Dr. Padmanabhan S.Sri (Canada)

THEATRE METHODS 07
PROGRAMME

Dr. Padmanabhan S. Sri (Canada)

A New-found Poetic Voice

Dr. P.S.Sri

Dr. P.S.Sri is a Professor of Comparative Literature in the Dept. of English at Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario. Sri’s research includes East-West Literary and Philosophical ideo-synthesis, Post-colonial and Multi-cultural Commonwealth Literature (with emphasis on Indian and Canadian writers), Arabic and Persian Literature as well as Sanskrit and Tamil Literature. Sri has a book on T.S.Eliot and articles on Bharati Mukherjee, Margaret Laurence, Yeats, Eliot, Forster, Rumi, Sanskrit myth, Tamil literature and folklore. Sri has also published several short stories and poems. Sri has won many awards and prizes.

A New-found Poetic Voice

When the creative impulse grabs you by the throat, you must speak. You need to raise your voice in story and song. You want to express your fears and hopes. You yearn to shape your agonies and ecstasies into striking metaphors and poignant symbols. You believe your spoken words will have the power to move. You wish the miracle of communication will set you free. Above all, you hope your fresh-found voice will not get lost in the wilderness.

"Through my poems, I seek to express a variety of emotions: my abiding love for the land of my birth, the hot and moist sub-continent of India; my surprise and delight at the first snowfall I experienced when I came to Canada nearly 36 years ago from the tropics; my twin realization that life is fragile and vulnerable and that life must be lived with zest; and my enduring love for the one woman in my life – my wife.

For some time now, I have been engaged in a fascinating enterprise of translating into English poems from the ancient and classical languages of India – Tamil and Sanskrit. Often, I feel though that I am not just translating these ageless poems. I am, in fact, trans-creating them side by side with the original poets. My trans-creations are my humble attempts to not only breathe new life into age-old classics, but also create cultural bridges between the East and the West, the ancient and the modern world".

Dr. P.S.Sri