Speaking in Tongues

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Original price was: ₹349.00.Current price is: ₹300.00.

Author: Kiran Bhat
Published Date: 16/10/2024
ISBN: 978-93-92494-74-1
Paperback: Paperback
Pages: 214

Second edition

First published in August 2022

500 copies sold in the first edition

Categories: , ,

Description

Speaking in Tongues is an attempt to unify three disparate poetry suites, written originally in Spanish, Mandarin, and Turkish, and then self-translated into English. The Spanish language poems — Autobiografia — rewrites twenty years of the poet’s life into fragments on race, queerness, identity, and growing up between cultures. The Mandarin poems — 客然脑说 — fuses the Confucian dialectic structure with Bhakti, as the poet responds to the existential questions posed to him. The Turkish language suite — Seyahatname — appropriates Evliya Çelebi’s infamous travelogue into a reimagination of the national narratives of the eighteen countries the poet considers home.

Already polylingual, Kiran Bhat made a choice to write in the language that was unfamiliar to him precisely in order to better experience the unknown or the strange in the lyric and in life. These poems sparkle with their efforts and their efforts are never in vain. — Kazim Ali

A deeply fascinating text brimming with playfulness and passion. Good literature is an act of self-excavation and self-invention. Kiran Bhat achieves this again and again in this gorgeous book. — Diriye Osman

Breaking the language barrier across a triptych of rhapsodic sequences, bridging lyrical confession to koan-esque self-questioning and the personification of whole nations, these poems are by turns restless, vulnerable, erotic and declamatory; full of hard-won insights into evolving selfhood. — Cyril Wong

Kiran Bhat is an Indian-American author, traveller, and polyglot. He is known as the author of we of the forsaken world…, but has published books in five different languages, and has had his writing published in journals, such as The Caravan, The Bengaluru Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Rail, 3:AM Magazine, SOFTBLOW, and many other places. He currently lives in Mumbai, where he is attempting to translate contemporary Mayan writings into English and Kannada.