The Joan Margarit Interview

Interview by Prithvi Varatharajan — Published on June 11, 2013
Tags: Catalan literature, interviews

Published in Issue 32

I was in Barcelona to interview the Catalan poet Joan Margarit for a radio program, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I’d arranged to meet the literary interpreter Julie Wark for a drink on the Paseo del Born, in the Gotic quarter of the city down by the harbor. Julie was curious about my radio project, for which I would be making sound recordings around Barcelona. She also very graciously offered to pay the cab fare to the poet’s house, as I had barely any money in hand—having been mugged on the outskirts of the city center, on my very first day there. We arrived at Joan Margarit’s house a few days later, to be greeted by his firm handshake and clap on the shoulder.

Joan Margarit was born in Sanaüja, a district of Catalonia, in 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War. The end of the Spanish Civil War saw the rise of Franco, who immediately banned the use of the Catalan language, and imposed Castilian as the national language. The war left a deep imprint on Joan Margarit, on both his childhood and his writing.

When I spoke to Margarit’s translator, Anna Crowe, she said that when Margarit was in primary school, all the children were obliged to kiss the Spanish flag at the beginning of each day. Margarit says he still remembers the smell of that cloth.

Margarit was born the son of an architect who was involved in the Spanish Civil War. He says in some of his poems that his father was a broken man, a fearful man, the rest of his life. He didn’t see his father until he was three, and after the war his father was rarely home, either in prison for being on the Republican side or looking for work. Some of Margarit’s poems describe his distant but conflicted relationship with his father. But Margarit became an architect, like his father, and was a Professor of Structural Calculations at the Technical School of Architecture in Barcelona until recently, when he retired.

Margarit’s first published poetry was in Spanish, in 1963 and 1965. Since 1980 he has established himself as a Catalan poet, and has published more than a dozen books of poetry in Catalan, and translated many into Spanish. Two of Margarit’s poetry collections have been translated into English by Anna Crowe: Tugs in the Fog and Strangely Happy, published by Bloodaxe in 2006 and 2011. Since 1975 Margarit and his family have lived in Sant Just Desvern on the outskirts of Barcelona, where there is a library named after him. I spoke to Joan Margarit at his home in Sant Just Desvern.

Prithvi Varatharajan: When were you born, and what impact did this have on your childhood and adolescence?

Joan Margarit: I was born in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, at the time of the battle of the Ebro. This aggression against your language when you’re a small child, and the fact that your culture is taken and taught to you in another language—this is a wound that never heals.

There are two problems here. One is a political problem, which is the right wing and the left wing: Franco was a fascist. And then the other problem is the Spanish language, which was imposed. But the language isn’t guilty—the language itself isn’t guilty. All languages are marvellous. All languages have a wonderful literature. You can be against Franco, and not against Machado or Quevedo.

So this is the story of a whole life. And a further problem: How does the poet come out in these circumstances? The first error that the poet makes is when he is very young. My culture is in Spanish, of course, because at school they taught everything in Spanish. If I spoke Catalan, they said “speak Christian.” So I thought, “I need to write poetry in the language in which I have culture, because poetry is culture.” This is a great error—a great error. See, culture is like a big cathedral, with buttresses, big pillars, and moulding in the ceiling. For poetry this isn’t important. For poetry, the only important part is the crypt, and the cathedral exists thanks to the crypt. And the crypt is the mother tongue. This is valid for poetry, not for prose. There are many writers who have written in French and they’re not French. With poetry this isn’t possible. The example that sometimes seduces people is Rilke—he’s Czech, and writes in German, and he’s a great German poet. But Rilke’s mother never spoke to him in Czech: it was a German culture throughout central Europe.

It’s impossible to write poetry that’s not in your mother tongue. I lost fifteen or twenty years trying to write in Spanish. It’s not true to say lost—you don’t lose, really. Until I was forty I wasn’t able to understand this story that I’ve just told you. And when I was forty I began this book, my Collected Works, and this has a big advantage. I like reading my favourite poets. I always start at the end, and I advance backwards to the beginning. I never get to the beginning, because the juvenilia are not so interesting, and I’ve saved myself this, because this book begins when I was forty.

PV: Can I ask you some more about Franco? Under Franco’s rule the Catalan people’s freedoms were taken away, like the freedom to speak your native tongue.

