Kutti Revathi – A Portfolio of Poetry – translated by Akilan Ethirajan


Kutti-Revathi-Poems-for-Mindy

Kutti Revathi is a Tamil poet committed to carving out a new idiom within the poetics and politics of the Tamil literary tradition and in that borderless space we now think of as “world poetry”.  Trained as a Siddha (Tamil indigenous medicine) doctor, her work speaks out consistently on behalf of the rights of the oppressed. She is the editor of Panikudam, a Tamil literary quarterly for women’s writing. Her works include fifteen poetry collections, including the controversial Mulaigal.  Her poems are a part of the book Wild Girls, Wicked Words, a collection of poems by four Tamil women poets,  edited and translated by Lakshmi Holmström.She has also written a novel, five collections of short stories, has made short films and documentaries and written lyrics for the composer, AR Rahman.

Akilan Ethirajan has taught English as a second language to adult learners at a government-aided college in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, and approaches his present work of freelance translation with thirty-six years of teaching experience behind him. He has published a Tamil translation of the Turkish novelist, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s The Time Regulation Institute. He has translated many articles from English to Tamil, and several poems from Tamil to English.