विलास सारंग:
"…
मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे, हे
माझ्या विवेचनाच सार होतं… आपण वास्तवाच्या -वाङमयीन सामग्रीच्या- केवढ्या
मोठ्या भांडाराला मुकतो आहोत, हे माझ्या लेखात निर्देशित केलं आहे...मराठी
वाङमयातील समुद्राची अनुपस्थिती मराठी समाजाच्या संरचनेशी कशी निगडीत आहे,
हे माझ्या लेखात स्पष्ट केलेलं आहे."
("वाङमयीन संस्कृती व सामाजिक वास्तव", 2011, पृष्ठ 66-67)
[Vilas Sarang: "....How consistently Marathi literature has ignored the reality of sea: that was the summary of my interpretation...the
huge extent of reality - literary content- we have lost has been
pointed in my article. The absence of sea in Marathi literature is
linked to the structure of Marathi society has been clarified in my
article." ("Vangmayin Sanskruti va samajik vastav")]
जॉन विल्यम्स यांची 'ऑगस्टस' १९७२ ही एक महान कादंबरी आहे. कै सारंगांनी ती वाचली होती का याचे उत्तर माझ्याकडे नाही.
पण त्यातील एक भाग खाली पहा:
"...It occurs to me, as we drift slowly southward, that without my having to tell them to do so, the crew, since they are under no compulsion to make haste, have instinctively kept always in sight of land, though as the wind has changed we have had to go to some trouble to make corrections to follow the irregular line of the coast. There is something deep within the Italian heart that does not like the sea, a dislike that has seemed to some so intense as to be nearly abnormal. It is more than fear, and it is more than the natural propensity of the peasant to husband his land, and to avoid that which is so unlike it. Thus the eagerness of your friend Strabo to sail blithely upon unknown seas, in search of strangeness, would bewilder the ordinary Roman, who ventures beyond the sight of land only upon the occasion of such a necessity as war. And yet under Marcus Agrippa the Roman navy has become the most powerful in the history of the world, and the battles that saved Rome from its enemies were fought upon the sea. Nevertheless, the dislike remains. It is a part of the Italian character.
It is a dislike of which the poets have been aware. You know
that little poem of Horace's addressed to the ship that was bearing his friend
Vergil to Athens? He advanced the conceit that the gods had separated land from
land by the unimaginable depths of ocean so that the peoples in those lands
might be distinct, and man in his foolhardiness launches his frail bark upon an
element that ought not to be touched. And Vergil himself, in his great poem
upon the founding of Rome, never speaks of the sea except in the most ominous
of terms: Aeolus sends his thunder and winds upon the deep, waves are lifted so
high that they obscure the stars, timbers are broken, and men see nothing..." (Book III)