poetry: who needs it ? by william logan - new york times

new york times- sunday review  : opinion.
poetry: who needs it ? by william logan 


                               poetry: who needs it ? 
                                    by  william logan,  June 14, 2014

GAINESVILLE - WE live in the age of grace and the age of grace and the age of futility- the age of speed and the age of dullness.  The way we live now is not poetic.  We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose.  There is prose that does us not great harm, nd that may even, in small doses, prose medecinal, the way snake oil cured everything by curing nothing.  But to live continaully in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose is to become deaf to what language can do.  

The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many and bought by almost usone. (Is this the silent majority?  Well, once the " silent majority" meant the dead.)  We now have a poetry month, and a poet laureate - the latest Charles Wright, announced just last week -- and poetry plastered in buses and subway cars like adverstising placards.  If the subway line wont run it, the poet can always tweet it, so long as it's only 20 words or so, we have all these ways of throwing poetry at the crowd is not composed of people who particularly want to read poetry- or who, having read a little  poetry are likely to breathe latest edition of "Paradise Lost".

This is not a disaster.  Most people are also unlikely to  attend the ballet, or an evening with a character-musical quartet, or the latest exhibition of Georges de la Tour.  Poetry  has long been a major art with  a minor audience.  Poets have always found it hard to make a living -- at poetry, that is.  The exceptions who discovered that a few sonnets could be turned into a bankroll might have made just as much money  betting on the South Sea Bubble.

There are still those odd sorts, no doubt disturbed, and unsocial, and tortures  of eats, who love poetry neverthless.  They come in ones or two to the difficult monologues of Browning, or the shadowy quatrains of Emily Dickinson, or the awful but cheerful poems of Elizabeth Bishop, finding something there not in the novel or the pop song.

Many arts have flourished in one period, then found a smaller niche in which they' ve survived perfectly well.  A century ago, poetry did not appear on little magazines  devoted  to it, but on the pages of newaspaers and mass-circulation magazines. The big magazines and even the newspapers began deelining about the time they stopped printing poetry.  ( I know, I know -- I've put the cause before the hroses.)  On the other hand, perhaps Congress started to decline.  When the office of poet laureate was created.  The Senate and the House were able to bumble along perfectly well during the near half century when there was only a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress --- an office that, had the Pentagon only been connected, might have been acronysmized as C.I.P.L.O.C. instead of being renamed.

Poetry has was a long ago showed aside in schools.  In colleges it's often easier to find courses on race or class of gender than on the Augustans or Romantic.  In high schools and grade schools, when poetry is taught at all, too often it is as a schudder of self expression on,  without any attempt to look at the difficulties and majistives of verse and the subtleties of meaning that make poetry poetry.  No wonder kids don't  like it -- it becomes another way to bully them into feeding " compassion" or " tolerances " part of curriculum that makes them good citizens but bad readers of poetry.

My blue-sky proposal : teach America's kids to read by making them read poetry, Shakes-peare and Pope and Milton by the fith grade; in high school, Dante and Catullus in the original.  By graduation, they would know Anne Carson and Derek Walcott by hearts.  A child taught to parse a sentence by Dickinson would have no trouble understanding Donald H. Rumsfeld's  known knowns  and unknown unkonowns.

We don't like in such a world, and perhaps not even poets alive today wish we did. My ideal elementary-school curriculm would instead require all children to learn: (1) the time tables up to, say, 25; (2) a foreign language, preferably obscures; (3) the geography of a foreign land, like New Jersey; (4) how to use basic had tools and cook a cassoulet; (5) how to raise a bird or lizard ) if the child is vegeterian, then a potato; (6) poems by heart, say one per week; (7) how to find the way home from a town at least 10 miles away; )8)  singing; (9) somersaults.  With all that out of the way by age 12, there's  no telling what children might do.  I have thieved a couple of items from Mr. H. Auden's dream curriculum for a college of Bards.  If my elementary school students are not completely digusted by poetry, off they could go one day to that college well prepared.

THE idea that poetry much be popular is simply a mistake. Yet who would have suspected that the Metropolitain Opera and the National Theater in London would now be broadcast to local movies theaters across America.  The cigar-chewing promoter who can find a way to put poetry before readers and make them love it will do more for the art than a century of  hand-wringing.  He might also turn a back.  You can live a full-life without knowinmg a scrap of poetry just as you can live a full life without even seen a Picasso or " The Cherry Orchard."  Most people surround themselves with art of some sort, whether it's by Amy Winehouse or Richard Avedon.  Even the daubs on the refrigerator by the toddler artist have their place.  Language gainfully employed has its places.  Poetry will never has the audience of " Game of Thrones" -- that is what television can do .  Poetry is what language alone can do. []

     william logan 
   < The New York Times/  Sunday Review : OPINION >
      < viet-studies > - tranhuudung/  usa.

