Dearth of competent translators

The delay in Gamperaliya English version:

In an interview with Sunday Observer , one of the co-translators of the English version of Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya, Dr. Ranga Wickramasinghe spells out the significance of the translation in the light of its unique literary value.

Interviewed by Ranga Chandrarathne

Q: Gamperaliya was published sixty five years ago. Why there was no English translation available until now?

A: It is an irony that although Gamperaliya was not available in English, Russian and Tamil translations were available forty years ago. I believe Lakshmi de Silva was the only writer who undertook to translate Gamperaliya into English, when my father was alive. There could be many reasons for this.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, when English was the medium of education for the urban middle-class who made up the administrators, professionals and the rulers, there was no need to learn Sinhala, and few had any interest in Sinhala literature.

My education was also entirely in the English medium. I must admit that although my knowledge of Sinhala literature was perhaps better than that of most of my classmates because of my father, it was yet poor.

There was very little interest or incentive to translate creative writing from Sinhala into English literature then. The few writers with sufficient knowledge of literature in English and Sinhala, who could have undertaken the task to translate from Sinhala into English, would have probably not found a readership.

There was also a rather dismissive attitude at the time to the indigenous literature and culture. There was a tendency to belittle our own creative writings. A well known Sinhala writer has commented that Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s critically acclaimed Italian novel The Leopard was the source of inspiration for Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya .

By contrast, the Russian literary critic V. Korchitov stated that what struck him was the close kinship of Gamperaliya in its theme, subject and high novelistic qualities and creative power to di Lampedusa’s novel.

Korchitov emphasised that the first Italian edition of The Leopard was published in 1958, fourteen years after the publication of the first Sinhala edition of Martin Wickramasinghe’s Gamperaliya in 1944.

If that Sinhala writer had said that di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard was inspired by Gamperaliya it would have at least been chronologically correct nonsense!.

A novel is set in a period in time and place. But the content may transcend differences due to place and time, and cultural and social differences.

As Korchitov points out, the two novels, Gamperaliya and The Leopard have similar themes, the presentation of the vicissitudes of a feudal class in a modernising world, the microcosm of a feudal family, the ups and downs in their circumstances, and their joys and sufferings).

Q: Why did you wait so long to attempt a translation yourself.

A: By the time I started my undergraduate studies, there was a greater interest in Sinhala literature. I came to know young Sinhala writers like Gunadasa Amarasekera, who was my contemporary in Medical School.

Interaction with him stimulated my interest, and prompted me to read more of Martin Wickramasinghe’s writings, which I am ashamed to admit, had been limited upto that time. Later, I tried my hand at translating some of the short stories over many years, but I got round to publishing a selection often of Martin Wickramasinghe’s short stories only an year ago.

After she read my translations of the short stories, Lakshmi de Silva suggested that I should translate Gamperaliya. I told her that I would collaborate if she would give the lead.

Q: You had an advantage in translating the book because you knew many of the real individuals who resembled the characters in the novel?

A: Yes, you could say that. As children, my brothers and sisters and I invariably spent the Sinhala New Year vacation in Koggala and Kataluwa, south of Galle. These were the villages of my paternal and maternal grandparents. The people, the social interactions and the physical environment were part of my experience from my early years. This created a de jevu that helped in the complex task of translating my father’s creative writings.

I also had the advantage that the author was my father. To get to know the author intimately is certainly helpful in translating, because a novel involves imaginative creations from thoughts, beliefs, feelings, emotions of an existential present and past. In a very short essay in the collection called Koggala Pragnaya, I tried to capture some childhood memories of my father.

Although he was self taught, one must not forget that he studied for five years in an English medium school, Bonavista. The knowledge of English and basic science acquired in that school, had stimulated his interest in reading, and his extraordinary natural curiosity to ask questions and to explore his environs.

You must know the story that when he saw a sea anemone, he raised the question whether it was a plant or an animal. After he left Bonavista, reading books became the only source of knowledge that he could turn to as the village schoolteachers were not equipped to answer the kind of questions he raised.

The topics that had come to his notice through his reading habit. Writing required him to extend his reading. Instead of going to public libraries he bought or ordered the most recent books on subjects he wanted to explore and gradually acquired his own reference library.

The books he had acquired over a period of some seventy years upto the time of his death, amounted to a reference collection of over 5000 books collected and preserved with care by him over a period of more than sixty years.