दुर्गाबाई कॉवेलच्या व्हिक्टोरियन फाजील ईश्शबाईला बधणाऱ्या नव्हत्या...Kacchapa Jataka 273

 

विलास सारंग त्यांच्या लेखक म्हणून कारकिर्दीत पहिल्या काळात दुर्गाबाईंकडे लक्ष देत नसावेत असे स्पष्ट दिसते पण जसे ते टिकावू अशा भारतीय प्राचीन वाङ्मयाकडे , बुद्धाकडे वळले , त्यांना दुर्गाबाईंची महानता लगेच समजली ...

त्यांच्या 'लिह्त्या लेखकाचं वाचन' मध्ये २०११ च्या आवृत्तीत पान ८६ वर काय लिहतात पहा :

 

 त्याच लेखात ते पुढे लिहतात :

 

 (कै सारंगांना त्यावेळी प्रकृतीमुळे एकच हात उचलता येत होता , म्हणून काहीसा डार्क ह्युमर दोन हाती नमस्काराच्या ऐवजी एकहाती सलाम, कॉवेल म्हणजे Edward Byles Cowell, FBA (23 January 1826 – 9 February 1903) )

 

त्या जातक कथेचं नाव आहे  :The Story about the Biting Turtle चावणाऱ्या कासवाची गोष्ट  कच्छप जातक २७३  

 The Bodhisatta was once an ascetic. He lived alone in the Himalayas, and while he was sitting in daily meditation in his leaf hut, a mischievous, horrible monkey would come and ejaculate in his ear. But being blissfully calm, the Bodhisatta was not disturbed and did not stop him. One time the monkey saw a turtle sunning itself with its mouth open and he stuck his penis in it. The turtle bit down hard, leaving the monkey in agony. He realized that only the Bodhisatta could end his suffering, so he lifted the turtle with both hands and went to see him.

It looked like the monkey was holding an alms bowl, so the Bodhisatta jokingly asked, “Who are you, a brahmin? Where did you go to collect so much food?” implying the monkey was greedy. The monkey replied, “I’m just a foolish monkey who touched something I shouldn’t have. Set me free and I will go away.” The Bodhisatta said, “The marriage between your clans has been consummated: turtle, you can stop having sex now.” On hearing the Bodhisatta’s words, the turtle and the monkey released their grips. They both showed respect to the Bodhisatta and left, the monkey running far away, never to return.

The monkey and the turtle were earlier births of two high-ranking soldiers who hated each other and spoke rudely every time they met. Neither the king nor their friends and family could set them right. One day the Buddha divined that these two men were close to having a spiritual breakthrough, so the next morning he went out collecting alms at their houses. While sitting with them, the Buddha preached about loving-kindness and dharma so eloquently that they both became disciples. The two soldiers forgave each other and were harmonious from then on.

Later, when the Buddha heard some of his disciples discussing how he had humbled the two soldiers, he told them this story so they knew that he had also reconciled the same two men in previous lives. 

 

विलास सारंगांची घोडचूक...Uninflected Language and Poetry

 (also see my posts "When There Were No Wikipedia and Google...and Now That They Are Here..." dated April 3 2016, "र. धों. कर्वे आणि वंडर वुमन...R. D. Karve and Wonder Woman" dated Oct 14 2016 and "गोडसेंचा गोंधळ : कुठाय चांदण्यातील मखमली नीलिमा?...James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Two Nocturne" dated Jan 30 2017) 

 Bill Bryson, ‘The Mother Tongue’, 1990:

“Its lowly position almost certainly helped English to become a simpler, less inflected language. As Baugh and Cable note: "By making English the language mainly of uneducated people, the Norman conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward unchecked." In Old English, as we have seen, most verbs were not only highly inflected, but also changed consonants from one form to the next, but these were gradually regularized and only one such form survives to this day—was/were.”

आज मी Sarah L. Kaufman यांचे Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing हे पुस्तक पाहिले. त्याची सुरवात अशी होते :

Reporter: Senator Kennedy, do you agree with your fellow candidates that the president has mishandled the crisis in Afghanistan?

Ted Kennedy: Well, in this moment of national crisis, any second-guessing that I…er…personally, with respect to the interests of peace. Moreover, with the…uh…unchallenged Soviet threat, the…er…grain embargo which…uh…as far as strong leadership in this country! Now, in respect to the…

Reporter: A verb, Senator, we need a verb! 

Verbs are the underrated stars of the English language. They hold it all together: sentences, imagery, meaning. A complete sentence cannot exist without one, yet a single verb can create complete meaning. (See?)

What’s more, verbs unlock the infinite potential of written expression, propelling poetry, metaphor, and emotion.

Verbs, as we learned in grade school, are action words, and they tell us about energy and states of being...

