मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च 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: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Monday, March 18, 2019

मला त्यात फक्त दोनच मराठी कवी सापडले...The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English

Robert Nye यांनी लिटररी रिव्यू , मे १९९४ साठी 'The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English' By


मी ह्या पुस्तकाची २००३ची एडिशन पहिली. मला त्यात फक्त दोनच मराठी कवी सापडले.

KOLATKAR, Arun Balkrishna
(1932– ),
was born in Kolhapur and works as a graphic artist in a Bombay advertising agency. He is one of the few genuinely bilingual poets of contemporary India, writing in both English and Marathi. Although his poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals in India, Britain, and the United States, his only two published collections to date are Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita (a selection of his Marathi verse) and a collection of thirty-one linked poems in English, Jejuri (Bombay, 1976). For this volume, he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Notable among his uncollected verse is the long poem, ‘The Boatride’ which was originally published in Arvind Mehrotra's short-lived little magazine, Damn You. It has subsequently been published in R. Parthasarathy's Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (Delhi, 1976).
Kolatkar's most sustained achievement, Jejuri, ostensibly records a pilgrimage to the temple of Khandobi at Jejuri, a small town in Western Maharashtra. The poet views Hindu tradition sceptically. His laconic verse borrows something from the medieval bhakti poets of Maharashtra, especially Tukaram (who Kolatkar has translated into English), and juxtaposes this with the relaxed diction of the American Beat poets. An idiosyncratic humour pervades much of Kolatkar's writing; it derives some of its force from viewing commonplace detail at an unaccustomed angle. In the short poems this can produce original, surreal effects. Longer poems, notably ‘Ajamil and the Tigers’, display a skilfully sustained handling of narrative and irony.

CHITRE, Dilip Purushottam
(1938– ),
was born in Baroda, where he had his early education. His family moved to Bombay when he was 13. After taking a degree in English from Bombay University in 1959, he went to Ethiopia for three years to teach in schools, and in the late Sixties and Seventies he was associated with the magazine Quest (now New Quest), for which he wrote essays, reviews, and a regular column of comment. He has edited An Anthology of Marathi Poetry: 1945–65 (Bombay, 1967), doing most of the translations himself, and his translations of Tukaram (seventeenth century) are collected in Says Tuka (New Delhi, 1991). He has also directed a film and held exhibitions of his paintings.
A prolific writer in two languages, Marathi and English, Chitre has created a large body of work, much of it uncollected. Travelling in a Cage (Bombay, 1980), his only book in English so far, contains merely a fraction of his English poems. The title poem was written between 1975 and 1977, when he lived in the United States. Its epigraph, ‘The heart is placed obliquely in the chest’ is from Gray's Anatomy, and a sexual encounter, not always obliquely dealt with, appears to be at the heart of the sequence. Chitre sees language, sex, even death, as a prison or cage, with self-murder, ‘the greatest of all forms’, holding the key to freedom. The book's shorter poems play down his De Profundis side, and employ a plainer, less inwardturning voice and a raconteur's tone.
Travelling in a Cage might be difficult to find, but poems from it are available in two recent anthologies, Indian English Poetry since 1950, ed. Vilas Sarang (Bombay, 1989), and The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (Delhi, 1992). For a discussion of his work,
see Modern Indian Poetry in English, by (Delhi, 1987).
(सौजन्य: ऑक्सफर्ड प्रकाशन)

अर्थात आता दोघेही वारले आहेत.

मला थोडे आश्चर्य वाटले: केशवसुत, बालकवी, माधव ज्युलियन, बा सी मर्ढेकर, नामदेव ढसाळ , सदानंद रेगे यांचा त्यात समावेश नाही याचे. (याचा प्रमुख अर्थ हा की त्यांचे इंग्लिश मध्ये चांगले अनुवाद झाले असल्यास प्रसिद्ध झाले नाहीयेत. उदा: विलास सारंगांनी केलेला मर्ढेकरांचा अनुवाद)....  