JM: The main part of the censorship was until the end of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and obviously the toughest five years were those immediately after the civil war which was a very harsh time. There was always clandestinity until the early ‘70s when it came to public demonstrations. But this censorship was very powerful in the Spanish realm as well: it was a dictatorship.

PV: You’ve written about freedom in the poem “La Llibertat.” Can you talk about your definitions of freedom?

JM: This is a love poem, basically. The last line is “it’s a form of love.” Freedom is a subject that’s complicated. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about it. And here we have a very complicated problem related to freedom: the independence of Catalonia. My way of seeing this is very simple, and doesn’t coincide with any other approach to the problem. If there’s a solution for Catalonia, it’s that of classical Greece. I would ask: in the confrontation between the Greek and Roman empires in the beginning, who won, Greece or Rome? The Greek culture won and still wins. Rome without Greece doesn’t exist. Rome is Greece, but knowing how to make arches. The Greeks didn’t know how to do arches. Rome is Greece with engineering—making roads, making bridges—but it’s Greece. Greece survives, and Greece is still in this book [tapping his Collected Works]. The only triumph of a small country is its culture. Culture is not protecting some singer, or someone who plays whatever instrument. Culture means being engaged with the basic things of culture, the first things of culture. Catalonia has no other possibility in the world today but to be great in cultural terms. This is the only solution.

PV: Can you describe what everyday life was like under Franco’s regime?

JM: Under any regime, even the toughest, harshest, the people get on with their everyday life. The life of the everyday can’t be extraordinary. There was no Internet, there was very little television. There were no mobile telephones, so life was very simple. I remember when the first computer came to the School of Architecture. It was the second computer in Barcelona. And we began to do our calculations on the computer. It was a huge machine, but it didn’t do very much. Today this little thing, my mobile phone, does more.

When you were walking around on the street you didn’t notice anything. People worked in factories. In ’68, I was a Professor of Calculus at the School of Architecture, and I went to do my classes there. In the bar opposite the school of architecture, the workers were there having their breakfast just like normal people.

In the university, you did notice. There was a time when we were expelled from the university for four months, and we were expelled for anti-Franco activities. It was very complicated, because among the students there were far-left people who sometimes said things more stupid than what the regime was saying. It was quite usual that when you were doing a class in calculus, one student would stand up and say “comrades, we have to stop this class, because Mr Margarit is doing this Calculus of Structures class very well, but doing this class very well means that he is giving support to the regime and keeping it going”—for example! So I had to stop the class and say “well, despite the regime we have to do Calculus of Structures, and we also have to combat the regime,” which was contradictory. If you could convince them, you won the battle, and they didn’t go.

Franco dominated this country for 40 years. He died in his bed, and even today, the Franco regime is a fact. And our king was put in place by Franco, and is still there.

PV: And the feeling in the air at the time was not so much fear, as just needing to get on with your life?

JM: Always, and this is what saves humanity.

PV: I’ll ask you something a little bit different. You write a lot about Barcelona. Can you speak about a few places in Barcelona that hold special significance for you?

JM: What’s significant is where you’re born and where you’ve moved. Alone, or with a woman that you’ve loved. Only that. The Rambla is very important because my parents lived there, and I lived there when I was young. The Carrer de Sardenya and the Plaça Sanllehy, because I lived there too, 12 years, when I was first married with young children; Carles was born there. And Sant Just is also very important—I’ve been here since 1975—many years, and I’m happy here. The Sant Just library is called the Joan Margarit library. This is my place.

The importance of the Estació de França . . . I don’t mean the present station, because it’s not used much anymore, but earlier, in the period immediately after the civil war. My father worked in Girona and he came and went by train. Today to go from Barcelona to Girona is an hour, but back then it could be three, four, five hours. I spent hours waiting for my father in the Estació de França, and it was very different from now: It was full of people, poor people. Everybody waiting for somebody. Everybody waiting for whatever train it was—this atmosphere. The Allies, and a child waiting and waiting for his father: this for me is the Estació de França.

