Lakdhas Wikkramasinha

His widow remembers him as “[a] hypersensitive, highly strung, and complicated person.” He taught English at the University of Kelaniya; translated Mandelstam and Lorca into Sinhala; wrote during the first tumultuous decades of an independent Sri Lanka; published eight volumes; and—like an earlier Romantic radical, Percy Bysshe Shelley—died by drowning. He left behind an extraordinary oeuvre, but too few readers know the work or even the name of the monumental postcolonial poet Lakdhas Wikkramasinha (1941–1978). “Hardly a photograph of him exists today,” observes Michael Ondaatje, who, with Aparna Halpé, has co-edited this unprecedented bilingual selection of Wikkramasinha for the NYRB Poets series.

“I have come to realise,” Wikkramasinha wrote of his English-language poetry, “that I am using the language of the most despicable and loathsome people on earth.” As “a way of circumventing this treason,” he proposed extreme measures: “making my writing entirely immoralist and destructive.” Entirely overstates things: in Wikkramasinha’s most distinctive rejoinders to Western powers and poetics, “immoralist and destructive” vengeance joins forces with subversive linguistic play. “Don’t Talk to Me about Matisse,” a critique of European exoticism and colonial brutality alike, alternates art-critical exactitude and corrective indignation:

Talk to me instead of the culture generally—
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

Wikkramasinha riddles these final lines with phonetic “gunfire,” a rapid-fire succession of dental ts and ds: white-washed, mud-huts, splattered.

Ondaatje and Halpé group Wikkramasinha’s English and Sinhala poems (the latter translated by Udaya Prashantha Meddegama) thematically, into three sections: history, politics, and family. That judicious arrangement belies an uncommon range of modes and moods, encompassing poems of seduction and devotion, recollections of a bullied schoolboy who “mocked himself to sleep,” and foulmouthed epigrams like “The British Council”:

When they kiss my arse, O Muse
Save me from the clap.

Public and private, past and present, homegrown and world-historical—everything interconnects in Wikkramasinha’s work, where even a grandmother’s painting of now-long-gone sunflowers can inspire a revolutionary’s manifesto:

my passion
to set fire to things, derives,
perhaps, from this sad
history…