Chamini Kulathunga

First published in Hopscotch Translation, February 2021

Introducing an ultraminor literature from a geopolitically minute space in the East—for example, from an island nation like Sri Lanka—into the galaxy of world literature, a terrain largely and sadly dominated by the West, is perhaps harder than communicating with aliens. Or maybe the saddest part of it is the fact that the analogy of “communicating with aliens” came to mind when I was looking for a way to describe the nature of the exchange of minority literature between East and West. Although we were taught and are now teaching our children that the world—or anything for that matter—is not merely black and white, the number of times authors and translators from minute literary spaces have to convince the gatekeepers of world literature that there are literatures in between and beyond what they have recognized as “majority” and “minority” literatures is shockingly surprising. This has been the everyday reality of the agents of Sri Lankan Sinhalese literature, myself included, for a very long time—and it may very well remain the case for a long time to come. At this point, I am beginning to wonder if what the gatekeepers are scared of is the entrance of a potentially ungraspable regionalism into the comforts of world literature they have enjoyed since time (im)memorial. However, the stories of the contemporary Sri Lankan Sinhalese author, academic, critic, political activist, and translator, Liyanage Amarakeerthi, occupy a beautiful liminality of ultra-minor regionalism and universalism as his stories cut into the deepest wounds of contemporary socio-politics in Sri Lanka only to reveal the universal pangs that lie deep down at the core of the wounds. “The Story of a Dreamy Sky,” a short story of such nature from his latest collection, was published in my translation in World Literature Today Online in August 2020, marking a remarkable feat in my years-long efforts to introduce Sri Lankan Sinhalese literature into the oeuvre of contemporary world literature in translation. The following is a conversation that came about as a result of an email exchange I recently had with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on his writing process, influences, notable publications, and his ideas on translation. What started as a personal correspondence, mostly for my research purposes, soon became an interesting exchange of ideas and anecdotes about literature that we collectively decided to share with a wider audience.

Read the interview on Hopscotch Translation