Prof. A.V. Suraweera has just published a Sinhala translation of Graham Hough's important work, 'An Essay on Criticism'. This is an admirable translation; Suraweera has understood the intent of the original work very comprehensively and has rendered it into lucid and precise Sinhala prose. Admittedly, Hough is a clear writer and does not present the kind of problems that a translator of the dense and opaque prose of a writer like Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan would have to contend with. However, Graham Hough presents his own share of problems for the potential translator; he assumes a deep understanding of Western literature in general and English literature in particular. Let us, for example, consider the title An Essay in Criticism; it is a take on Alexander Pope's work, "An Essay on Criticism", published in 1711, and which delineates norms of literary creativity and criticism. Suraweera, quite legitimately in my judgment, has opted to leave out certain passages, and shorten others, which have little relevance to the Sinhala reader. By translating this work into Sinhala, Suraweera has performed an invaluable service by clearing a space in which a focused and informed discussions of literary theory can transpire.

Graham Hough is in many ways a forgotten critic. Even at the height of his powers as a living critic, he was overshadowed by other critics like F.R. Leavis. For example, in the English Department at Cambridge where he taught, Leavis, Raymond Williams, L,C, Knights, M.C. Bradbrook exerted a greater influence than Hough; this was indeed a pity because Hough had many interesting things to say about modern English poetry, novels of Lawrence and literary study in general. His book, "Image and Experience", challenged audaciously some of the presuppositions of the so-called revolution in modern poetry ushered in by Eliot and Pound.

Many of the best passages in this critical study succeed in demonstrating that poems such as Pound's "Cantos" and Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "Four Quartets" survive, not assisted by their structure, but in spite of it.

I had the good fortune of studying with Prof, Graham Hough in the mid sixties in Cambridge. I took his course on advanced literary theory. Each week, about fifteen of us from England, Canada, America, India, Nigeria etc, sat around a table and discussed contemporary literary theory. These discussions ultimately found a more permanent home in his published writings. This was before the ascendancy of post-modernism and post-structuralism and the texts we discussed were by Northrop Frye, G. Wilson Knight, William Empson etc. I was deeply impressed by his commonsensical approaches to the study of literature. Commonsense, of course, is not innocent and free of ideology; the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz saw it as a cultural system.

Two Sri Lanka critics were conspicuous admirers of Hough's work. Reggie Siriwardena popularized his writings among English readers while Gunadasa Amarasekera pointed out to the Sinhala reader the relevance of such critical texts as "The Dark Sun", "Image and Experience" and "An Essay on Criticism". As I recall, Amarasekera published a long review of "The Dream and the Task" in a local English newspaper, and I gave a copy of it to Hough. He was deeply interested in what Amarasekera had to say, especially the parallels he perceived with classical Sanskrit poetics.

There is a connecting thematic thread that runs through his work. In "The Last Romantics", he sought to trace a trajectory of thinking from the Victorian aesthetes to Yeats. In "The Romantic Poets", he focused on the some of the eminent poets of the 19th century. "The Dark Sun" is devoted to a demonstration of the intersections of romanticism and social realism in Lawrence. "The Image and Experience", constitutes a continuation of the interests of "The Last Romantics" to an investigation into the ideas underpinning poetical revolution of the twentieth century. "The Dream and the Task" and "An Essay on Criticism" carry forward these ideas in order to enforce newer connections. At the end of the day, what impresses me most about Hough's lectures as well as his writings is his down to earth nature, the penetrating insights, and the scrupulous avoidance of unearned profundities.

He was unafraid to follow literary argumentation where it leads. He pointed out in a reasoned manner how inescapably we are answerable to literary texts.