Abstract:
Critics have spoken of an innovative idiom to express Sri Lankan experience in
English but intelligibility is a further problem faced by international readers. There are two factors
that need to be considered. One is that native and traditional metaphors may not be able to express
modern life. On the other hand the range of experiences and problems faced by all Sri Lankans could
not be expressed by the English educated elite. Therefore achieving our goal of writing good poetry
which expresses a truly Sri Lankan experience in an internationally understandable and effective
medium may be made practicable through translations. They would be able to express their variety of
experiences fusing modern, western and local imagery in the new idiom understandable to an
international audience. Having stated the focal point, the present paper makes an attempt to look into
the poems translated into English from Tamil selected from the writings of the poets living in Sri
Lanka, though there are Tamil poems translated into English from India, Singapore, Malaysia and the
Diaspora in Europe, Canada and Australia. The study focuses on the possibility of evolving a new
idiom to express Sri Lankan Tamil life in English.
