Siri Gunasinghe’s Sinhala Poems in English — Just Three-by Michael Roberts

If you could set an elephant walk a tightrope, I can assure you can handle a poetry translation. This is the general idea that people have on translating poetry. Although I have not specialized circus tricks, I have translated a few poems and they have been published in many channels. But every time I read them, I feel that I would have done better. Ability to translate is something that grows within you day by day I conclude. But I know that translation skill is not a synonym for maturity.

Language is the central subject of any discussion about translation. However, there are certain elements involved in the process of translation which go beyond this conventional area.

This is especially true for literary translation in general and translation of poetry in particular. Literary translation is a translational species in itself, but it differs in many important respects from the kind of translation practiced in a language class. On the one hand, literary translation involves a good deal of interpretation about intent and effect. On the other hand, the literary translator is often not as much interested in literal ‘transliteration’ as in finding a corollary mood, tone, voice, sound, response, and so forth.

As once a prominent scholar in translation studies, Richard Jackson highlighted, a translator must see to it that what he writes is similar, but not the very same; and the similarity, moreover, should not be like that of a painting or statue to the person represented, but rather like that of a son to a father, where there is often a great difference in the features and body shape, yet after all there is a shadowy something—akin to what the painters call one’s air—hovering about the face, and especially the eyes, out of which there grows a likeness.

We writers, too, must see to it that along with the similarity there is a large measure of dissimilarity; and furthermore such likeness as there is must be elusive, something that it is impossible to seize except by a sort of still-hunt, a quality to be felt rather than defined. We must write just as the bees make honey, not keeping the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own, blending many different flavors into one, which shall be unlike them all, and better. So, contrary to some critics’ argument that poetry “loses” in translation or poetry is “untranslatable”, there are others with the opposite standpoint that it can be preserved, illustrated and illuminated if a good job is done, because poetry is in large part found again and re-painted by the translator. Of course, many of the original poetical touches of color cannot be transposed and they must be arranged; yet these new arrangements may be even more luminous than the original. Thus a good translation discovers the “dynamics” of poetry, if not necessarily its “mechanics”. The point to be noted here is that as Peter Newmark states, literary translation is “…the most testing type of translation. It can further be claimed that translation of poetry is the acid test showing the challenging nature of the task.

In the discussion on poetry translation, I should mention the glowing women involved in Sinhalese poetry translation. Dr Lakshmi De Silva published a collection of Sinhalese poetry including Seegiri Graffiti. Dr Ranjani Obeyesekere translated ‘Yasodarawatha’ and Dr Hemamali Gunasinghe did various poems including many of Cumaratunga Munidasa’s poetry. As a teacher of translation studies these works immensely help me to deliver my message to the students when I teach. They have contributed in showcasing a part of our exquisite cultural mosaic.