----------------


WILLIAM LOGAN
(born 1950 is an American poet,critic,and scholar)

Logan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to W. Donald Logan,Jr.
and Nancy Logan.  He lives in Gainesville, Florida and Cambridge,England with his wife, the poet and artist, Debora Greger. Educated at Yale (BA, 1972, and the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa (MFA 1975),he has authored eight books of poetry as well as of live books of criticsm.     WIKIPEDIA


      

voices from thailand : phra thepmolee- nrin- lokanit- phittayalongkorn- sri praj - TENNGARA 6

TENGGARA 6 - dept .of english
univ. of malaya- kuala lumpur
         malaysia

        POETRY FROM THAILAND                        

                                                        Translated by Narong Ketudal
                                                                                       

     Phra Thepmolee


                                                 The Big Mountain

See clear there in front, a big mountain peak floats as clouds
The trees are green, white, black, red,
like the nine jewels people admire,
             When the sun shines intense, the colors are like stars standing
             clear, scintillating, sparkling in the open:
Beautiful, bright,  brillant, becoming rainbow blasting over the horizon
             Some colors grow out to become edges, slants, leaning over
                                                                           the steep palissade.


        Nrin 

                                                             Translated by Narong Ketuda
                                                                                                    

                                         How could it in

                              No human voice
                              no bells that toll
                              cold
                              I lie here
                              on the hill

                              A caataway
                              a homeless stray
                              slumbers
                              no solitude
                              under the stars

                              In the midst of night
                              I drink the honey dew
                              and taste the mist of death

                              The wind breeze
                              the rain's splash
                              the stone's silence
                              Cramped I freeze

                              How cold it in
                              to sleep away from you.


                                     Horseshoe crab

                     The horseshoe crab
                     carry their husbands
                     on the back
                     and roam the salty earth
                     nibbling sea-weeds
                     Men catch them slive
                     But take only the wives
                     The husbands are no good
                     they are set loose on the shore.
                     Alone and blind, they go nowhere,
                     Starved in the stomach and pining at heart,
                     they died in heaps
                     on the sea ground.


                                         Lotunes

                                In the pond
                                lotunes thrust out
                                like your breats
                                scented
                                water
                                soft
                                The buds excite me,
                                The bees taste them.
                                How can they fly away?


                                  Both of us weeping

                   What are the thousand eyes of Indra watching?
                   The four-faced Nara is not listening.
                    Krishna's overslrept on Naga's back.
                    Both of us weeping
                    the gods ignore.


    Lokanit

                                                            Translated by Narong Ketudal
                                                                                      

                                             Water-lilies

                                     Frogs born
                                     in the pond of water-lilies
                                     never know the taste of lotus honey;
                                     Bees fly from miles away
                                     and plunge in the pollen.


                                         The Burning Sun

                                The mild moon shines, circled by stars;
                                The gentle is surrounded by friends.
                                The vulgar is neibourless;
                                The burning sun shines alone.


     Phittayalongkorn


                                                             Translated by Narong Ketudal
                                                                              


                                              Full moon

                                 Luna light is bright
                                 only full moon
                                 The rabbits are drunk to madness
                                 And you
                                 young maiden,
                                 Your charms never cease to shine
                                  My heart gets drunk, both
                                  when the moon is full
                                  and crescent.


        Sri Praj

                                           Alone

                              An easy row of birds
                              slants the sky
                              Our loses the others
                              as I row alone.

   -----------------------     

         <TENGGARA 6 /   Dept. of English - Univ. of Malaya-
                             Kuala Lumpur-  Malaysia.>
                               
                                 
                     
                     
                 

voices from vietnam : tran thi tue mai + the phong+ van nguyen duong - TENGGARA 6

TENGGARA 6-  Dept. of English-
Univ of Malaya - Kuala Lumpur
             Malaysia


                           Tran Thi Tue Mai

                                                                                       Translated  by
                                                                                       Dam Xuan Can

                                                                      

                                                                                                   TRAN THI TUE MAI [ 1923- 1982]                                                        
                                            Way to look at things of dawn

Here I am with the long nigh
 Of days in the past and the future

The late carriage hastily hide farewell to the sad street
The time-ground wheels still go round and round;
Lofty trees cast shadows on the road,
While the leaves are waiting for the wind, and the branches pitying the
                                                                                             leaves

Here I am with the deep night,
Bewildered with love and tormented by hate;
Nothing is left in my arms,
Spring is only a useless and bitter memory.

