Desires Become Demons: Four Tamil Poets

Translating Feminisms showcases intimate collaborations and conversations between some of Asia's most exciting women writers and emerging-star translators: contemporary poetry of labour and language, alongside essays exploring how, where and by whom feminist writing and female bodies are translated. For us at Tilted Axis Press, feminist publishing means working against the fetishisation of oppression and demands that authors explicitly subscribe to what white women recognise as feminism, or even foreground their femaleness in their work. We work towards ensuring that the women we publish have the creative agency to contextualise their own work, resisting the commodification and/or erasure of their femaleness on their own terms. As part of Tilted Axis's wider project of decolonisation through and of translation, and in response to seeing women authors of colour misread through a white feminist lens, we wanted to re-imagine the possibilities of a fully intersectional, international feminism. In the process, we've expanded our own conception of feminist writing and being we hope these chapbooks will do the same for you. Writer, feminist and activist Malathi Maithri (born 1968) is recognised as an important contemporary Tamil poet. She hails from Puducherry State in southern India. Her very first short story, Prayanam, was published in Kaniayazhi, a premier literary magazine, in 1988. This has been followed by the publication of three books of poetry and a collection of essays. She has co-edited Paraththal Adhan Sudhandiram (Flying is Its Freedom), an anthology of literary works, and Anangu (Woman), a collection of essays. Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil women's experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance. Kutti Revathi is the pen name of Dr S. Revathi. A Chennai-based Tamil poet, her poetry seeks to evolve a subversive language to explore and reclaim a long-colonised realm of experience--"the map of a Tamil woman's body." Sukirtharani is a prominent Dalit poet in Tamil. She is currently at work on a novel which she describes as dalit-feminist. In 2009, she organized a poets protest against the violence against Tamils in Sri Lanka, in which a large number of poets read. She has published four collections of poetry: Kaippatri Yen Kanavu Kel, Iravu Mirugam, Avalai Mozhi Peyarthal, and Theendap Pataatha Muththam. Recently, she was given the Sundhara Ramasamy Viruthu Award by Neithal Ilakkiya Amaippu, Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu. She has completed her MA, M.Phil. and B.Ed. in Tamil Literature. She is working as a Tamil teacher in the Govt. Girls Higher Secondary School, Ranipet, Tamil Nadu. Meena Kandasamy (ed.) is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Gypsy Goddess. Her second novel, When I Hit You, Or, The Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Atlantic Books/ Juggernaut), was published in 2017, and shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018. She is the editor of Four Tamil Poets, and her translations of these four female poets are included here alongside some by the late Lakshmi Holmström.