Abstract:
This paper investigates the literary-ideological impact that the novel Pitastharaya (translated to Sinhala from the original French text The Stranger by Somarathna Balasooriya) had on Sri Lankan authors who work in the field of literary writing and translations. Based on the understanding that a source text is written for a source community (Dooley 2005; Torop 2000) whose culture and way of life influence the formation of its literature, it is worthwhile to contextualize the impact that a translated literary text can have on a target community, especially taking into account the global significance of the text The Outsider by Albert Camus in relation to a greater cultural make-shift process that was globally followed by existentialism after the Cold War era. Since translations flourish nations by establishing deep interactions, a profound text such as The Outsider that pioneered to establish a different code of ethics and cultural values challenging the hegemonic bourgeoisie and Victorian worldview as well as that which experimented a narrative technique such as ‘Writing Degree Zero’ (Barthes 1998) should be investigated paying attention to the cultural make-shift process of the target community. Especially, the impact that the above translation had on the Sri Lankan Buddhist community has to be particularly looked into since even existentialism itself was influenced by Western Buddhism. The leading Sri Lankan authors and critics who write in both Sinhala and English media as well as renowned translators will be interviewed to understand the ideological influence that they received through the translated text while the text analysis intends to investigate the justice that the target text had made to the source text by being authentic, accurate and context conscious. In the meantime, the analysis mainly concentrates on the text The Stranger (English translation) and Pitastharaya (Sinhala translation) to illustrate whether the target text could successfully decode the genuine linguistic integrity, innovativeness, writing degree zero, semiotics as well as different cultural signifiers in the source text.
