Ashok Ferrey’s Colpetty goes to France
Ashok Ferrey, who struck a deep chord in Colombo when his debut Colpetty People first came out, is the only Sri Lankan writer after the great Martin Wickremesinghe to have his work bought, translated and published in France on a commercial scale. It was Wickremesinghe’s outstanding novel Viragaya which first gave a taste of Sri Lankan literature to the Francophone world in 1995.
Last month, the residence of the French Ambassador down Lake Drive, Rajagiriya, gallery-like with exquisite curios and art, was awash with a cosmopolitan gathering come to raise a glass to the Sri Lankan launch of L’Incessant Bavardage des Demons, the French translation of Ashok Ferrey’s 2016 novel The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons.
The event was attended by the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Professor Maithree Wickremasinghe.
The launch was part of the French embassy’s Spring Festival, and included readings from the original text as well as the French version.
The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons is the story of Sonny Mahadewala, a student at Oxford. His mother back in Kandy, a parvenu Kumarihamy commands a reduced household of four domestics. She is convinced that her not- sohandsome son is possessed by demons. The dramatis personae includes the Devil himself, who comes down from Oxford to see the island where ‘only man is vile’.
It was Francis Cappe of the Alliance Francaise who first contacted around seven French publishers to see if they would be interested in the work of a Sri Lankan author. Within a month there were two firm offers for The Ceaseless Chatter, and Ashok chose Editions Gallimard. This is one of the most prestigious publishing houses in France, but Ashok says he was also captivated by the fact that they operated from a house on the Rue de Conde, Paris, once lived in by Beaumarchais, the librettist of Mozart. Those architectural and historical connotations were equally magical for him.
Ashok remembers first going there to meet his editor, Marie Pierre-Bey, herself a very distinguished translator of the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer amongst others. He remembers the formidable lady descending the grand stone staircase in twinset and pearls, (“the sort of clothes the Queen of England might have worn had she been a literary editor”).
In heavily accented English she had pronounced ‘I loved it!’ and things were to happen rapidly from there. Initially a little unhappy with the translation she rolled up her sleeves and re-did it. Reading it, Ashok immediately thought it brilliant. About twenty jokes were missing, being untranslatable, but then, many readers had previously opined that those jokes shouldn’t have been there in the first place, that they trivialized the essentially serious nature of the work. The French version also loses about 30 pages of the original – some of the earlier scenes in Miami and London – which Ashok thinks makes for a much tighter novel. In brief he thinks the version is even better than the original.
The book was first launched in Paris at UNESCO in an event organized by the Sri Lankan Ambassador in Paris. Ashok says the next day was akin to running the marathon: a breakfast meeting with 7 Parisian booksellers (all of whom had read the book and quizzed him minutely), newspaper interviews, and radio spots on Swiss, French and French West African radio, with a glamorous photo- shoot in the Luxembourg Gardens.
L’Incessant Bavardage is doing very well indeed in France, La Croix, the daily, also carrying a review. Ashok has also got feedback from French visitors to Sri Lanka who found that the novel really brought to life the country and the people.
Ashok hopes that many more French readers will be inspired to visit Sri Lanka after their rendezvous with the utterly delightful characters and setting of the novel.