Friday, March 15, 2019

चांदोबा, चांदोबा स्विस बँकेमागे लपलास का?... Chandamama Magazine and Swiss Banks

चांदोबा मासिक हे या ब्लॉग वरती अनेक वेळा आले आहे... पण ते बिझनेस लाईन, मार्च १० २०१९ ला ह्या पद्धतीने येईल असे वाटले नव्हते....


"End of good tale: New owners of Chandamama in dock for Swiss stash... It enthralled children with stories from Indian mythology for decades while narrating virtues of good deeds, but the Chandamama magazine’s new owners are now in the dock for allegedly stashing funds in Swiss banks. Mumbai-based Geodesic Ltd, which acquired the iconic magazine in 2007, and its three directors are being probed by Indian authorities for alleged money laundering and other financial irregularities, and Switzerland has agreed to provide “administrative assistance” (share information) regarding their accounts in its banks...."

चांदोबा ने तहहयात नैतिकता शिकवली... आता वरील केसचा शेवट असा न होवो .... 


कलाकार : चंदामामाचे यशस्वी 

सौजन्य : चंदामामा, सप्टेंबर १९७१

Thursday, March 14, 2019

Albert Einstein@140

Today March 14 2019 is 140th birth anniversary of Albert Einstein

Charlize Theron

Photographer: I don't know

Monday, March 11, 2019

वाङमयीन 'चेटकिणी'....A Celebration of Magical Women Writers

विलास सारंगांची वाङ्मयीन टीकेवरची पुस्तके आपण वाचली तर आपल्या लक्षात येते की त्यांच्या नजरेत दुर्गाबाई कशा शेवटी शेवटी उत्तुंग झाल्या ते.... पहिल्या पुस्तकांतून दुर्गबाईंचा उल्लेख सुद्धा नाहीये... हे पुन्हा एकदा लिहतोय कारण हे वाचल:

"“The absence of the witch does not invalidate the spell,” Emily Dickinson wrote. So great writers bewitch us with their work long after they have absented themselves from the world. The enduring bewitchment of thirty such titans and trailblazers of the written word,"
('Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers' by Taisia Kitaiskaia, Katy Horan)

'long after they have absented themselves from the world' दुर्गाबाई मला कायम bewitch करतात, त्या सारंगांना पण bewitch करत होत्या....


Sappho (630–570 BCE). 

Artist: Katy Horan

अश्या प्रकारच्या चित्रांचे प्रयत्न मराठीत वेगळ्या प्रकारे वसंत सरवटे यांनी केले आहेत - साहित्यीकांची अर्कचित्रे काढून....

Friday, March 08, 2019

Manneken Pis@400; But Could Have Been @4000...

#MannekenPis400 

Wikipedia informs:

"Manneken Pis, meaning "Little Pisser" in Dutch, is a landmark small bronze sculpture (61 cm) in the centre of Brussels (Belgium), depicting a naked little boy urinating into a fountain's basin. It was designed by Hiëronymus Duquesnoy the Elder [nl] and put in place in 1618 or 1619...."


courtesy: Wikipedia

But I realized this milestone only when I saw the following cartoon

Artist: Maddie Die, The New Yorker, February 11 2019


Wednesday, March 06, 2019

Bill Ward@100

#BillWard100

Today March 6 2019 is 100th birth anniversary of Bill Ward (William Hess Ward) 6/3/1919- 17/11/1998



