Doubling Ourselves: the Facilitators

Doubling Ourselves, the Sinhala/Tamil translation workshop presented by the Gratiaen Trust in association with the John Keells Foundation, will be held on March 6th. To find out more about the workshop facilitators, read on.

Naveen Kishore received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1973 and began working as a theatre lighting designer. He then established Seagull Books in 1982, a publishing program in the arts and media focusing on drama, film, art and culture studies. Today, it also publishes literature, including poetry, serious fiction and non-fiction. In 1987 Kishore set-up The Seagull Foundation for the Arts as a non-profit Charitable Trust. The Seagull School of Publishing was set up under the auspices of the Trust in 2012. Kishore is a photographer who has extensively documented female impersonators from Manipuri, Bengali and Punjabi theatre practices. In particular he photographed Chapal Bhaduri, a female impersonator of the Bengali folk theatre, Jatra, in a project entitled Performing the Goddess. He is also the recipient of the Goethe Medal and the Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Seagull Books currently publishes a renowned series of literary translations.

Carmen Wickramagamage is Senior Professor in English at the University of Peradeniya, where she teaches Literature in English, Feminist Theory, Women’s Writing and Translation Studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is fascinated with the challenges that translation poses in its myriad manifestations and considers herself more a student of translation than an expert. She was joint coordinator of the Diploma and Postgraduate Diploma in Translation Studies conducted by the Departments of Sinhala, Tamil and English of the University of Peradeniya between 2002 and 2006. Her translation of Sunethra Rajakarunanayke’s novel Podu Purushaya into English as Metta: A Story About Love, which was funded by the Gratiaen Trust, won the award for the best translation from Sinhala into English at the State Literary Awards 2012. Currently, she is translating Gunadasa Amarasekera’s novel Karumakkarayo into English though “time” has become her greatest enemy in bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Liyanage Amarakeerthi is Professor in Sinhala at the department of Sinhala, University of Peradeniya. He is an award-winning creative writer who has published five novels and eight collections of short stories and numerous works of translations from English to Sinhala to date. He has served on the jury of the H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Translation and on numerous other literary jury panels. He obtained his PhD from University of Wisconsin in 2004.

 Kanchuka Dharmasiri teaches at the Department of English at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and her research interests include contemporary performance, translation, and postcolonial studies. She has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She recently edited Performance in a Time of Terror, Five Sinhala Plays from Sri Lanka (Routledge, 2021), translated by Ranjini Obeyesekere. Her articles and chapters have appeared in various journals and books such as Translating Women: Different Voices and New Horizons (Routledge: 2017), Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre (Routledge: 2016) and Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan: 2014). She is the editor of Streets Ahead with Haththotuwegama (Ravaya: 2013). Dharmasiri is also a theatre director and translator. She produced Subha, a transcreation of Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, “Subha” and has translated and directed plays such as Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and Woody Allen’s God. Her most recent production is Nodutu Aes / Unseen Eyes (2018/19), a devised multi-media play based on Bertolt Brecht and Kumari Kumaragamage’s poetry.

Sumathy Sivamohan   is Professor in English at the Department of English, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.  An award-winning film maker, performer and play wright, poet and academic, her creative work emphasizes the idiom of conversation and colloquiality, while being experimental in form and style.  She has translated poetry and prose from Tamil to English and has taught in the Translation Studies programme at the University of Peradeniya. Her academic and research lie in the areas of gender, dispossession, the displaced, and the fraught question of nation, Sri Lankan literatures, translation and performance, film studies.  She has performed widely, namely Delhi, New York, London, Melbourne, Zurich and nationally in many parts of the country. She co-won the Gratiaen Prize for English literature in 2001 and in 2011 was awarded the Premchand Fellowship by the Sahithya Akademi of India. She was the Chair of the Jury for the H.A.I. Goonetileke Prize for Translation in 2018. She is a militant champion of the cause of free education in Sri Lanka.

Somasuntharampillai Pathmanathan (‘Sopa’) is a leading Tamil Poet / Translator from Yālpāṇam in Northern Sri Lanka. He has published 03 volumes of his own poetry and 6 collections of poems in translation, beside Shanmugalingam : Plays into English and Burmese Monk’s tales into Tamil. 'Sopa', as he is popularly known in literary circles, has presented papers in many international fora including SAARC Literature Festivals (Delhi) and 'Poets Translating Poets' (Frankfurt, Mumbai and Chennai). He published Thennasia Kavithaikal (2017), an Anthology of South Asian poems in Tamil which won both Sri Lankan State literary award and the Provincial award.

Dr. Ponni Arasu is a historian, lawyer, and actor by training. She is a polyglot with fluency in Tamil and English and a working knowledge of Hindi and Kannada. In her work as an oral historian, an activist, and in her theatrical art practice, she can seamlessly transition in working with many languages simultaneously. Her engagement with translation began as a necessity in these areas of work. It has since grown into a passion and a commitment. Her primary translation practice is from English to Tamil and vice versa. She has also worked with translations between Urdu/Hindi into Tamil or English. Believing in the ethos of collaborative translation, she is deeply committed to translation and interpretation in order to build bridges; create shared worlds across differences; foster deeper mutual understanding of peoples/places/societies. She believes this work will make an intervention in established hierarchies of languages and their affiliated cultures.  She enjoys translating all genres of writing from theoretical texts to literary works.