While crisscrossing the globe on diplomatic postings, there is one trusted companion Niluka Kadurugamuwa never forgets to take along — his books. The Sri Lankan foreign service officer does not stop with just reading them. He translates critically acclaimed fiction from around the world to Sinhala, the language spoken by a majority in the island nation.
His latest work Veeduru Maligawa (by Colombo-based Sumitha Publishers) is a translation of the novel The Glass Palace , bringing its acclaimed author Amitav Ghosh to the Sinhala reader for the first time. Kadurugamuwa began translating the historical novel — over 500 pages long — in October 2020, at the height of the pandemic. He completed the task in July this year and the Sinhala version, which is more than 800 pages, is now ready for launch. It marks his first major translation of an Indian author, and coincides with his time in New Delhi, where he is currently the Deputy High Commissioner at the Sri Lankan mission.
On why he chose Ghosh’s historical fiction published in 2000, Kadurugamuwa said it was the “mesmerising prose”. “I like all his work but this novel speaks to our shared histories. Ghosh captures the anti-colonial sentiment so powerfully. And that is something intertwined with all our stories, because we were all colonised in the past,” he says in a telephone interview.
“The story spans generations and countries, covering South-East Asia, Burma and India… it is so well-researched and rich in context,” adds the 46-year-old diplomat.
Growing up in Diyatalawa town in Badulla, located in Sri Lanka’s scenic hill country, Kadurugamuwa began reading Sinhala translations of European, American and Russian writing, mostly fiction. Soviet literature has for long had a dedicated readership in Sinhala, especially in Leftist circles. “I remember those hardbound books of Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Nikolai Ostrovsky and Chinghiz Aitmatov that were so popular when I was growing up,” he says. Later, Kadurugamuwa took a strong liking to Latin American literature, introduced to Sinhala readers by writer-activist Gamini Viyangoda.
In his late teens, Kadurugamuwa attempted his first translation, with African-American author Richard Wright’s short story Silt . “I was so thrilled to see my translation in print, although it was heavily edited,” he says, chuckling at his writer’s scepticism of newspaper editors. He continued through his university days, sending translated short stories to newspapers and magazines. “They would pay some 500 rupees (LKR), and that was big money for a student in the mid-1990s.”
Kadurugamuwa’s interest in world politics and languages led him to Masters’ degrees in International Affairs and Languages, and eventually to Sri Lanka’s foreign service in 2003. Despite a hectic career, marked by regular moves and busy days, his late evenings were invariably dedicated to a page or two of translation work. Over the years, he has translated Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel In Evil Hour , Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-haired Woman , Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea , American author Mario Puzo’s Six Graves To Munich , and fellow Sri Lankan writer Manel Abhayaratne’s novella Maya — in addition to several short stories — traversing genres such as crime, historical fiction and magic realism.
His translations have been published mostly by Colombo-based Vidarshana Publishers until now. Kadurugamuwa’s translations sell at least 2,000 copies, which is considered a good figure in the Sri Lankan market. The books are often priced a little over LKR 1,000 (roughly ₹366); The Glass Palace’ s translation will be priced at LKR 1,600.
With long days, full of high-stakes bilateral meetings or discussions at UN forums, it cannot be easy to meet deadlines, even those set by him. “Oh, it is certainly not. In the case of The Glass Palace , I bought a copy in Bangkok about a decade ago, but never got to reading and translating it. Then I bought another copy when I was posted to New York, but still couldn’t do it. I brought it back to Colombo but never got to it. And then I bought a third copy when I was posted to New Delhi this time, and actually sat down with it,” says the writer-diplomat, who has won Sri Lanka’s State Literary Award for the best translation twice.
In terms of style, Kadurugamuwa prefers literal translations. “I don’t drop anything from the original, I try to be as faithful as possible to the text. Of course, there are things you can’t translate quite literally, because the context could be vastly different. In those cases, I use footnotes. Veeduru Maligawa has about 110 footnotes.”
Another challenging aspect is language. “For instance, the word ‘you’ in English doesn’t have a straightforward counterpart in Sinhala, which is a diglossic language that is spoken and written in many ways. There are many variants of ‘you’ in Sinhala and I’ll have to choose based on the context,” he says. Would he write his own book sometime? “I don’t know, perhaps a memoir.”
Despite the effort and time that translation warrants, Kadurugamuwa revels in the exercise. “You get to inhabit another writer’s head, temporarily becoming that person while writing. It is a marvellous feeling!”
That is perhaps why he somehow musters the energy and motivation needed for translating fiction that inspires him, despite the many professional demands on his time. “Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, televisions were not common in our town. The only window we had to the world was books. As a diplomat I can surely say that books help me connect with people, and books help me do my job better.”