And Montjuïc: Montjuïc has changed a lot after 1990 and the Olympic Games. With other architects I worked on the Montjuïc stadium for the Olympics. For my generation, Montjuïc is the place where the military castle has always been, pointing at Barcelona. Montjuïc has been the place where the aggressors, mainly the Spanish aggressors, have attacked the city. And this image of Montjuïc has been in our heads and in our hearts since the 18^th century. This is changing now. The military castle has become part of the city of Barcelona only in the last 3 or 4 years; it belonged to the army before. There was a military museum there that was really a beautiful museum! All the arms were kept there, but it was history: beautiful. It was a magnificent museum. But the city has not been able to maintain this museum and now it’s diminished. It’s a rejection by the city of Barcelona, of what it meant.

Montjuïc is the most beautiful park in Barcelona. It was where, after the end of the civil war, a lot of hovels were built, and they were there until 1990. But today it’s something else, and for the new generations it will be something else again. I have a poem called the Ballad of Montjuïc. This poem speaks about all of this. There was a place in Montjuïc called the canyet, where they used to throw all the dead animals—in Spanish it’s called “the vulture place.” Montjuïc for me is all of this!

PV: You’ve written many poems about your father, who was involved in the Spanish Civil War—poems like “My Father’s Face” and “The First Frosts.” Can you tell me a little about your relationship with your father?

JM: My father had a very big scar on his face, in the mouth and nose. When he was little my grandmother—his mother—was holding him in the left arm, and with the right arm she was putting oil into the frying pan on the fire, and the baby fell face first into the pan, and burnt all this part of the nose and mouth [gesturing]. He had this scar for the rest of his life. I remember when I was about 14 or 15 years old one of my school classmates said, “what happened to your father’s face?” And I said, “what do you mean, my father? What do you mean?” The son doesn’t see this!

My second image is of my father fleeing during the war because he didn’t want to fight on either side, like 90% of people in Spain, like 90% of people when there’s a civil war, because the civil war is waged by a few people on one side and a few people on the other. But in the end everybody has to do something. I remember that when I was small… first of all, my father wasn’t there; second, he was there, but he never left the house because he had no work. Or he wasn’t there because he was in prison in Sant Ande, because he fled to France during the war, came back through San Sebastian, and they caught him and put him in prison in Sant Ande. With Franco if you didn’t have a safe conduct or guarantee—a guarantee from somebody that you were OK, from the winners that you were OK, somebody who said “I’ll be responsible for this person”—you couldn’t get out of prison.

And that’s why he wasn’t there when I was a child. And that’s why when my father did get a job he found it in Girona or Figueres in the northern part of the country. So he came and went, and this links up with what I was saying about the Estació de França. Then my family went to live in the Canary Islands in the ‘50s, at the end of my adolescence. This for me is a very important chapter. I’ve written a lot of poems about the Canary Islands, in particular about Santa Cruz de Tenerife. For me it was Treasure Island! In the 1950s, Tennerife was an island with very few inhabitants—very quiet, with a marvellous climate and a big volcano. As a young boy I felt free there compared to when I was here in Barcelona. This was another perspective on the world because the Canary Islands had more trade relations with England than with Spain. It was a free port, so items for sale were coming and going without taxes. This meant that there were products on the market that after coming from Barcelona—from the lack of Barcelona—made me feel like I was on Treasure Island.

Then I came back to Barcelona to study architecture. In those days to come from the Canary Islands to Barcelona on a steam ship took 5 days, and the plane was extremely expensive and impossible. With a mercantile boat it took 10 days! You were more comfortable and you also had a cabin, and it was much cheaper. This for me was the beginning of poetry, on these voyages by boat from the Canary Islands to Barcelona. This was very important.

PV: So it sounds like the poetry came first, before the architecture.

JM: Naturally!

PV: And what influence has one had on the other?

JM: I began architecture when I was 18 and I’d already written a few poems. It was very difficult to get into the school of architecture in those days. Normally there were 200 students wanting to go in and only 4 or 5 got in. It was very tough. When I got in and really had to start studying architecture properly, I thought, “This can’t be. You’re a poet; you have to work with things around poetry.” It’s the same error I made with the language before, but applied to something else. I stopped my studies and went to work in a publishing house. They set me the task of doing a dictionary of science, which meant copying other dictionaries of science. It wasn’t what I thought it would be!