Here I am with the long night
With myself scattered on the open book and out in the rain-tapped yard
Embracing the flowery land
Is not enough to express my boundless and compassionate love and hope.

Here I am with the deep night,
My shoulders suddenly ache under the weight of history;
Roads, far and near, and choked with the smell of death,
Whatever the name, my country is the resting side of war,
What is left?  What is still amendable?
Thousands of eyes are watching each other with rising despair.

In the long night, here I am
Awakened within the blood -- mine and my people' s.
Ups and downs of life should not dishearten us:
We will survive, we will survive

I am still with the tender night
My arms open, I look forwards to watching things of dawn.


                                       July the twentieth *

 Nine o'clock at night;
The Faculty of Arts campus is packed as on a festival night.

I sneak in
The fire has risen high;
Shoulder to shoulder in a circle
We assemble around the fire
The fire is burning hot:
                 let us all sleep not.

Sleep not!
Sleep not!
Afyer years of intolerable ignorance
The call is thundering in every direction
Wake up,  We cannot indulge in sleep anymore.

Stand up!  March!
The turning of history is here!
We have had too much bloodshed and misery in this wretched land;
We will no longer stand such cruel humiliation
We are all children of Trưng Vương, Trần Hưng Đạo, Quang Trung,
                                                                                         Lê Lợi,

Keep on marching,  says the voice of yesterday
Clear the trail!  is todays' call

His voice resounding;
The young speaker on the platform delivers the message;
The starlight in his eyes he walks oout  to the road
Screaming in the fog and wind
The young and brave demonstrate
To wake up  the town.

Sleep not to nigh!
July the Twentieth
Sleep not to night!
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us keep up ouf anger;
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us keep up our anger;
Whether in the North or in the South
Let us hold each other's hands tightly
The hour has struck!
Wake up everybody.


*The 20th of July, 1954 was the day of the partitioning of Vietnam.

( TENGGARRA-  P. 96- 97)



               The Phong

                                                                                         Translated by
                                                                                      Dam Xuan Can

                                                            THE PHONG [ i.e. Do Manh Tuong  1932-       ]


                       What I choosr in this mad World.

I choose autumn, pine forest and sad sunshine;
I give up writing poetry
                   and will not torture myself anymore
Do me a favor, my solemn-faced and wise wife.
Say to me,
                " Burn a fire!   Hand the mosquito-net!"
 I am the voluntary slave who is fully contented.
Let us have a long sleep,
                 O wife, sons and daughters!
Tomorrow morning
                  we'll wake up early
                   set out to grow vegetables.

Outside the hedge
                 near the farm gate
We'll put up a board " Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted"
In all languahes on the world .

1964

    ( TENGGARA, 6 - p. 95)



           Van Nguyen Duong

                                                                                             Translated by
                                                                        Dam Xuan Can

                The still-remaining sadness

Give me the still-remaining  sadness
Of your pair of pearl-shaped and crystal tears:
At the bottomof the sea there are pearls
Along with mysterious eyes floating here and there
Assad as your tear-glistering face in the night life

Chaistmas night wakes our memory
With music in the background
Accompanying the worn-out song "Desperate Frontier Love"
I see your wet eyes
And crystal tears dissolve in my body
                  drops after drop of lip-burning gin
My heart bitterly grieves as in a dream
You have become tears yourself.
O my old flame, now the wife of Phiên,
The chap used to sing the song, and was always by my side
In battle on green paddies;
With his beautiful  voice he took you from ny hands.

You have moved on the dancing floor in the dim light
As on the desert of life to the waltz of the century of war,
The waltz you, Phiên and I liked so well.
You moved from country to town,
I from the partition line to the South
And your Phiên became a war casualty
We threee belong to the generation of shattered dreams

You are familiar to me one.  You are frightened
At being  exposed as a prey at the music and drinks
And teh singer's  ttaccato voice keeps ringing in your ears.
You will hild other bodies
                than that of the husband survivin g the war
Give me the still-remaining sadness
The pearl shaped eyes
And crystal tears,
I will cry for you in the days ahead
Filled with the sounds of the lean waltz of the troubled century.


