Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Dead GA Still Speaks...जी ए म्हणाले आम्हाला, युरिडिसी म्हणाली ऑर्फियसला

Today December 11 2013 is 26th Death Anniversary of G A Kulkarni (जी ए कुलकर्णी)

Paul Koudounaris:
 “Pushed into the footnotes of European religious history, charnels were once part of a dialogue with death that has now fallen silent. For the people who constructed them, however, the dialogue was loud and clear, and the dead were not expected to be mute.”
"Then I saw again all the oppressed who are suffering under the sun, and beheld the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter, and with their oppressors there was violence, and they had no comforter; and I esteemed the dead happy who have died long ago, more than the living who are still alive; and happier than both, him who hath not been born." 

(Ecclesiastes 4: 1–2)
Edith Hall. 2005:

"Greek drama is being performed on both the commercial and amateur stages of Britain, as of the world, with greater frequency than at any point since classical antiquity. At times during the 1990s more plays by Euripides or Sophocles were available to the London theatre-goer than works by any other author, including Shakespeare."



 "Orpheus and Eurydice"  Artist: Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein

"...Several months later, I was sitting in a theater watching Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice. After marrying Orpheus, Eurydice dies. In the underworld, there is a chorus of stones that addresses the audience.

Eurydice wants to speak to you.
But she can’t speak your language anymore.
She talks in the language of dead people now.

This was it. Further to the communiqué I had received at my mother’s grave, and to my problem with poetry while mourning.
The play said: elegies are false. They think they can talk to the dead, but dead people speak in the language of the dead, and we can’t."

(Joy Katz, 'Left Behind", November 2013) 

This reminded me of G A Kulkarni's allegory (रूपककथा) stort-story 'Orpheus' (ऑर्फियस)now part of his book 'Pinglavel' (पिंगळा वेळ), 1977.

Here is an example given by GA of how dead people perhaps speak. 

(मृत) युरिडिसी म्हणाली ऑर्फियसला:

"… तू चुकलास.  माहीत असणे निराळे आणि स्वतः हाडामांसात मृत्यू भोगणे निराळे. तू तो भोगला नाहीस; मी तो भोगला आहे …"

(Eurydice to Orpheus:

"...You are wrong. Knowing is one thing and experiencing the death in one's own flesh and bones another. You did not experience it; I have experienced it...")