POETRY

The Empty Chair

By Liyanage Amarakeerthi translated by Alexander McKinley     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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Up against the table at the place where I write,
at the place where I go beyond noise to be silent,
there is a chair that remains empty,
which I do not know.

I do not see that it is like that
in the deep dark of the regime that cut the light
until that chair is whacked
by my kneecap.

All alone I rub
the knee that swells into a coconut shell,
with no groan of mine heard
by wife and child.

Up against this table where I write,
that empty chair remains every day.
It will illuminate in the deep dark,
in the deep dark
of the regime that cut the light.

Ah, now the memories come of that chair:
sitting in that chair,
the finest phrases have been written,
the first rough drafts
of stories and articles and everything.

In this gloom,
that chair appears to me,
invisible except in an emergency,
that chair.

The chatter about departed light, the uproar,
the daily routine of rising noise:
in the midst of it, appears to me
the empty chair.

The chair where I sit
to think sometimes,
thinking good thoughts in this house,
it is in the deep dark that the regime granted.
That seat kept illuminating it,
the empty chair.


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TO READ MORE TRANSLATIONS AND THE ORIGINAL POEM, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 57 No. 4




LIYANAGE AMARAKEERTHI (BA, University of Colombo; MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison; PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an academic scholar, fiction author, poet, and translator. His Sinhala novels, short stories, and translations have received multiple awards from publishers and literary festivals in Sri Lanka, and he is a two-time winner of the National Literary Award. He is a professor in the Department of Sinhala at the University of Peradeniya.

ALEXANDER MCKINLEY (BA, Grinnell College; MTS, Harvard Divinity School; PhD, Duke University) studies the religious traditions of Sri Lanka and has been translating Sinhala and Tamil poetry for over a decade. He teaches at Lake Forest College and Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Mountain at a Center of the World: Pilgrimage and Pluralism in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2024).


VOLUME 57 No. 4