the relation between Tamil contemporary poets, literary heartlands and Indigenous homelands here on Turtle Island.
This article appeared in the 2026 Feb/Mar issue.
