Giriraj Kiradoo
(India, 1975)   
 
 
 
Giriraj Kiradoo

Giriraj Kiradoo (born 1975) has published poems, criticism, translations and short stories in literary magazines and journals, including Bahuvachan, Poorvagarah, Aalochana, Tadbhav, Hindi, India Today, Sahitya Varshiki, Naya Gyanodaya, Sahit, Vaak, Indian Literature, Samkaaleen Bharatiya Sahitya, Vagarth, Akaar, Kathakram and Dishabodh, among others. He writes in Hindi. He is the founder-editor of Pratilipi, a sprightly bilingual (Hindi–English) and multi-script online literary magazine – the first and only one of its kind so far. He received the prestigious Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Smruti award for his first published poem in 2000.

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’)

© Arundhathi Subramaniam

Bibliography

Anthologized in
Urvar Pradesh, Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi, 2009, ISBN: 978-81-267-1812-2
Prem ke Roopak, Vani Prakashan, New Delhi, 2006, ISBN: 81-8143-543-5
Natyanubhava, Vagdevi Prakashan, Bikaner, 2004, ISBN: 81-87482-49-4

As Translator (forthcoming)
A Hindi translation of Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy, Harper Collins India, 2010
An English translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Hindi novel Tirohit, Harper Collins India, 2010
An English translation of Arun Kamal’s poetry collection Naye Ilake Mein, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2010

Links
Confessions of a Kapoot: Advocating the Devil, an article by Giriraj Kiradoo read at the Sahitya Akademi International Seminar on Myth, Magic, History: Contemporary Indian and Latin American Fiction in February 2006
Pratilipi:  Giriraj Kiradoo’s writings in Hindi

 

 
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