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    • Translates into 
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        afar
        afrikaans
        albanian
        arabic
        araucanian
        armenian
        assamese
        basque
        belarusian
        bengali
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        estonian
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        georgian
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        korean
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        kurdish
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        latvian
        lezghian
        lithuanian
        lushai
        macedonian
        malay
        malayalam
        maltese
        marathi
        mayan language
        mongolian
        nepali
        norwegian
        occitan
        oriya
        ossetic
        persian
        polish
        portuguese
        rhaeto-romance
        romanian
        romany
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        sanskrit
        sardinian
        scots
        scottish gaelic
        serbian
        shona
        sindhi
        sinhala
        slovak
        slovenian
        sorbian language
        southern sami
        spanish
        swahili
        swedish
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        tatar
        telugu
        tetum
        turkish
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        ukrainian
        urdu
        uzbek
        vietnamese
        welsh
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Sridala Swami

Twisting

  • 1 Never Start Something You Can Finish | Translations: de
  • 2 h_ngw_m_n | Translations: de
  • 3 Post Mortem | Translations: de
  • 4 Solid | Translations: de
  • 5 Not Loss but Residue
  • 6 Clearing the Air
  • 7 Twisting
  • 8 Five Falls, Kuttralam
  • 9 Surviving The Fall Meant Using You For Handholds
  • 10 Synaesthetic
Language: english
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Twisting

In the end we have dystopias:
visions that arose with the steadiness
of smoke in a still room
but grew too large for cohesion,
preferring dissipation
to the sightless certainty of columns.

We watched. That is all we did:
watched faces as they came in and out of focus;
watched as the angle of our vision widened
to include even what we would never see
in our lifetimes. This is how we begin.

Somewhere in the middle
we lost our way:
we thought of mazes and labyrinths
and brains folded around themselves.
Patterns teased and seduced us.
We believed we had all the time in the world.

© Sridala Swami
From: Escape Artist
New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2014
Audio production: Haus für Poesie, 2016

Translations:

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   (Clearing the Air)
7 / 10
nächstes Gedicht
(Five Falls,...)   
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Sridala Swami

photo © Goethe-Institut / Vivek Muthuramalingam
* 22.03.1971, Mettur Dam, Tamil Nadu, India
lives in: Hyderabad, India

Sridala Swami is a poet, essayist and photographer. Her first collection of poems, A Reluctant Survivor (2007), was published by the Sahitya Akademi/ National Academy of Letters. Swami has written four books for children, published by Pratham Books in 2009 and 2012. She was the 2011 Charles Wallace Writer-in-Residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, 2013.

 photo © Goethe-Institut / Vivek Muthuramalingam
Swami’s second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, published by the Aleph Book Company (2014), is the first book to appear under the aegis of the Jehangir Sabavala Foundation (JSF). It was shortlisted for the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize.

She writes a poetry workshop column in The Daily O called The Sideways Door and blogs at spaniardintheworks.blogspot.com

Publications
  • A Reluctant Survivor

    New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007

  • Escape Artist

    New Delhi: Aleph Books Company, 2014

Awards
  • 2011 Charles Wallace writer-in-residence at the University Stirling in Scottland

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