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Note:

Altyn-Dagh is a made-up name, 'gold mountain' in Turkish. In Chinese colour symbolism, gold is the colour of the centre. There are mountains called 'golden' - the Altai - in Central Asia. Roshnan means 'creatures of light', i.e. 'humans', in Parthian Manichaean texts. The nucleus of the poem is the idea of the undifferentiated as the precursor of all forms - the centre in the sense of being equally close to everything. I was interested in the idea of a place where Chinese, European, Iranian, and Siberian cultures touched, and of a language equally close to the languages of all those places.

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