Meet the 2024 Mentees: Poorna Swami (Urdu)

Poorna Swami will translate Safiya Akhtar’s Murmurs from Urdu.  

(Image Description: Poorna, an Indian woman with black hair in a pixie cut, stands against a white wall. She wears a white shirt printed with large pink flowers and smiles gently at the camera.)  

Poorna Swami was born in Mumbai and raised in Bangalore, cities she continues to call home. While she was growing up, different family members spoke to her in different languages and as a result, she learned to speak and read Hindi, English, Kannada, and Urdu. She continues to feel and fumble her way through a few more languages too, and hopes one day to finally feel at home in some—any—language.  

Reading the Urdu/Hindi dictionary to debate the meaning of a word was a common family activity in Poorna’s childhood home. So, it was hardly surprising when she found her way to the study of non-Anglophone literatures as an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College and the School of Oriental and African Studies. After graduating with a degree in English and Dance-theatre, Poorna joined the online translation quarterly Asymptote as their India Editor-at-large. She co-edited the journal’s first feature on Indian language poetry in English translation, featuring contemporary poems from eleven different languages. She feels strongly about promoting literature in translation as a way to share new discourses, aesthetics, and ways of knowing the world.  

Poorna has worked as a freelance writer and journalist in India, writing for publications such as The Caravan, Open, Mint Lounge, the London Review of Books blog and The Hindu BLink. Her favorite form of literature is poetry, and she can spend hours reading poems, alone or aloud with friends. She also writes her own poems in English, which have appeared in Indiana Review, Indian Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Prelude. In 2018, Poorna won the Srinivas Rayaprol Prize for young Indian poets. For her, translation is a lot like writing poems—a movement between rogue instinct and mathematical precision. She began translating from Urdu because she fell irreparably in love with its poetry.  

In her not-so-secret parallel lives, Poorna also choreographs, dances, and collaborates as a dramaturg with other dance makers. By day, she is a PhD student in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, where she studies 20th-century Urdu and Hindi print culture, with an emphasis on feminist histories, transnational networks, and translation. Like most writerly folk, she is very into cats.