I realized I had to do it back to front: I had to work on something that was independent from poetry, had a maximum of independence. So I went back to architecture school, recovered the time I’d lost. And within architecture I chose the area that was as far from poetry as possible, which was the calculus of structures, and I’m a specialist in the calculus of structures. This was one of the things I got most right in my life. In my work as an architect I have always been very closely related with the work itself. I’m a man who does the field work. When I went to visit the work every day the first thing I did was to look for the bars around it. When I’d found one that was fairly quiet and well-hidden from the work—any work of architecture takes one or two years, and every week you go to visit the work—I always went a couple of hours early, and I went to the bar to be a poet. So from poetry to calculus of structures I passed in a matter of seconds. If you’re writing scripts for the radio, in contrast, you can’t make that step so quickly.

Poetry is a real lady, and can’t stand competition. The calculus of structures is no competition for poetry. So I went to visit the work, went back to the bar, and in 3 seconds I’ve made the step the other way, and I was back to being a poet again. I’ve done this all my life.

The poet always speaks about himself. He seeks within himself what is his own and yet at the same time of everybody, because all of us are much the same. I have to find within myself what is also within you, so that when you read me, you say, “that’s me!” So this means that a poet has to have a life. This means that a poet has to have an amorous life, a sexual life, an economic life, and to be a father or parent—he has to have a life. A professional life, and so on. A real life. With this life, you’re like everybody else, and you know what’s going on with the others, and what’s happening with you. You see it’s the same thing. Then you’ve got to take from what is happening to all of us the essence of it—what we have in common, which is the basic thing. To do this in the form of a poem in very little space, and very concisely. The basic thing, or the essence, can never be big, which is why very few novels can be fundamental. But all poems are fundamental.

PV: I’m struck by how directly you write about personal disasters, such as the death of your daughter Joanna—you named a book after her. Do you believe it is the poet’s duty to meet experience head on, and to represent reality just as it is, without softening it?

JM: All good poems do that. The poet does it as best he can. For example, Paul Celan is a poet who is at the opposite pole to my way of writing poetry. It would be impossible to find two more different poets, but we do the same thing. We both talk about what we have inside us. We can’t talk about anything else—it’s impossible. What else shall I talk about—your life? I don’t know you! I have to talk about your life through mine, which is what I know, and since I know that your life and my life are basically the same, I know that if you lost a daughter the same thing would happen to you as did to me. That’s what it’s about. This is the basis of being able to write a poem, otherwise you can’t write a poem. All good poets do this: some do it more explicitly, and others do it less explicitly. I dare to say that not even the poet chooses.

To write a good poem is very difficult. I write it as I can and not as I like. It’s like the man coming down a staircase with everybody at the bottom waiting for him, and halfway down he slips and falls. He gets to the bottom and everyone’s laughing. He gets up in a dignified way, brushes off his clothes, and says, “each of us comes down as best we can. We each do what we can.”

To come back to Joanna: this is a singular book because it talks about something at the same time as it was happening. This isn’t recommendable. All poets know that it is much better to talk about things when they’ve already happened and they’re properly digested. But I decided to say to poetry, “if this doesn’t help me, I give up.” The difficult thing was to write real poetry and not just laments. I believe that the book Joanna is made up of poems, real poems. I was a poet and not someone writing laments or an intimate diary, and where necessary I changed the real setting for one I imagined, but this was poetry. I think that’s why this book had some success as a book of poems. If this had been a necrological outpouring or an account of my personal misery the book wouldn’t have succeeded. It wouldn’t have had any echo, or made any immediate effect, and people wouldn’t remember it. If you’ve read that book 10 years after it was written, it’s because you’re reading poetry.

PV: Can you tell me a little bit about your daughters Anna and Joanna?

JM: Anna only lived one day and died very fast. Joanna was born with a mental handicap: she had the Rubinstein-Taybi syndrome. She had it, I would say, in the ideal proportion. She had a lot of problems with mobility so she walked with crutches and in a wheelchair. She also could never learn to read well or to write, yet her sensibility was very, very refined, and we cultivated this. So this means that Joanna came with us to a concert of Bach or Beethoven, and she painted, and her paintings were impressive. She only had one way of relating with other people, which was loving them. She was a gift from heaven. But you don’t realize this at first, and in the beginning you want this child to disappear out of your life. This takes a long time to overcome later. It’s a strange kind of remorse, because later you see that what we had was a gift. I don’t know if I’m a good person or not, but without Joanna I would have been a lot worse, that’s for sure. So this very important person, this person who was very important for all the family—for my wife, for my son—at the age of 30 got cancer of the pancreas and she died. She died in 8 months, most of which she spent at home. She died at home. We left everything to look after her, and that’s why I could write the book because I was here all day with her. This has been a key happening in the lives of all of us. That’s the story.

