Battle of Austerlitz@220...Pinnacle of Napoleon's Success and Seeds of His Ultimate Destruction

The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important military engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle occurred near the town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire (now Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). Around 158,000 troops were involved, of which around 24,000 were killed or wounded. The battle is often cited by military historians as one of Napoleon's tactical masterpieces….

Napoleon:

“There is a movement in engagements when the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives a victory; it is the one drop of water which makes the vessel run over.…”

Count Yorck von Wartenburg :

“Napoleon did not, after all, vanquish his enemies so much by the battles of Ulm and Jena, however disastrous these were, as by his incredible marches.”

Honoré de Balzac,  Louis Lambert, 1832:

“When I read the story of the Battle of Austerlitz I saw every incident. The roar of the cannon, the cries of the fighting men rang in my ears and made my inmost self quiver.”

 Alistair Horne, "How Far From Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805-1815", 1996 :

"...If Austerlitz raised Napoleon to the pinnacle of his success, it also turned his head and filled it with the delusion that no force or combination of forces could now stop him conquering the world. On the Pratzen Heights were born the seeds of his ultimate destruction.

Summing up on the ‘dazzling glory’ of Austerlitz, (Adolphe) Thiers was to write a generation later:

A campaign of three months, instead of a war of several years, as it had first been feared, the Continent disarmed, the French Empire extended to limits which it ought never to have passed, a dazzling glory added to our arms, public and private credit miraculously restored, new prospects of peace and prosperity opened to the nation.… For calm and reflective minds, if any such were left in presence of these events, there was but one subject for fear – the inconstancy of Fortune, and what is still more to be dreaded, the weakness of the human mind, which sometimes bears adversity without quailing and rarely prosperity without committing great faults...."

 

 Claudia Cardinale in "Austerlitz", 1960

How Tricky Translating The Brothers Karamazov Is...You Can't Give Clue to A Detective Story While Translating First Sentence!

                                            Vilas Sarang on the translation of The Stranger
 

The first sentence of "The Brothers Karamazov" in Russian is: 

"Был у нас в округе, в свое время, и теперь еще у нас в памяти, помещик, Федор Павлович Карамазов, отец троих сыновей, и отца троих сыновей, и умерший смертью трагическую и загадочную, умерший ровно тринадцать лет назад, о чем я расскажу на своем месте." 

Был у нас в округе, в свое время, и теперь еще у нас в памяти: "In our district, in his time, and still remembered by us..."

помещик, Федор Павлович Карамазов: "a landowner, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov..."

отец троих сыновей: "father of three sons..."

и умерший смертью трагическую и загадочную, умерший ровно тринадцать лет назад, о чем я расскажу на своем месте. "and who died a tragic and mysterious death, who died exactly thirteen years ago, about which I will tell in its place."

 

Daniel Soar write in LRB March 6 2025:

"...The Brothers Karamazov has been translated into English a ludicrous number of times: since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.

Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity – accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but sometimes loose? – though those who claim to stick closely to the original usually make more noise about it: no one wants to say their version is far removed from the book you want to read. I don’t find the debate, in the abstract, very interesting. 

‘Literal’ translation is a contradiction in terms. Languages have different syntaxes, with Russian word order quite unlike that of English or French or Spanish, and many words in one language don’t have an exact equivalent in the other – the Russian for ‘dark’, тёмный, has connotations of the murky, the clouded, the unknowable, the obscure, as well as perhaps the suspicious or dodgy – which makes it impossible to render perfectly in English. 

The word turns up in the first sentence of the novel, as one half of the phrase ‘трагической и тёмной’, referring to the (later to be revealed) circumstances of old man Karamazov’s death. The трагической (‘tragicheskoi’) is easy: it’s a recognisable cognate of ‘tragic’, and there’s no alternative. 

The other word is much harder. Both Magarshack and MacAndrew render the phrase as ‘tragic and mysterious’; McDuff has ‘tragic and fishy’ – all this seems fine. Pevear/Volokhonsky and now Katz pretend there’s no issue by translating it ‘literally’ as ‘dark and tragic’. Avsey, for some reason, has ‘violent and mysterious’, and Garnett does ‘gloomy and tragic’. ‘Gloomy’? What does she mean? That the story is depressing? Avsey’s choice is damaging for a different reason: apart from everything else it is, The Brothers Karamazov is a detective story, with a large element of suspense: to say that old man Karamazov’s death will be violent is to give rather a lot away.

So the choices have consequences. And with Dostoevsky, these choices matter more than they do with most other writers..."

 

 

Illustration by German artist, Kurt Hilscher (1904-1980), for the German translation of 1984, by George Orwell

This Year Fibonacci Day is Special After Reading The Golden Road

 Today November 23 is Fibonacci Day. 

This year it feels special after reading William Dalrymple's book "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World"...

"...Five hundred years later, in 1205, Leonardo of Pisa, known by his nickname ‘Fibonacci’, returned from Algeria to Italy with his father. Fibonacci had grown up in a Pisan trading post in Bejaïa, where he had learned fluent Arabic as well as Arab mathematics. Aged thirty-two, he wrote the Liber Abaci, the ‘Book of Calculation’. It was he who first popularised in Europe the use of what were later thought of as ‘Arabic numerals’, so seeding the commercial revolution that financed the Renaissance and in time, as these ideas spread north, the economic rise of Europe.

