[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":239},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-mahagama-sekera":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":205,"description":206,"died":207,"era":208,"extension":209,"heroImage":210,"imageCredit":211,"imageLicense":212,"imageSource":213,"meta":214,"navigation":215,"notable":215,"path":216,"roles":217,"seo":220,"sources":221,"stem":237,"translated":215,"url":224,"__hash__":238},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fmahagama-sekera.md","Mahagama Sekera",null,1929,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":196},"minimark",[11,15,23,28,35,54,57,61,67,70,77,103,107,126,129,133,139,157,160,164,189],[12,13,14],"p",{},"In 1964 a Sinhala poet published a long poem in free verse and used it, among other things, to explain where he had finally located beauty. He had looked, he wrote, in the paintings of George Keyt, in the songs of W. D. Amaradeva, in the sculptures of Tissa Ranasinghe, in the Avukana Buddha. He found it somewhere else: in a human heart, wet with tears, held in the palm, shining like a diamond.",[12,16,17,18,22],{},"The poem was ",[19,20,21],"em",{},"Mak Nisada Yath"," (මක්නිසාද යත්, \"The reason is\"), and the man who wrote it had spent the previous four years supplying that same Amaradeva with the most exquisite love lyrics on Sri Lankan radio. Mahagama Sekera is the rarest kind of artist in any country: one who became famous for making beautiful things, and then said in public that beauty was not the point.",[24,25,27],"h2",{"id":26},"radawana","Radawana",[12,29,30,31,34],{},"He was born on 7 April 1929 in Radawana, in the Gampaha district, to Maha Gamage John Singho and Ranawaka Arachchige Roslin. He went to the government school in Radawana and on to Kirindiwela Maha Vidyalaya, and he began not as a writer but as a painter — trained at the Government College of Fine Arts, of which he would later become Principal. In 1956 one of his canvases, ",[19,32,33],{},"Mahabinishkramana",", took an award at the Jathika Kala Peramuna's annual exhibition. The habit never left him: he designed book jackets, drew newspaper cartoons, worked in batik and embroidery, and painted the images used in his own film.",[12,36,37,38,41,42,45,46,49,50,53],{},"The other early skill was translation. In 1956 he turned Arthur Conan Doyle's ",[19,39,40],{},"The White Company"," into Sinhala as ",[19,43,44],{},"Dhawala Senankaya",", and in 1958 he published in the journal ",[19,47,48],{},"Rasavahini"," a forty-five-stanza Sinhala version of Edward FitzGerald's ",[19,51,52],{},"Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam",", cast in unrhymed quatrains of sixteen syllabic instants each. Both jobs mattered later. A man who has spent months finding Sinhala equivalents for someone else's cadences is a man who knows exactly how much a Sinhala line can hold.",[12,55,56],{},"In June 1958 he took a post as a Sinhala–English translator in the Department of Official Languages, the new government department set up to implement the Sinhala Only Act. For a young Sinhalese writer in 1958, this was the state offering a living — and, as his later poetry shows, a bargain he came to think hard about.",[24,58,60],{"id":59},"madhuvanti","Madhuvanti",[12,62,63,64,66],{},"In 1960 Sekera began writing songs for Radio Ceylon. Amaradeva had just become conductor of the station's Sinhala Music Orchestra, and the two of them launched a programme named ",[19,65,60],{},", after a North Indian raga. The name was the manifesto: this was to be art song, not filler between advertisements.",[12,68,69],{},"The working method was unusual and it is the reason the songs sound the way they do. Sekera did not write \"lyrics\" in the ordinary sense; he took poems he had already written and rebuilt them — structure, syntax, vocabulary, word-endings — until they would sing. Amaradeva then set them, blending raga with Sinhala folk melody, and sang them himself.",[12,71,72,73,76],{},"Out of that came \"Gi Potayi Mi Vitayi\" (\"A book of verse, a flask of wine\"), his teasing reply to FitzGerald's eleventh stanza: keep your book and your wine, the singer says, what I want is the book of your eyes and the wine of your lips. Its companion \"Oba Ma Turule\" (\"You in my embrace\") plays the same stanza straight — when you sing in my arms, the jungle becomes a heavenly kingdom. And in \"Ihala Vele\" (\"In the upper fields\") he reached past literature altogether, borrowing the twelve-instant metre of ",[19,74,75],{},"kamat kavi",", the verses farmers recited on the threshing floor, for a song about a man ploughing the lower field alone while a woman he cannot reach gathers leaves in the upper one.",[12,78,79,80,83,84,87,88,91,92,95,96,99,100,102],{},"He was also writing for the stage. His musicals ",[19,81,82],{},"Swarnathilaka"," (1959), ",[19,85,86],{},"Kundalakesi"," (1961) and ",[19,89,90],{},"Hansa Geethaya"," sit alongside songs for Chitrasena's ballet ",[19,93,94],{},"Karadiya"," (1961) and Gunasena Galappatti's ",[19,97,98],{},"Mudu Puttu"," (1962). ",[19,101,86],{},", set to music by Somadasa Elvitigala and staged at Colombo's Havelock Theatre, retold a thirteenth-century Buddhist tale of a princess and a condemned thief; its most loved song, \"Anna Balan Sanda\" (අන්න බලන් සඳ), invents an episode the old text left blank — the two of them singing a love duet as they climb the mountain where he intends to kill her.",[24,104,106],{"id":105},"the-songs-the-country-memorised","The