PV: Thank you for telling me. And I think you contrast this situation to something that happened to Neruda, who had a handicapped daughter.

JM: Yes, Neruda was very important to me; he was the first poet I admired, and I still admire him. Neruda had a mentally handicapped daughter. His first reaction was just like mine, like most people’s—rejection. I was able to overcome that; he couldn’t. He never saw her again. He sent the mother and the daughter, using the civil war as an excuse, to Holland, where the mother was from, and never saw them. Neruda is the poet that’s talked about most things—he’s spoken about a book, a table, radio, peppers, the sky, communism, Stalinism, everything—everything but his handicapped daughter. That was him. Poor, great poet.

PV: There’s a style of writing in Spain known as “poetry of experience.” Tell me about that, and whether you think your writing could be included in that category.

JM: I’d go back here to everything I’ve already told you about poetry. Paul Celan and I do the same thing, but experience . . . who is the person who doesn’t write about his own life and experience? It’s impossible not to.

Every art always has a group of people around it who use it to get on in the world. This is an economic problem. One thing is a painting by Van Gogh. Another thing is the price of a Van Gogh painting; another thing is the people who talk about a Van Gogh painting; another thing is falsifying a Van Gogh painting. This has nothing to do with one of his paintings. It’s very human and very logical that these should exist around a work of art, but it’s also very easy to understand that this doesn’t interest the creator in the least. At most it could interest him in terms of vanity. But now I’m at the age of being beyond all that [laughing]. Humility comes on its own. And at ninety even more so, and then you’re even more humble when you’re dead!

PV: You’re very passionate about jazz. Names like Chet Baker, Clifford Brown and Charlie Parker keep popping up in your poetry. When did your passion for jazz begin?

JM: Carles, my son, will be the witness to this—he’s a composer and a jazz musician. He must have found something at home to make him decide to be a jazz musician. The importance of jazz for me is this: I love music, starting from Baroque. Apart from being an art that moves me, music demonstrates for me more than any other art that when the Greeks were shooting, they shot very well. Because of that, today, everybody in the world wants to be Greek! What kind of music do the Japanese want to play and hear? Beethoven. It’s very logical, because this music’s been created. The music from the East is very interesting, but it’s not like Beethoven—it’s not as good as Beethoven. If you aim right, it’s very good, but if you aim even a little bit wrong, after many years, the deviance is enormous. Lao Tze and Buddha are very interesting and very important, both of them, but they don’t go anywhere. It’s all going inwards, and the inside is also very important—but what’s inside also has to walk outside. Socrates and Plato are from a period which is more or less contemporaneous with Lao Tze. But they aim better. So today, Plato and Socrates mean more to us than Lao Tze. I don’t know if I’ve explained myself very well—I’m not being disrespectful here—not at all.

Let’s go back to jazz! For me, classical music is what I usually listen to. I go as far as Shostakovich and Stravinsky; beyond this, I can’t manage. So I go along this musical line to jazz. For me, jazz is the modern aspect of music. The music of my time is jazz. I’m sorry it’s not Lutoslawski—it’s Charlie Parker. I’m not trying to say that this is a general truth: this is my own truth. I’m not saying that contemporary music has no use, but it doesn’t for me. It’s my problem, not music’s problem. And jazz saves me.

PV: And do you draw on any jazz rhythms in your poetry, or is it more for spiritual nourishment?

JM: No, no, no! When you do a recital, there’s always someone who says “let’s have a bit of background music.” I always say, “I’m the one who puts the music in my poem! This is my music. It’s not Beethoven or Charlie Parker, it’s me.”

PV: Tell me about some of your literary influences.

JM: The first influences were Spanish because my culture came through Spanish. And from Spanish, Machado. The ‘98 generation—Unamuno, Machado and Rubén Darío. And then the famous generation of ‘27—Cernuda, García Lorca—especially those two, and Neruda. In Catalan, when I started moving into Catalan culture after I turned thirty more or less, Joan Maragall, Salvador Espriu, Joan Vinyoli, Gabriel Ferrater, Vicent Andrés Estellés and Miquel Martí i Pol, who was a friend of mine. It was he who was like a literary parent to me, and who showed me I could write in Catalan.