“....Like many artists of the time, Ward moved between several companies, and around 1946 worked for “Busy” Arnold, Quality’s publisher, who also hired Cole. When Arnold asked Ward if he had any ideas for a new story for his Modern Comics anthology, Ward suggested Torchy—the strip about the dizzy blonde he’d created while in the Army. Torchy was a stripping morale booster for troops, in much in the same way as its U.K. counterpart, Jane. The strip became a huge success and got its own title, while Ward’s particular skill at drawing women got him moved over to Quality’s massively popular romance comics...
... Ward’s women were caricatures from the start; with enormous breasts and miniscule waists, they seemed to totter about effortlessly on 12” heels in skintight cocktail dresses. “Like a lot of folks I’ve spoken to over the years, I’ve had conflicting feelings about the man’s art. Certainly, he produced lusciously gorgeous depictions of the female form, but frankly, a lot of what I’ve seen from Ward slipped over the line from sexy to crass, particularly much of his later work, where his ladies were often festooned with a grotesquely gargantuan bosom,” said an uncharitable fellow cartoonist, Fred Hembeck....
... Ward produced an incredible 30 cartoons a month for Goodman and was paid a mere $7 for each one. It’s estimated that Ward drew or painted over 10,000 pin-up cartoons during his life, more than any other artist before or since. His influence is still felt today and he is regarded very much as an artist’s artist...”
(‘Erotic Comics: A Graphic History: Volume 1’ by Tim Pilcher, 2008)

महाराष्ट्रातील कित्येक माजी-आजी कलावंतांवर बिल वॉर्ड यांचा प्रभाव असल्याच जाणवत...


Artist: Bill Ward


Saturday, March 02, 2019

ज्यावेळी वर्तमानपत्रे मौल्यवान होती .....Shyam Joshi on Newspaper Reading

ज्यावेळी वर्तमानपत्रे मौल्यवान होती, त्यावेळी ती अशी वाचली जात....

चित्रकार : श्याम जोशी, वाङ्मय शोभा, एप्रिल १९६७

Wednesday, February 27, 2019

मराठी भाषा दिवस...What You Can't Say.....

#मराठीभाषादिवस   #Kusumagraj107

आज फेब्रुवारी २७ २०१९, मराठी भाषा दिवस आणि कुसुमाग्रजांची १०७वी जयंती.  

 भाषा दिवस निमित्ताने दोन कार्टून पाहण्यासारखी आहेत .... 



Artist : Charles Barsotti, The New Yorker, 2010


Artist: RGJ, The Spectator, UK


Sunday, February 24, 2019

सूर्य-पाहिलेला-माणूस एकट्याने नाचताना ....Xenophon's Solo-dancing Socrates

"सूर्य पाहिलेला माणूस "हे नाटक यापूर्वी ह्या ब्लॉग वर दोन तीन वेळा आलं आहे ....


Bettany Hughes:
 "...Of course comedy is where Socrates belongs. Where else could he be? The ugly, pot-bellied eccentric. The wrong-footing genius; the stonemason’s son who understands how fragile and foolish mortal life is, and yet at the same time how sublime. The soldier commended for his bravery who stands, like a snowman in the middle of a winter campaign, caught in one of his embarrassing staring fits. All the other characters in Socrates’ story – Alcibiades, Pericles, Aspasia – could appear in tragedy, in epic drama. Socrates, unique, world-class as he is, is at the same time a queer middle-aged man with feet of clay. A curiously comforting, curiously unsettling pilot-passenger in the leaky lifeboat. A man easy to mock...."
 



"Socratic dancing",Musée Carnavalet, Paris 

Artist: Honore Daumier

" ... For instance, what could be more enchanting than a Socrates who solo-dances for joy and exercise, so unlike the Socrates we know from Plato? In Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates asks the Phoenician dance-master to show him some dance moves. Everyone laughs: what will you do with dance moves, Socrates? He replies: ‘I’ll dance, by God!’ A friend of Socrates then tells the group that he had stopped by his house early in the morning, and found him dancing alone. When questioned about it, Socrates happily confesses to solo-dancing often. It’s great exercise, it moves the body in symmetry, it can be done indoors or outdoors with no equipment, and it freshens the appetite...

.... Though the historical person of Socrates will remain forever enigmatic, it could be argued that Xenophon strikes closer to real life in his depictions of the man. Plato had a serious philosophical agenda of his own, involving a search for transcendence, purified rationality and sublimity. Xenophon’s interests are at once more worldly and more realistic..."