But these numbers were not Arabic in origin. As Fibonacci and his Arab masters recognised, they were Indian. ‘When my father held the post of notary at the customs house at Bejaïa, he arranged for me to come to him when I was a boy,’ wrote Fibonacci in the introduction to his Liber Abaci.

Because he thought it useful for me, he wanted me to spend a few days there in the mathematical school, and to be taught there.

Here I was introduced to a wonderful kind of teaching that used the nine figures of the Indias. With the sign 0, which the Arabs call zephyr (al-sifr), any number whatsoever can be written. Getting to know this pleased me far beyond all else … Therefore concentrating on this method, I made an effort to compose this book, so that those seeking knowledge of this can be instructed by such a perfect method and so that in future the Latin race may not be found lacking this knowledge....

Fibonacci became probably the greatest mathematician of the European Middle Ages...

...The solution, generation by generation, was a series of numbers known as the celebrated Fibonacci Sequence. This was in turn related to the Golden Ratio, which Fibonacci realised was something which kept reappearing in nature: the spiralling of the chambers of the nautilus shell, for example, obeys this ratio. Although Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci contains the earliest known description of the sequence outside India, the sequence had been described by Aryabhata as early as the sixth century..."

 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest@50

 

गाथा सप्तशती सदाशिव आत्माराम जोगळेकर...S A Joglekar@128

 गाथा सप्तशती  सदाशिव आत्माराम जोगळेकर...S A Joglekar@128

जन्म १९ नोव्हेंबर १८९७ - मृत्यू २९ जानेवारी १९६३

 वाङ्मय शोभा संपादक , मार्च १९६३

माझी कोरी भिंत त्यांनी वेळोवेळी रंगवली आहे ...Critical Presence of Visual Artists in My Life

मराठीतील एक अत्युत्तम निबंधकार म्हणजे दत्तात्रय गणेश गोडसे ... 

त्यांच्या "लिहून भिंतीवर भुजंग भरला रंग चिताऱ्याकडून...."  शीर्षकाच्या निबंधात ते म्हणतात :

"…बहुधा पांढऱ्या फटफटीत कपाळाची भिंत अशुभ समजण्यात येत असावी....ही भित्तिचित्रे म्हणजे त्या वेळच्या बालमनाची यक्षसृष्टीच होती...भिंतीवरून दरवर्षी नव्याने काढण्यात येणारी चित्रे ही त्यावेळच्या आमच्या बालवयात मोठे कुतूहल असे; आणि ती काढणारे 'पेंटर' तर आम्हाला प्रत्यक्ष परमेश्वर वाटत. दरवर्षी कोणत्या भिंतीवर कोणत्या नव्या चित्राचे लेणे चढणार याबद्दल आम्ही उत्सुक असू. शाळकरी मित्रांच्या संवादाचा विषय ही चित्रेच असे. गावाच्या काही वाड्यांच्या प्रशस्त भिंती या वार्षिक चित्र प्रदर्शनांची उघडी सभागृहे असत..."

('नांगी असलेले फुलपाखरू', १९८९)

मी मिरजेत असताना एका विवाह मंगल कार्यालयाची सचित्र भिंत बराच वेळ थांबून पाहत असे ... पण माझे कोणी मित्र त्यात रुची घेत होते का ते मला माहित नाही ... ती माझीसुद्धा यक्षसृष्टी होती .. ती भिंत आणि चित्रे अजून ५०-६० वर्षांनंतर सुद्धा चांगली आठवतात ... 

आमच्या घराजवळील दत्ताच्या देवळाबाहेर एक निष्पर्ण असे झाड होते , त्या झाडावर तीन थेटर्स च्या सिनेमांची पोस्टर्स लागत जी दार आठवड्याला , किंवा त्याच्या पटीत बदलत , त्यावर सुद्धा माझे लक्ष असे... सिनेमा हा सांस्कृतिक जीवनाचा अत्यंत महत्वाचा घटक होता ... 

कॅलेंडर हा एक अत्यंत जिव्हाळ्याचा भाग होता , घरात खाली-वर मिळून तीन-चार कॅलेंडर्स तरी लागत , जी बरीच वर्षे दीनानाथ दलाल किंवा रघुवीर मुळगावकर यांची असत .. वर्षभर बरोबर राहून ते घरचा भागच होत ... 

 मिरजेचे भित्तिचित्रे कलावंत कोण हे मला सांगता नाही येणार पण दलाल आणि मुळगावकर आजही बरोबर आहेत ... एका अर्थाने जीवनात सातत्य असते ते अशा गोष्टींमुळे .. 

ते माझ्या दृष्टीने आयुष्याचे फार मोठे घटक आहेत...माझी कोरी भिंत त्यांनी वेळोवेळी रंगवली आहे ...

 रघुवीर मुळगावकर , रत्नप्रभा , १९६७

सौजन्य आणि आभार : रघुवीर मुळगावकर परिवार

 

कलाकार : दीनानाथ दलाल, दलाल आर्ट स्टुडिओ

 

सौजन्य आणि आभार :

महाराष्ट्र राज्य मराठी विकास संस्था, चित्रकार दीनानाथ दलाल मेमोरियल समिती, दलाल परिवार