There was a time when I was going onto 50, and I started reading poets in English. I can’t speak English or understand it spoken, but I can read it, and together with Sam Abrams, I translated a big work of Thomas Hardy—150 poems. And then we did the complete works of Elizabeth Bishop into Spanish. I’ve also worked with Anna Crowe on 150 poems of R.S.Thomas that’s about to come out, in Catalan. So I discovered English poetry, and that was very important for me. This is the literature that’s helped me most in the latter part of my life—the poetry that’s helped me most.

Poetry isn’t literature. One of the worst wounds that’s been inflicted on poetry is to consider it as literature. With so much difference between poetry and the novel, or between poetry and prose in general . . . I’m a man of science, in training. I calculate structures, and I’ve worked with mathematics throughout my life. I can guarantee that poetry is closer to science and to music than it is to the novel. Since it’s made of words like the novel is made of words, it’s a very facile understanding to say “it’s words, so it’s the same thing”. They’re not the same thing at all if one small poem all by itself can be as powerful as a whole novel! It means that words in the one case don’t mean the same as they do in the other. You won’t find any scientific researcher who will say to you, “making a scientific discovery is the same thing as writing a novel.” But others will say, “making a scientific discovery is like the inspiration for writing a poem.”

PV: And in saying that poetry is closer to science than to the novel, are you talking about precision?

JM: Among other things. It’s very difficult to know what a poem is. Or music—what are works of art? We don’t know. We know that they’re made—that people do them. But we don’t know what they are. I don’t know what poetry is, but I can recognise a good poem. I know what characteristics it has to meet. There must be exactness and concision. Homer is exact and concise, always. The novelist doesn’t have to be exact and concise. If he were exact and concise he’d write a bad novel. In the novel, there must be parts where the reader even gets a bit bored, because the novelist knows that the reader has to rest a bit. This is part of the planning of the novelist, but this is beyond the experience of the poet. I have to put as much as the novelist puts into his work to write my poem—not a book of poems, a poem. With a poem that you read in the morning, that has to be enough for you for the whole day, if it’s a good poem. We also have to understand that poetry’s very easy to falsify: it’s easy to do something that looks like a poem. Thousands of poets do this. Maybe I do too, I don’t know. They won’t know until a long time has gone by. I know that Machado was a great poet, but Machado didn’t know that—he couldn’t know. The only proof is that after a hundred years he’s still being read. It’s the wretchedness and the grandeur of art, this matter. And it’s also the tragedy.

There’s one poem in my last book which hasn’t been published yet. I’m talking about the audition of a pianist in a church in Paris. We went to Paris to listen to Sonata 23 of Beethoven in a little church. We didn’t know who the pianist was. We were in Paris and we thought, “oh that’s a Beethoven sonata, let’s go and listen to it.” We were in the church, there were about 30 people, there was a Steinway piano. A man in his 50s came out, very corpulent, in a dinner suit. He sat down, and without the music in front of him he began to play. It was horrific! The man knew the music by memory, and he played horribly. He was in his 50s, had worked on it a lot—his whole life devoted to music, uselessly! This is the drama of art. It’s just what comes out, whether it works or not. This is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath what’s good in art is very dramatic.

PV: Alright. And I think you still write in both Catalan and Castilian.

JM: I always begin a poem in Catalan: I can’t start in Spanish. I remember the crypt. It takes me 2 months to write a poem; I struggle with it for 2 months. I start in Catalan, but in the second session, it’s already there in Spanish and Catalan. I work with both languages because sometimes the errors I’m making are more evident in Spanish than in Catalan, or vice versa. And one of the languages says, “hey, you’re wrong here!” You look at the other one, and it’s wrong there too. And as I insist, languages are not guilty of anything. The guilt lies with the people who use the language. The same language can be used for writing a love poem or for insulting someone.

PV: And the relationship between Catalan and Castilian for you is still that of the cathedral and the crypt?

JM: Catalan also has its cathedrals now.

Prithvi Varatharajan is a freelance producer of poetry programs for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is currently also a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia

Published in Issue 32

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