Two poetry collections

Ajith Nishantha is a Sinhala poet who has read quite a lot of English poetry. Some of them he has tried to translated into English for his own inspiration. He has written his own Sinhala poems on his own thoughts, experiences and observations.

The collection of translated poems is titled as Sanda Saha Diya Banduna (Moon and the Urn of Water, 2011) as an author publication. The original poems are collected as Kulikaviyakuge Papochcharanaya (The Confessions of a Hired Poet).

Wider gamut

Nishanta has gathered much experience as a contributor to various Sinhala newspapers and periodicals where poetry pages abound. He thanks his well wishers who helped him to be known to a wider gamut of readers through these pages. I found these pages provide a platform to express poetic skills in manifold ways, some with metrical poems and some others with free verses.

His first poem looks like a preface to his collection where he mentions he had got poetic inspiration through this expressive outlook via poetry pages. He uses the term ‘kavisita’ (poetic mind) as his source of inspiration. While reading through pages of these two collections, I had a feeling that Nishanta is a poet with a rare skill in perceiving some sensitive areas of life though they look common in the actual nature of their occurrences.

The title poem revolves round the life of a poet who is being hired to get the creative activities done for the benefit of the stakeholders with whom he works day in day out. He does not see the inner sufferings of the sensitivity of the creativity. The hired poet becomes a slave of his masters.

This suffering itself is a sort of clamour for mental liberation on the part of a sensitive poet, who so desires to express himself in the most fitting manner. This may not be agreeable on the part of those who employed him. But his chances of liberation are remote. In this direction the poetic persona is made to express his frustration in the exploitative world of commercialism.

The poem titled as Viyapath Bogasa (Old Bo Tree) is a sensitive observation about a sacred tree that needs veneration, though grown in the busy urban area where nobody has the time to take care of it. It just grows and becomes older and older neglected. But yet it is a sacred tree. Several minor poems centre round the aspects of love and separation. Most of them are quite short and look like graffiti. They look more like random jottings in a journal where the poet takes out from time to time.

Mini poems

Then come mini poems on domestic matters such as filial duties of a wife and admiration of activities on the part of the children. One good example is titled as ‘Podi Putuge Balirupa’ (Rough drawings of the small son), where the poet expresses his inner bliss on seeing the drawings of a child using his father’s papers and pens lavishly and freely.

The father is silent and feels that the only way is to allow the freedom of expression. The poem titled ‘Sadaya’ (Party) revolves round the mannerisms of human behaviour on the part of adults in a party where they dance and drink to the fullest and act like a pack of idiotic misfits.

The concept of transience is sensitively captured in two poems titled ‘Tavula’ and ‘Avalassana Abisaruliya’.

The extension of the same feeling is shown in poems like ‘Kantoruva’ and ‘Vassanaya’ where the poet sees how things in day to day life change due to the actions of humans without their knowledge and control. ‘Varada’ is a rare specimen on the subject of genes written in a poetic form. ‘Sandagamana’ shows how the poet is disillusioned about his romantic notions on moon and splendor he was taught as a child. This notion of disillusionment makes him feels that he has not seen the real moon.

His collection of translated poems include works of contemporary as well as past poetic works which include poets like Thomas Hardy, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore and Bertolt Brecht followed by those poets of the region inclusive of works of poets drawn from languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese and various other languages. Presumably they are translated from English Translations anthologized from time to time down history.

Poetic works

It is good to see such poems appearing in one collection especially as the reader perhaps not so familiar with these poetic works. It is said that the translated works move faster than the originals and they are received warmly as companions from far and near. In this direction Nishanta has to be commended for his effort.

But one point remains to be said.

Even noted by the translator of Greek poems to English Robert Graves, what is lost in the translation process is poetry. This is a point that has to be remembered as last poem comes in two languages, The impact made in the very first instance is lost up to a certain degree in the final effort.

This does not go to say that the translation of poems from one language to another is not needed and anticipated, instead it challenges the very effort at translations.

The translator of poems from one language to another too has his/her poetic license in a broader sense. But herein the translation method adhering to a sensitive study of the cultural background of the original work is emphasized. The poems translated from Naidu, Tagore and Brecht in the collection of Nishanta are good examples where the flavour of the original is not lost The translator Nishanta has taken extra care to present the biographies of the original poets as briefly as possible.

This enables the reader to obtain more information via other sources, and to further the aspects of the particular creators.

In his preface to the two collection the original and the translated works, Nishantha notes these works of his have seeped into the book scenes, a result of his search for further findings in the area of foreign and local creative works.

The effort has not gone waste for the two faces of Ajith Nishanta’s creative process are visible.

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