Godfrey hailed as 'versatile personality'
Speech: Extracts of the speech delivered by Tissa Jayatilaka
at the Gratiaen Prize award ceremony held in Colombo recently.
Those who attended the Gratiaen Prize ceremony last year would recall
that Mr. Godfrey Gunatilleke announced that it was his intention to step
down as Chairman of the Gratiaen Trust in 2006. He relinquished office
towards the end of last year and I was honoured by the Trust with the
invitation to succeed Mr. Gunatilleke - an invitation I accepted with
immense pleasure despite my other preoccupations.
Mr. Gunatilleke contributed handsomely to the work of the Gratiaen
Trust over a 10-year period, leading the Trust with quiet confidence and
immense flair, qualities that are, for me, the hallmarks of his
personality.
Given his glittering career in the Ceylon Civil Service and later his
outstanding work beginning in the early 1970s as the founder Executive
Vice Chairman of the Marga Institute - Sri Lanka's Centre for
Development Studies - not too many are aware that his first love has
been literature.
Godfrey Gunatilleke read the English under Prof. Lyn Ludowyk and took
First Class Honours in the subject. He is author of a brief but
insightful and influential essay which was published in Community in
1954. Community, a literary - critical journal, was edited by Dick and
Pauline Hensman.
In that essay Godfrey Gunatilleke called the English current in Sri
Lanka at that time 'a language without metaphor', through the
metaphorical mode, Gunatilleke wrote and I quote: We become alive to our
own feelings and respond to the world of eye and ear.
Though he recognised that our English did contain a metaphor of a
sort, he characterised it as 'derivative' and lacking in immediacy being
'created by the community, which spoke it in a different climate.'
He went on in the essay to define some of the consequences for art:
I have still to read a piece of creative writing by Ceylonese which
gathers our landscape, vegetation, the familiar intonations of our
speech unobtrusively into an effective idiom, giving me the sense of
here and now, the immediacy, which is the moving spirit in art. As
Ashley Halpe has pointed out, Gunatilleke's own short story The Garden
went a long way towards repairing the deficiency.
So in Godfrey Gunatilleke we had a very versatile personality at the
helm of the Gratiaen Trust, one who not only appreciated good creative
writing but was a good practitioner of it as well. In the years he
chaired the Trust several changes and innovations took place with regard
to the nature and scope of the Gratiaen Prize.
The introduction of the award of separate prizes for translations and
for original creative writing that came in 2003 in seminal among these
changes and innovations. This was the year of Ian Goonetileke's death
and Michael Ondaatje decided to name the prize for translations in Ian's
memory.
This is neither the place nor the occasion to make a formal
evaluation of Godfrey's contribution to the Gratiaen Trust or to the Sri
Lankan world of literature and literary criticism. Mine is simply
personal testimony and an effort to place on record on my own and on
behalf of all of my colleagues in the Trust our warm appreciation of
Godfrey's services to the Gratiaen Trust as its Chairman. That he has
agreed to continue to serve as a Trustee is our gain.
I am very conscious of the honour I am heir to in succeeding Godfrey
Gunatilleke as Chairman of the Gratiaen Trust. I am also acutely aware
of the fact that I am seeking to fill rather large shoes indeed in
following in the footsteps of men of the calibre of God rey Gunatilleke
and his predecessor the late Ian Goonetileke.
With the support of my colleagues on the Trust and Michael Ondaatje,
I shall do my utmost to carry forward the important work of the Trust.
And there is much to do in the aftermath of this brave new era of
globalisation when commerce appears to have re-settled on every tree and
the 21st century equivalents of those 'dark Satanic mills' that Blake
warned us about in the 19th century are upon and around us.
One of the antidotes we possess to meet the present challenges is
literature because it is one of the surer ways of transmitting decent
human values. So the Gratiaen Trust, devoted as it is to the fostering
of good writing, has its work cut out for itself.
The Gratiaen Trust, as we know, was established in 1994 with michael
Ondaatje's generous donation after he won the Booker prize. The first
Gratiaen Prize was awarded for the year 1993. This year's award is
therefore the 14th award.
This year the Trust received 25 entries and most of them were
published works unlike in the past when the Trust used to receive more
unpublished manuscripts. I think this steady growth may be taken as a
sign of success in so far as one of the primary objectives of the Trust
goes - that of encouraging and promoting creative writing in English.
The highlight of the year undoubtedly was the event the Trust hosted
towards the end of 2006. On the 25th November at the BCIS auditorium we
launched our companion volumes to A Lankan Mosaic. Michael Ondaatje and
the Trustees have assigned great importance to a multi-lingual programme
of translation of Sinhala and Tamil creative works.
The Trust began its translation programme by producing an anthology
of translations of Sinhala and Tamil stories into English in a single
volume entitled A Lankan Mosaic I referred to earlier. We have now
translated these stories into Tamil and Sinhala - the Tamil stories into
Sinhala and the Sinhala into Tamil. It was these two companion volumes
that were released to the public at the fag end of 2006.
It is expectation of Michael Ondaatje and the Gratiaen Trust that as
this trilingual body of writing expands and grows, its capacity to
promote harmonious co-existence and understanding and to have a healing
effect on our conflict-ridden society, would be considerable. Admittedly
ours is a modest programme with an immodest goal - but one that is
called for in these vexed times.
Work on the proposed website for the Trust with interactive access is
progressing and we expect that the finishing touches to this project
would be put soon. |
