Much of the poetry published in Sri Lanka has never made it out of the country.
This is how it tends to be for poetry; print runs are small, and audiences, local. But here are powerful stories of a nation in ceaseless turmoil; of island-denuding tsunamis and civil war.
“I hear there isn’t much art / In the bombing of Jaffna… in the old man on a bicycle / fleeing his burning compound,” writes Indran Amirthanayagam, in Not Much Art (2001).
Subtle verses of resistance seek to defend the power of the word, as in Illavalai Wijayendra’s 1990 Tamil work, To Those Who Bear Sticks, translated by Shash Trevett in 2022: “But my words remain upright / They beat and subdue yours / Having lost to my words / you return bearing sticks.”
“Poets act as curators, archivists and preservers of language itself, as in the case of Tamil in Sri Lanka,” says Trevett, 49, a poet whose family moved to the UK when she was 13, to escape the civil war. This power is part of what prompted three poets with roots in that country — Trevett, Vidyan Ravinthiran, 40, and Seni Seneviratne, 73 — to compile an anthology of Sri Lankan verse.
Out of Sri Lanka (Penguin India) features work by over 100 writers, some written in English and some translated from the Tamil and Sinhala. The poems date from 1948 and 2022, written by poets in Sri Lanka and with roots there but now living around the world.
“This anthology represents a human rights intervention, it is – discussing a country afflicted with amnesia, in denial of its past – a matter of putting things on record,” the editors write, in their introduction.
This is a book for those who love Sri Lanka, miss their home, or remain within it, says Trevett. “Many young poets are writing in interesting ways, merging Sinhala, Tamil and English, for instance, in ways that seek to break down barriers. Then there are poets from the diaspora writing of generational trauma so powerfully that we wanted readers in Sri Lanka to see their work.”
Excerpts from an interview with Trevett, on behalf of the trio.
What does the poetry of this time frame, 1948 to 2022, represent?
Poets in the early years of that period were pioneering free verse and breaking free from the constraints of colonialism. These concerns are reflected in their work.
Before the civil war, the Tamil poets’ main complaint was the caste system. Sinhala poets write about the sadness of families split apart as women sought employment as domestic workers in the Middle-East or South-East Asia. Then the civil war engaged the Tamil poets from the 1980s onwards. Exile and dislocation became prominent themes for Tamil poets fleeing the war and for Sinhala poets who faced the challenges of migrating to a new country.
The constraints of building a life as a second-generation immigrant are dealt with very skilfully by poets of the diaspora. They write engagingly about occupying a third space, belonging neither “here” nor “there”, and what that does to their sense of self.
The introduction touches upon the stark difference between the lives and work of Tamil and Sinhala writers. How has this changed?
During the civil war, Tamil poets wrote about what was happening around them: Death, destruction, subjugation. The Sinhala poets largely did not mention the war. They were writing about falling in love, travelling, emigrating.
The Tamil poets of the 1980s and ’90s felt greatly let down by this absence of solidarity. The Sinhala poets did speak out against the state’s brutality in quashing the Marxist uprisings of the 1970s and ’80s, in the south. But the separate zones of interest seem to have been clearly marked during the civil war.
Nowadays Sinhala and Tamil poets are translating each other’s work, doing readings together and forging a new republic of letters. There is so much hope resting on these young poets.
Were there any regrets about the final selection?
A big regret is that we failed to represent the Malayaha Tamils from the Hill Country. We struggled to find any good translations of their poetry. They face so much discrimination in Sri Lanka, I only hope that someone else will shine a spotlight on their work very soon.
Sometimes we have also had to leave out a big name because of poor or inadequate translation. I hope that efforts are made to elevate the art of translation in Sri Lanka. With so many poets speaking all three languages, translations between the three should be a thriving art.
What do you hope people will take away from the collection?
I think we were driven by a wish to show that the island was so much more than palm trees and golden beaches. We discovered young poets who, in a post-war Sri Lanka, were tackling corruption, dislocation, sexual and identity politics, alongside age-old preoccupations with family life or love.
I think we were all often delighted by what we read, sometimes sobered, sometimes upset. Almost every poem we included in the book evinced some sort of reaction from us and we hope that they will similarly strike the reader.
With more translations, at least of prose, and more attention paid globally to literature of the subcontinent, do you think Sri Lanka is finally starting to get the attention it deserves?
Poetry out of Sri Lanka still has a long way to go before it can compete equally with, say, India, on the global stage. I would love for many of the poets we feature to become better-known in the UK.
The 2022 Booker Prize for Shehan Karunatilaka has raised the profile of Sri Lankan literature. VV Ganeshananthan, whose work is included in our anthology, is also being lauded at the moment, for her 2023 novel, Brotherless Night.
Poetry is not as widely read as prose, but we hope that readers around the world will be interested enough to pick up this book and dip into it. And this is just the beginning. We hope that others will build on, and extend, our work.
