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."

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

आप्पलपोट्या राक्षसाची गोष्ट... Gopal Dutt Kulkarni's The Selfish Giant

 Today June 18 2014 is 78th Birthday of my father Gopal Dutt Kulkarni (गोपालदत्त कुलकर्णी)

 “And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, 'You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.” 

― Oscar Wilde, The Selfish Giant, May 1888



Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘Titans of History’, 2012:
“...The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel Wilde published in 1889, pushed the limits of respectability with its themes of decay, cruelty and illicit love, causing Wilde’s wife, Constance, to remark that “since Oscar wrote that book no one invites us anywhere anymore.” Yet it is a timelessly sensitive and affecting evocation of our fears of death and aging. Even his fairy tales, The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, do not shy away from the unpalatable reality of cruelty going unpunished and heroism unrewarded...”

My father translated a bunch of Oscar Wilde stories for kids. They form his book "डाळिंबाचे दाणे "(Dalimbache Dane). It is dedictaed to us- his children. I simply adored the book and read it dozens of times.


The first story in the collection is "The Selfish Giant". He called it  'Appalpotya Rakshasachi Gosht' (आप्पलपोट्या राक्षसाची गोष्ट).

It made me cry every time I read it. My father had poured his heart into it.



 courtesy: Facebook page on Oscar Wilde


'The Selfish Giant' Illustration for the first edition, May 1988 by  Artist: Walter Crane (1845–1915)


Artist: Jobr, FB page of Oscar Wilde
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