जमेल तेथे तळटीपांचे पैंजण घाला...Annotate the Artists

 बा सी मर्ढेकर:

"शब्दांवर थोडी हुकमत असली आणि लय तोंडवळणी पडली म्हणजे कविता लिहिणं फारसं कठीण नसतं. त्यापलीकडे काही पुढील लिखाणांत आहे किंवा नाही हे वाचकच ठरविणार. त्यांच मत अनुकूल पडल नाही तर लेखकाने योग्य तो बोध घ्यावा. पण 'भूमिके'चा टोप चढवून आणि तळटीपांचे पैंजण घालून नकटीला शारदेच सोंग घ्यायला लावण ह़ा त्यावर तोडगा खास नाही." 

(पृष्ठ: १२०, 'कांही कवितांचे' प्रास्ताविक, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९-१९७७)

ह्या भूमिकेला दुसर एक अस्तर आहे, आणि ते म्हणजे, मर्ढेकरांचे आवडते टी एस इलियट यांनी त्यांच्या सर्वात महत्वाच्या कवितेला "तळटीपांचे पैंजण" (annotation) घातले होते... 

 

"...The first person to annotate a poem by T.S. Eliot was T.S. Eliot. His notes on The Waste Land (1922) were composed partly so that his 433-line poem could be issued by his American publishers Boni & Liveright as a book, and partly, as he recalled in ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’ (1956), ‘with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism’...."

 

आता मर्ढेकर म्हणायला मोकळे होते- इलियटने केले पण मी ते कधीच करणार नाही...

 

असो , कोणाचेही , विशेषतः पब्लिक डोमेन मध्ये आलेल्या, कोणत्याही कवी/लेखकाचे लेखन annotate करावे या मताचा मी आहे... 

D, J. Taylor says in The TLS, June 4 2021:

"Why annotate Orwell’s novels? One compelling answer is that we now have the freedom to do so. Orwell died in January 1950, meaning that all six of them came out of copyright in the UK at the start of this year. Transatlantic reprint programmes, based on the ninety-five-years- from-first-publication rule, will have to wait until as late as 2029. Here in Britain, on the other hand, a vault guarded by the seneschals of Messrs Penguin Random House and its predecessor firms these past seventy years has just creaked open, and any old aspiring editor or zealous footnoter can go and wander about inside.

Another is that, in terms of the period detail which can weigh down the most evergreen classic, Orwell’s fiction is beginning to show its age. This is especially true of the four prewar novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939), each of which comes stuffed with references to Woodbines and De Reszkes (brands of cigarettes), the Boots Circulating Library, Express Dairies, gorblimey hats (a kind of First World War-era forage cap) and Dr Palmer (William Palmer, 1824–56, the celebrated “Rugeley Poisoner”)...."

 Helena Bonham Carter and Richard E. Grant in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1997|© Everett Collection Inc/Alamy