मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, December 10, 2012

Gathering in Circles Around the Glimmering Lights of GA's Epigraphs

Tomorrow December 11 2012 is 25th death anniversary of  G A Kulkarni (जी. ए. कुलकर्णी)

Walter de la Mare:

"No, No, Why further should we roam
Since every road man Journeys by,
Ends on a hillside far from Home
Under an alien sky"

from me to GA:

"तुम्ही अवतरले गोकुळी आम्ही गोपाळांच्या मेळी
तुम्ही होते रामराजा आम्ही वानरांच्या फौजा"

(Marathi folksong quoted in Srinivas Vinayak  Kulkarni's 'Aamhi Vanaranchya Phauja', 1965)

I still remember the December 12 1987's eerie morning  at Nashik (नाशिक) when I heard about GA's death on the All India Radio

After reading GA's numerous letters, particularly about his final years,  and knowing full well that such decisions are very complex, I still wonder if he should have stayed back in his beloved Dharwad instead of moving to alien Pune (पुणे). When I went to Agra in 1980's,  I was most moved by the place they show where  dethroned Emperor Shah Jahan used to sit and stare at The Taj Mahal in the distance as he lay dying. 

I was at 'G A Kulkarni road' in Pune, a few months ago, to attend an engagement ceremony, in a makeshift hall, in a multistory building's basement, and how grotesque it sounded that that piece of Pune- complete with a Pizza Hut- and not some Greek Colosseum or a stretch of beach at Mahabalipuram is named after GA!  Indeed, the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.


Although I have bought it some time ago, like majority of  my books, I have still not read  Cervantes's 'Don Quixote'. 

But I kind of feel I have 'received' it after every reading- 50 at least- of G A's  'Yatrik' (यात्रिक) from the collection of his short stories 'Pinglavel' (पिंगळावेळ), 1977.

Equally delightful has been reading D V Deshpande's (धों वि देशपांडे ) commentary on G A's story in 'jeeenchya katha: ek anwayarth' (जीएंच्या कथा: एक अन्वयार्थ).

 Yatrik  has these lines:

"अरे, निर्बुद्ध, जड जगाविषयी बदलती रुपके करत राहण्यापेक्षा तुझ्या रुपकांप्रमाणे जर जग बदलत जाऊ लागले तर तुला तरी जास्त काय हवे सांग."

("...hey, instead of creating changing metaphors for stupid, gross world, if the world starts changing to suit your metaphors, tell me what more you want.")

In October 2012 I read on Guardian website:

"New book cover designs for the Observer 100 greatest novels of all time list – in pictures:

Belgian artist Tom Haentjens has united 100 artists from 28 countries in a co-creation project, Doedemee to help raise awareness of illiteracy in Africa. Each has redesigned a poster-sized cover for a book from the list compiled by Robert McCrum in 2003..."

What  pleasure those designs gave!

I was captivated particularly by this:


Don Quixote, designed by Lobulo Design Photograph: Public Domain

Now doesn't it represent: Wold Starts Changing to Suit His Metaphor...?   I feel it does.

They say GA was a good painter. I can't vouch for that. But being a voracious reader, I wonder if he ever saw Roc Riera Rojas illustrated special edition of  Don Quixote. 

After seeing the picture below from that edition, I re-read GA's story and imagined dialogues between Don and Sancho spoken by the figures below.

It was a lot of fun. 



GA was a master of epigraphs. His books would not be complete without the epigraphs he chose for them. (I wonder why  he didn't also choose images to go along.)

Rachel Sagner Buurma writes:

"Epigraphs escort us safely across the boundary between the title page and the story. Easing us into narrative, epigraphs make us pause and notice the transition from the world to the work, from life to the novel. They slow us down—which is why we often skip them."

(The New Republic, December 6 2012)


GA chose these two epigraphs for 'Pinglavel' (पिंगळा वेळ), 1977:

                           You do not know
The unspoken voice of sorrow in the ancient bedroom
At three o'clock in the morning.
                                               - T. S Eliot

'Shallow people demand variety - but I have been 
writing the same story throughout my life, every
time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve.
                                                         - Strindberg   

I have reproduced them very close to as they appear in the book.

Now revisit  Prof.  Buurma's quote above.

Each story from GA's book is nicely set up with these epigraphs...they indeed transition us from 'the world to the work, from life to the novel. They slow us down' —but I never skip them! I might skip his book!

Prof.  Buurma concludes:

"The Art of the Epigraph’s epigraph, drawn from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, says that books “continue each other in spite of our habit of judging them separately.” This is true—but it might not be the whole truth. For though we like to imagine the autonomy of a world of books that speak to one another, separate from our own fallible judgments and best guesses and wishful thinking, it may be that all we have are groups of readers, gathering in circles around the glimmering lights of our authors’ epigraphs, building literature together one line at a time."

GA probably would have loved this conclusion...'groups of readers, gathering in circles around the glimmering lights of our authors’ epigraphs, building literature together one line at a time.'