songs the country memorised",[12,108,109,110,113,114,117,118,121,122,125],{},"Film work made him a household name. He won Best Lyricist at the Sarasaviya Awards in 1968 for \"Sinidu Sudu Mudu Thalawe\" (සිනිඳු සුදු මුදු තලාවේ) from ",[19,111,112],{},"Sath Samudura",", and again in 1970 for \"Ratakin Ratakata\" (රටකින් රටකට පාර අසාගෙන) from ",[19,115,116],{},"Binaramalie",". Sources disagree about his earlier prizes — English and Sinhala accounts name different years, different festivals and different songs, one crediting \"Atha Gavu Ganan Durin\" (ඈත ගව් ගණන් දුරින්) from ",[19,119,120],{},"Gatavarayo"," and another \"Me Sinhala Apage Ratayi\" (මේ සිංහල අපගේ රටයි) from ",[19,123,124],{},"Saravita"," — so the safest thing to say is that by the mid-1960s he was winning them regularly.",[12,127,128],{},"Then there is \"Ratna Deepa Janma Bhoomi\" (රත්න දීප ජන්ම භූමි), and his Sinhala rendering of Tagore's \"Where the mind is without fear\" as \"Mage Deshaya Awadhi Karanu Mena Piyanani\". Estimates of how many songs he wrote in total vary from source to source and none of them can be verified; what is not in dispute is that a striking number of them are still sung.",[24,130,132],{"id":131},"the-turn","The turn",[12,134,135,136,138],{},"Something changed around 1963. Sekera's early poems had personified the imagination as an unearthly woman — sapphire eyes, lips like red lotus, hair like a peacock's feathers — in pieces such as \"Sankalpanaya\", \"Saraswati\" and \"Maya\", and had turned one of them into a ",[19,137,60],{}," song about \"maidens of thought\" flowing out of the world of dreams.",[12,140,141,142,144,145,148,149,152,153,156],{},"In ",[19,143,21],{}," he dismissed her. He now loved a different figure, he wrote, and gave his reason: ",[19,146,147],{},"you are a human like me"," — flesh, blood, bone, compassion, jealousy, selfishness and anger, not gold or gems or pearls. In the same poem a voice called Today wakes a sleeper who is drunk on the ruins of Anuradhapura and tells him the past is dead and rotting in the ground. And Today shows him a sunrise over the mountain that Buddhists call ",[19,150,151],{},"siripa kanda",", Hindus ",[19,154,155],{},"sivanoli padam",", and Muslims and Christians the footprint of Adam, where four greetings are exchanged: \"Good morning, Christine\" — \"Vanakkam Nadaraja\" — \"Vanakkam Mohammad\" — \"Ayubovan\".",[12,158,159],{},"He wrote that in 1964, the year after the government restated its intention to make Sinhala the sole official language and the Tamil Federal Party answered with a boycott. A senior Sinhalese writer, employed by the very department created to enforce that policy, was putting a multi-ethnic morning on Adam's Peak into print. It is the single most quoted passage he ever wrote, and it deserves to be.",[24,161,163],{"id":162},"the-unfinished-thesis","The unfinished thesis",[12,165,166,167,170,171,174,175,178,179,170,182,185,186,188],{},"The later books keep pushing: ",[19,168,169],{},"Rajathilaka, Lionel saha Priyantha"," (1967), ",[19,172,173],{},"Bodima"," (1970), ",[19,176,177],{},"Nomiyemi"," (1973). He wrote novels — ",[19,180,181],{},"Thun Man Handiya",[19,183,184],{},"Mano Mandira"," (1972) — and in 1970 directed ",[19,187,181],{}," as a film, winning Most Promising Director at the Film Critics and Journalists' awards.",[12,190,191,192,195],{},"In 1974 he registered for a doctorate at Vidyodaya University on the influence of rhythm in Sinhala prose and verse, and submitted the thesis in 1975. He was working through the examiners' final corrections when he died on 14 January 1976, at forty-six. His last book of poetry, ",[19,193,194],{},"Prabuddha",", appeared in 1977, after him.",{"title":197,"searchDepth":198,"depth":198,"links":199},"",2,[200,201,202,203,204],{"id":26,"depth":198,"text":27},{"id":59,"depth":198,"text":60},{"id":105,"depth":198,"text":106},{"id":131,"depth":198,"text":132},{"id":162,"depth":198,"text":163},"7 April 1929","Painter, translator, novelist and film-maker, but above all the lyricist who taught Sinhala song to carry serious poetry — and who then turned on his own beautiful illusions and wrote against them.","14 January 1976","1950s-1970s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fmahagama-sekera.webp","Wikimedia Commons user Koombiya","Public domain (released by the author)","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:SekaraImage.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fmahagama-sekera",[218,219],"Lyricist","Poet",{"title":5,"description":206},[222,225,228,231,234],{"title":223,"url":224},"Mahagama Sekera — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FMahagama_Sekera",{"title":226,"url":227},"මහගම සේකර — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%B8%E0%B7%84%E0%B6%9C%E0%B6%B8_%E0%B7%83%E0%B7%9A%E0%B6%9A%E0%B6%BB",{"title":229,"url":230},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (full text)","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fstream\u002Fdli.doa.211\u002F211_djvu.txt",{"title":232,"url":233},"Modernizing Composition — University of California Press","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ucpress.edu\u002Fbooks\u002Fmodernizing-composition\u002Fpaper",{"title":235,"url":236},"W. D. Amaradeva — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FW._D._Amaradeva","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fmahagama-sekera","_782ZOzdArT-gLGVeDrDXN-_zW9VJvyUBIwFOQPBJM4",1787999332555]