A short note on published poems

By Basil Fernando

(October 22, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka Guardian) My first poem was published in New Ceylon Writings while I was a student of law at the Faculty of Law, Colombo, edited by Dr. Yasmin Gunaratne, who was then teaching at Peradiniya University. I published my first collection of poems, The New Era to Emerge, in 1972. Several of the poems published in that short collection were reproduced in several anthologies. Two of the anthologies that I do remember are the ones produced by Dr. DCRA Gunatilake and Dr. Rajiva Wijesinghe. Several of these poems are also translated into other languages and reproduced outside Sri Lanka. I published my first Sinhala collection around 1974 under the title Koluwa Malaya, and most of the poems are around the massacre of young people in the 1971 insurrection. One of the poems was translated under the title ‘The Wreath with No Name’ and has been reproduced constantly. It is also engraved into the stone before the Disappearances Monument in Seeduwa, Katunayake. The poem reads as follows:

The Wreath with No Name

This wreath of flowers
with no name attached
is for you
who has no grave

It is placed
besides a road
as the earth which touched
you cannot be found

Forgive me
for making a memorial
by the wayside.
Forgive me.

I shared the award for best poem with Richard de Soysa from New Ceylon Writings for my poem ‘Yet another Incident in July 1983’. This poem has been reproduced over and over again and translated into many languages. It has been included in anthologies and also in other books. It has also been used as part of the syllabus in some universities outside Sri Lanka.

I published my third collection of poems, second in English, sometime in the 1980s under the title Evelyn, My First Friend. Poems from this collection, too, have been included in anthologies.

My fourth collection of poems, third in English, was Kalyana Mitra (Beautiful Friendship), which has about 60 poems, and several of these poems also have been published separately in publications in Sri Lanka and abroad. My fifth collection of poems is The Sea was Calm behind your House, published in English. My sixth collection of poems, second in Sinhala, is China Gedara Kirilige Geethe (Bird of the Chinese House).

A collection of my poems was translated into Malayalam under the title Sundaramaithry, which is a translation of the poems in Kalyana Mitra by Dr. Dhanya Menon. To my knowledge, this is the first collection of a Sri Lankan poetry collection of a single author into any Indian language.

Several of these collections can be viewed at www.basilfernando.net

-Sri Lanka Guardian