The Mirror Wall at Sigiriya carries verses scratched into its polished plaster by visitors who climbed the rock over a thousand years ago. Most of them wrote to the painted women on the rock face — addressing them, praising them, complaining of their silence. W. J. M. Lokubandara's book is a literary appraisal of those verses, the body of writing known as the Sigiri graffiti.
The approach is that of a reader of poetry rather than an epigraphist. Lokubandara renders the verses into English and comments on them, and his interest lies in imagining the thoughts of the people who composed them: who they might have been, what moved them to write on a wall, what they were feeling as they stood before the paintings. This sets the book apart from Senarat Paranavitana's Sigiri Graffiti, the scholarly edition of the corpus, which concentrates on epigraphy and grammar. Writing in the Sunday Times, Senake Bandaranayake described the book as following the analysis set out in Lokubandara's earlier Sinhala work Sigiri Gi Siri. The subtitle, Whispers of the Mirror Wall, indicates the register.
Photographs by Patrick Ratnayake, Gamini Jayasinghe and others accompany the text.
W. J. M. Lokubandara was Speaker of Parliament at the time the book was launched. He writes here as a reader of classical Sinhala verse, and the book is the English counterpart to the Sinhala study he had already published on the same material.
Readers who have climbed Sigiriya will recognise the setting at once: the gallery wall below the paintings, the smooth surface that once reflected the rock, the lines of writing left by those who came as visitors long after the citadel was abandoned. The graffiti are among the earliest surviving Sinhala poetry, and they are unusual in being the work of ordinary travellers rather than court poets. This book offers them in English with a commentary that treats them as poems.
Published in English by Godage International Publishers of Colombo, an established Sri Lankan house publishing in both Sinhala and English. The book will suit readers with an interest in classical Sinhala literature, in Sigiriya itself, and in anyone who wants the Mirror Wall verses in a form that can be read for pleasure rather than consulted for reference. It also serves well as a companion to a visit, read before or after the climb.
- Author: WJM Lokubandara
- Publisher: Godage International Publishers
- Language: English
- Pages: 172
- ISBN: 9789553006103
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