The Jim Gair Collection – Chamini Kulathunga

In summer 2019, I was able to be at Cornell to assist in cataloging the donation of Prof. James Gair’s extensive South Asian library collection to Cornell University’s Kroch Asia Library. Gair was a Professor of Linguistics at Cornell, and a former Director of the South Asia Program, under whom SAP established its consortium with Syracuse University as a National Resource Center. Because of Gair’s legacy, Cornell is a leader in Sri Lankan Studies, and the only university in the US to offer a full curriculum in Sinhala language. I was supported through a Summer Fellowship from the University of Iowa, where I am a graduate student in UI’s Translation Workshop. As a MFA student in Literary translation at UI, I work with Sinhala and English literary texts, translating them between the two languages.
Read more on Cornell University’s South Asia Program’s 2019 Bulletin

Why Sri Lankan Literature Matters?

“Even within South Asia, Sri Lanka occupies a minority state in terms of both its geography and population. From a translator’s perspective, I couldn’t help but notice that the rate of Sri Lankan contemporary literature that is being circulated (in translation or in the original language/s) and read around the world is comparably lower than the national literatures of many other countries. It is also studied and anthologized much less often than other national literatures of the world. We talk about the infamous “3% factor” of annual literary translation publications in the US, but we’ve hardly ever seen or heard about a translation from the Sinhalese making it to the languages that contribute to that percentage, right”

-Interview with Project Plume