Giriraj Kiradoo

Kiradoo was also Associate Editor with the Rajasthan Sahitya Academy for a brief period and is the founder of Udaharan, an independent forum and an alternative publisher. He is a translator of Hindi, English and Rajasthani, currently translating Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy into Hindi, Geetanjali Shree’s Tirohit into English and Sahitya Akademi-award-winning Hindi poets, Shree Kant Verma and Arun Kamal, into English. He teaches in a university in Rajasthan and is an editor at Siyahi, a Jaipur-based literary consultancy.

Kiradoo is yet to publish his first volume of poems; although his work has been widely anthologised, he is better known currently as a dynamic young alternative publisher, translator and critic. And yet, the translations of his poems by Rahul Soni reveal a quirky self-assurance and accomplished poetics at work.

There is a recurrent perspective of aeriality in these selected poems. This overhead view seems to be the poet’s chosen strategy to defamiliarise the immediate world; parachutes, aeroplanes, meteors and flying machines populate these poems as the poet’s means of zigzagging between a now and an elsewhereness. Rooftops turn suddenly into basements under the overarching roof of the heavens; Paanch Batti Circle and Rajmandir Cinema in Jaipur turn into the loci of bizarre events under an immutable sky, and yet at the end of the poem, remain obstinately themselves. In this shifting world, skies fall apart as readily as nests, omens become memories, and lovers speak in tongues that are both intensely singular and collective:

the language I love her in
does not stay mine when written
the language she loves me in
does not stay hers when spoken
now and then
we stumble in the dialects of this city

(‘In Her Neighbourhood’)