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."

Saturday, January 04, 2014

The Women Come And Go, Talking of Julian Peters

Today January 4 2014 is  126th Birth Anniversary of T S Eliot

 T S Eliot:

“No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written. He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.”
 
T S Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 1915:

"...Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'
Let us go and make our visit.


In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.


The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, ..."



"...Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement." (Wikipedia)

The poem will celebrate its centenary in 2015.

As soon I read this poem around 1982, I liked it, although I did not understand a lot of it.

I particularly loved these two lines:

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."

Why? I don't know.

 (On September 28 2007, I wrote a post  "In the Room the Women Come And Go, Talking of Dev Anand", on Dev Anand's autobiography.)
  
On the art of comics, Holland Cotter says in the New York Times, November 15 2013:

"Comic art is, on a very basic level, about concentration, about fitting a complete world in a small space and keeping it coherent and readable."

Isn't poetry about the same: 

"fitting a complete world in a small space and keeping it coherent and readable."?

Recently,  I got too see an adaptation of the Eliot's poem as a comic book by Julian Peters


 

Artist: Julian Peters

Now, there are five frames in the picture above.

The third, "Let us go and make our visit",  is fine and so is the fourth, "In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo", and so are the frames one and two at the top where the poet is shown dressing up.

They all are very good drawings but add no value to my appreciation of the poem.

But wait...what makes the comic strip of Peters special is the fifth frame depicting the following line:

"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes"

That is the way the fog rubs its back upon the window-panes as the poet walks by...Wonderful. 

I hope when they celebrate the poem in 2015, they will also remember Julian Peters's adaptation.

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