                                             Autobiography

I first learned the story of my life the year I turned ten,
When I started learning the history of my country
My mother used to say,
"Long ago our predecessors founded the coiuntry of Vietnam Under
                                                                                       the Sun.
Now the sun has gone down -- but why in the East "
Then I understood and was deeply moved.
In the morning I looked at the bridge sun on the fields
Where scarecrows has been set up for some thousand years
Where black buffaloes were pulling ploughs
And the menfolk planting seedlings with their hands
For one thousand years my country was enslaved by the Chinese
For eighty years by the French,
No change whatsoever was brought about
So runs my biography to the age of ten
The story of my ten years in the darkness of eighty years!

I learnt more about my life when I was twelves,
I started missing the school beating.
Dreadful seems right under my eyes
My family fled to the coastal area leaving the beloved house behind;
The peasants rose up to fight
Vast fields were left overgrown with weeds,
I no longer heard love songs alternately exchanged in sun- drenched days.
The scarecrows were in tatters showing patches of straw and mud
Decent common folk were like scarecrows
They woke up very early in the morning to watch the situation,
At dusk they were still heading to some refuge in the hamlets.
Everywhere we find the soldiers wearing combat boots
We are with our own eyes
The stinking corpses drift to the riverside
And attached by hawks and crows,
So runs my biography at the age of twelve,
At the start of a bloody war.

With a turn of the tide life changed
Life was so sad when I was fourteen
When the comeback took place everywhere,
I returned to my old village
In the old days my beautiful three-roomed house with red tiles
Occupied a privileged spot at the end of the village
Right in front of a bamboo hedge
Now the fire of war had burned all the supporting pillars,
Even trees were mowed down, the trees with gorgeous leaves,
Weeds were growing everywhere, blocking the entrance .

   (TENGGARA 6, p. 98- 99)

                                                                       TENGGARA  

lloyd fernando : picture of the artist as a eurasian / TENGGARA April, 1968.

TENGGARA/ April ,1968
Dept. of English - Univ. of Malaya
Kuala Lumpur - Malaysia.


                   Lloyd Fernando

                                                         Lloyd Fernando

                                        PICTURE OF THE ARTIST 
                                 AS A EURASIAN
   WITH the appearance of A Mortal Flower, the second part of Han Suyin's autobio-graphy, the nature of her undertaking and her qualities as a writer appear in a clearer light *.  One guesses that the sucessding volumes -- it is said there re to be in all -- will not very much from the pattern already established ; that of interleaving patches of history with the course of her own life.  Even now Miss Han's  two present volumes constitute probably the only substained literary work in English about East Asia by an East Asian.   When the autobiography is completed, its volumes will stand as a body of writing about East Asia by an East Asian.   When the autobiography is completed, its volumes will stand as a body of writing about whose literary quality there will stand as a body of writing  about whose literary there will be varied opinions, no doubt.  Miss Han had tried to be biographer, autobiographer, historian and writer, sometimes all at the same time, and not always successfully.   Like herself these volumes are hybrid, contradictory, vigorous, there.  The difficulty of appraising her achievement stems largely from her own ceaseless quest for a stance in literary and cultural terms.  It is clear by now this stance will chiefly be of the nature of a counterweight to the attitude she apostrophises as "Europocentrism, the universe of man reduced to a small Europe." 
 It is no longer sufficient to shrug this away as a mistaken assumption resulting from
'oudated' nationalism in resurgent Asia.  Asia needs to be allowed the space to breathe, in literarure as much as in politics.  In the past five hundred years travellers, mission-aries, military governors, botanists, administrators, sailors, teachers,  businessmen and casual residents in Asia have produced a voluminous minor literature upholding  -- as often as not, openly  -- the vision that the world grew out from Europe; and secure in the conviction that every Asian thing could eventually be fitted  into some grand Western conceptual framework.  Claude  Levi-Strauss is one of the few Europeans of any authority to throw light on the dilemma of the intelligent observer of cultures alien to his own.  In Tristes Tropiques he declares, " Implicity we claim for our own society, for its customs, and for its norms, a position of privilege, since an observer from a different social group would pass different verdicts upon those same examples."

