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| Sunday, 6 April 2003 |
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Among learned bookish wits by FACTOTUM It was April 1. One wondered if the suspense that pervaded the British Council auditorium that day at sundown was in anticipation of some prank, not on the scale of course which Tony Blair was urging his men to bombard Baghdad, if that could be called the work of pranksters. But then understatements and hyperbole are possible with this breed known as creative, imaginative writers all of whom were vying for the coveted Gratiaen Prize, and had assembled to know if they had caught the jurists' eye to be short-listed for the big cash award. Trustee and Hony. Secretary welcomed all but the media but then we are quite at home in the shadows! Council Director was quite elated over the ever increasing tide of writings that appear in English even among those who follow courses there bringing to mind the heavy mail of prose and verse that clamour for space in the pages of this newspaper. He having done, it was the turn of the 'star-studded' panel of judges to run the show. Chairman of film fame and himself a past winner of the award pinned himself to a text to avoid rambling and was soon to educate the audience on the guidelines that were followed in picking the short-listed from among a good forty or more participants. If topicality was low down in the list, that was at the expense of more sought after originality, creativity and the clever turn of phrase. In an attempt not to give the game away until this evening when the winner will be announced the short-list was in alphabetical order of the surnames and he let the other jurists take turn in announcing them. The more senior academic, linguist and first Professor of English of the Open University decided to add to the suspense. Declaring the first name only he took time to comment ably on the strong points of the writer's work and then read out a short poem in fact and called up the worthy to read from her work. Then and only then did he get on to the next and the next. The other academic on the panel who had spent the better part of her life abroad then followed suit until the crop of five had been announced and sorely tested not only on their writing but also on their oral rendering which certainly kept the audience enraptured. The prose and verse were inviting enough to go the whole hog of tearing the poems to bits, accepting the invitation to sleep, or be moved by the translation out of the darkness. The dilemmas and travails of factory hands and the satirist's caricatures of Colpetty people were all invigorating. Here then the women outnumbered the men. One of the men even backing out of his turn to read, nominating his spouse to stand in. The only Sinhala name stumped one of the judges. That went to highlight the 'hybridity' of those who had emerged as the top writers in English that day. Even their diction may have seemed alien to the average Lankan but then it was all in all a great evening opening the way for learned, bookish wits to read in their own pastime more than what is intended or ever imagined by the writers. Isn't that to manifest their own eloquence and elegance? |
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