Today, European norms jangle vigorously with much that has remained inarticulate for centuries in Asian societies.  Even some influential Asians  -- particularly Southest 
Asians -- while seeking political disengagement seem to act on the simple-minded premise that the only task of Asian societies is to hurry up and become exactly like European societies.  The Asian experience, after centuries of contact with the West, is a vast paradox.  How, to speak only of the Asian writer, can one etablish a foothold which will give one a vision not limitingly regional, but which will yet restore a sense of proportion between modern  European dominance and abiding Asian traditions?  Han Suyin, of course, hasn' t got the ideal anthropologist' s detachment nor, as yet, the poise of the true artist to answer this question.  Hers is the response of one deeply involved, loquacious, strident, yet intrinsically useful, " Strange are the ways of history," she declares,

      where no singlr thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging, growing           near wholeness.  To understand any event in any country, one must go back three generations.  A                     century ago sprouted the seed, root of to-days' s tree, whose branches cast thheir spreading shade over
        our heads, whose leaves may fall in a storm only to be replaced by a myriad other leaves.

Not, admittedly, an entirely satisfactory way of putting it.  The style is a shade poeticised, the metaphor too organic.  -- too suggestive of fluent, predictable developments in Asia.  The writer, no less than the specialist, must view with bafflement the kinds of society evolving in Southeast Asia, for example, partly as a result of the mass migration of Chinese overseas which Miss Han touches on in The Crippled Tree, and  the massive American involvement in Vietnam to which she also refers.   Anthropologists must put away their mathematical models while they ponder with subtler perception, the extraordinary phenomenon of inter-culture assimi-
lation, conflict and growth taking place in Asia to-day.  As for the Asian writer such a context demands of him many knowledges, many skills -- almost too many.  Perhaps at the moment one can attempt to do more than begin with one's own life history -- as James Joyces did fifty years ago in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  -- 
and , given  the present tangled skein, interleave that history with the more public fortunes of one's countries -- for there, surely, is the crux of being Eurasian whether by descent, like Miss Han, or from upbringing and environment like countless Asians to-day.  In a sense, all Asians are Eurasians, even the Chinese in the new China with an imported Europen political ideology profoundly transforming their lives.  Considering that it was on Western initiative that East met West, it is odd to think how few Europeans are Eurasians  in the same sense s well.

Miss Han's chosen scopoe is audacious, her industyry enviable.  She deals with the coming of the Hakkas to Szechuan in the late seventeenth century (her family are Hakkas  or, more correctly, Hans); the scramble of the Western powers especially Germany, France, Britain and the United States for financial and commercial control in China; the movement of people en masse from region to region in China.  She goes into some detail in tracing the events which led to the Boxer Uprising and culminated in the first Chinese Revolution of 1911 under Sun  Yatsen.  She traces the chaos that followed where dissident generals became warlords in particular districts and pillaged the countryside and massacred innocent peasants.  Her first volume end with the rise of Chiang Kaichek with his victorious armies from the South brutaly exteminating Communists along the way, and the forecasts the allegiance Chiang  was to offer to Western interests on the side.  Miss Han declares that " so far as research can make it so, historical accuracy has been maintained" in dealing with his wide canvas.   Historians, most likely, will consider it futile to enter into professional debate upon the account she gives.  Hers is history absorbed into a personal vision, embraced in a personal kind of way, an invaluable guide-line into nationalistic motivations in modern Asia, at the very least.  But there is little to transcend nationalism in these volumes, no real answer to the Europocentrism she so rightly chastises.

Miss Han's wide-ranging scrutiny of the past is often persuasive, always interesting. The eternal upheaval and chaos are clearly intended to mirror on a wider scale the desintegration of her own family.  For two-thirds of The Crippled Tree, the reader is held by the quite moving story of the conflict between her parents and the early years of their adjustment to one another.  These chapters although varied in content, hold together remarkably well.  Her control vanishes, however, when she reverts to the story of her own unloved childhood.  She adopts the devices of referring to herself in the third person here, by her childhood name Rosalie, but there is an irritating, uncritical adoption of the child's sense of injustice.  She is at her best when she writes of others, whether it is her father and mother, or her Elder Brother, called  Son of Spring, or practically any one else whether connected or not with her family.  Miss Han's strong, perpective, troubled, nostalgia eventually disarms criticism since what she seeks to understand concerns many millions of Asians to-day:

   In Rosalie a fragmentation of the total self occured, each piece recreating from its own sum of facts a
    person functioning seperately, with holding itself from the other, yet throughout maintening a secret               vigilance, boneless, coherence, fragile as the thread that guided Theseus in his labyrinth.  Others born 
    like her of two worlds, whoc hoose not to accept this splitting, fragmentation of monolithic, identity 
    into  several selves, found themselves later unable to face the contradictions latent in their own beings.           Consistency left them criplled for the world's incoherence ( The Crippled Tree, p. 382).

She was to learn later that "the overseas Chinese had a good many adaption problems, as many as a Eurasian like myself."

Compared with the first volume, there seems to be rather less reason in  A Mortal Flower for the bold experiment of associating a personnal history, however intrin-sically interesting, with the evolution of modern China.  The story of " Rosalie-me"
 ( as Miss Han rather earnestly refers to herself during one phase of A Mortal Flowers),  her work as a typist, her entry into Yenching Univeristy in Peking her undergraduate days in Belgium, her lectures on behalf of the Communists, her early affairs, and her decision to return to a China in 1938 on the verge of fresh turmoil, the account of all these does not rest comfortably between the chapters devoted to straightforward history.  In grappling with her own fragment self, Han Suyin reveals a flair for self-dramatisation and a strong desire for self-justifification; she also writes with impressive non ideological social passion.  Often these attitudes war with one another -- it would be too much to expect that they should be fully composed.  Past and present, Chinese heritage and European education, liberal views and socialist sympathies, objective spectator and propandist of the new China, historian and passionately involded writer, all these jostle with one another, and together are symptomatic of the fragmented self she speaks of.  Her hold of events is predictably uncertain, given their wide scope.  With A Mortal Flower it becomes clear that she makes frequent and questionable use of hindsight.  The re-ordering of the past loses its value as an effort to understand the present and becomes, rather, a justification of the present.  The panoramic view of West-East entanglement appears to shrink frequently to a platform for the new China.  Her control of tone is similarly uncertain.  Self-conscious poeticism alternates with stridency.  If these are three volumes to come, it should be possible to remedy such faults, or at any rate for a reader to evaluate them more fairly.

In these volumes there has been -- so far -- an effort at epic; what one actually has is rather more of a picture, a filmic spectacle on a grand scale.  When the remaining volumes are published, Miss Han's great effort will easily run to much more than a thousand pages.  We could have has A Portrait of the Artist as a Eurasian and may, one day, still do.  One remembers that Stephen Hero, which was James Joyce's  original manuscript for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was more than 1500 pages long.  Stphen Hero was eventually honed down to a lean 300 pages, varied, aesthetically apt, and culturally a sharply defined reflector of Joyce's age.   It is pure conjecture whether Miss Han will symphathies lie; she has established albeit rather more precariuously, a balance between her Eastern and Western heritage.  It remains to be seen whether, in view of her preferred scope, she will consider the challenge worthwhile of choosing between absorbingly intelligent special pleading or being  writer and only a writer and nothing but a writer.  Only the ignorant -- and Europocentrics -- would say that that is an easy choice for a Eurasian to-day .

      LLOYD  FERNANDO

----
*  Han Suyin, The Crippled Tree,   (London:  Cape, 1965);  A Mortal Flower (  London : Cape, 1966)

        ( TENGGARA  October, 1868  - p. 92- 95)


       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     Lloyd Fernando was born to a Sinhalese family in Sri Lanka in 1926 in 1938, his family migrated to Singapore.  Mr Fernando was educated at St Patrick's  in Singapore, with the occupation  nterrupting, that education from 1943 to 1945.  During the Japanese attack on Singapore, Mr Fernando's father was killed.            During the Japanese occupation, Fernando worked in a variety of manual labor jobs.
      Mr Fernando thereafter graduated from the Univeristy of Malaysia in  Singapore and subsequently served as  an instructor at the Singapore Polytechnic.  Mr Fernando became an assistance lecturer at the Univeristy of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur in 1960.  Mr Fernando was awarded a scholarship at Leeds University, UK, where he received his Ph.D.
       In 1967 Fernando was appointed to serve a professor at the The English Department of the Univeristy of Malaya, where he served until his retirement in 1978.  Subsquently, Mr Fernando studied law at City Univeristy in the UK and then at the Middie Temple, returning to Malaysia with two law degrees whereupon he was employed by  a law firm and thereafter started a seperate law pratice business in 1997.
Mr Fernando had a stroke and ceased his professional activities ,  and  


      Literary works  [edit]

- Scorpion Orchid , 1976,   ISBN 978-0-686-77802-8
- Culture in Conflict, 1986, ISBN  978-9971-4-9021-8
- Green in the Colour, 1993, ISBN 978-981-3002-68-5

"New Women" in the Late Victorian Nond, 1977, 
      ISBN 978-0-271-01241-4            WIKIPEDIA