 

त्या वरून मला विलास सारंग यांचे "अक्षराचा श्रम केला" हे २००० सालचे पुस्तक आणि त्यातील हे आठवले :

 

" ...इंग्रजी आणि मराठी या भाषांमधील एक महत्त्वाचा भेद काही अंशी यासाठी जबाबदार धरावा लागेल. इंग्रजीमध्ये इन्फ्लेक्शन्सचा विपुल वापर होतो; मराठीत जवळजवळ नाहीच. भाषेच्या या वैशिष्ट्याचे डब्ल्यू. एच. ऑडेनने मार्मिक विवेचन केले आहे :

"काव्यरचनेच्या दृष्टीने इंग्रजी भाषा इतकी छान असण्याचे एक कारण हे की, ती इन्फ्लेकटेड आहे. शेक्सपिअर करीत असे त्याप्रमाणे इंग्रजीत क्रियापदाचे नाम किंवा नामाचे क्रियापद सहजरीत्या करता येते. जर्मन, फ्रेंच, इटालियन यांसारख्या अनइन्फ्लेकटेड भाषांमध्ये ते करता येत नाही...."

सारंग जे ऑडेनने मार्मिक विवेचन म्हणतात ते आहे दि पॅरिस रिव्यू च्या The Art of Poetry No. 17, स्प्रिंग १९७४ च्या अंकात :

"AUDEN: No, I couldn’t be less. For myself I find that Shakespeare’s greatest influence has been his use of a large vocabulary. One thing that makes English so marvelous for poetry is its great range and the fact that it is an uninflected language. One can turn verbs into nouns and vice versa, as Shakespeare did. One cannot do this with inflected languages such as German, French, Italian."

म्हणजे इंग्लिश आहे  अनइन्फ्लेकटेड आणि मराठी , जर्मन, फ्रेंच , इटालियन वगैरे आहेत इन्फ्लेकटेड! पण ह्याच्या बरोब्बर उलटे सारंग लिहतात. 

मराठी विभाग, मुंबई विद्यापीठ ह्यांनी हे पुस्तक प्रकाशित केले आहे , मौज ने छापले आहे आणि co branding सुद्धा केले आहे, दोघांकडे फॅक्टचेकर नसावेत ह्याची मोठी मौज मला वाटते!

 

हे मराठीत का घडले नाही? Why Nineteenth-century French Novelists Were So Often Obsessed With Painters and Painting

 Anka Muhlstein, 'The Pen and the Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels', 2017:

"I have often wondered why nineteenth-century French novelists were so often obsessed with painters and painting, while in the 1700s Diderot was the only writer of his generation to take an interest in art criticism. What a striking contrast that not one well-known novelist of the 1800s failed to include a painter as a character in his work. This is fair enough for Balzac and Zola, who had ambitions to bring every aspect of society to life, but read Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Anatole France, Huysmans, Maupassant, Mirbeau, and of course Proust, and you enter a world in which painting is surprisingly important. What is more, all these novelists explored not only how a painter sees things but also how he looks at them, and this produced a new way of writing. “I would just have liked to see you dismantle the mechanism of my eye. I enhance the image, that much is sure, but I don’t enhance it as Balzac does, any more than Balzac enhances it as Hugo does,” Émile Zola told his protégé Henry Céard, highlighting the visual nature of novels at the time.¹ This was essentially a French phenomenon; it has no real equivalent in England, Germany, or Russia. In the United States, it was not until the end of the century that painting became a literary subject in the work of Henry James. In England, Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature...."

हे मराठीत का घडले नाही , फ्रेंच कादंबरीचा मोठा प्रभाव ह ना आपटे यांच्या सारख्या लेखकांवर असून सुद्धा ? वि का राजवाडे, विलास सारंग त्यांच्या अत्यंत प्रभावी समीक्षेत सुद्धा याचा उल्लेख सुद्धा करीत नाहीत. 

The Raising of the Cross, 1610-1638 by Peter Paul Rubens

 Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary (1857)

Referenced painting: The Raising of the Cross by Rubens and various religious images

Importance: In scenes such as Emma’s visit to the Rouen cathedral, Flaubert weaves references to sacred paintings and stained glass. Emma’s romantic and aesthetic ideals are informed by her exposure to religious and historical art, reflecting her escapist tendencies.

 

What Should be the First Line of “The Stranger”? ...by the New Yorker and Vilas Sarang... विलास सारंग 'आउटसायडर' च्या अस्सल पहिल्या दोन ओळीच्या शोधात

 विलास सारंगांनी अनुवादावरती विपुल लेखन केले आहे. त्यांच्या 'सर्जनशोध आणि लिहिता लेखक', २००७ मध्ये "अस्सल 'आउटसायडर' च्या शोधात" नावाचा लेख आहे.

ते लिहतात ;

It's interesting that Ryan Bloom has written an essay "Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be" for The New Yorker dated May 11, 2012. (https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translation-what-the-first-line-of-the-stranger-should-be)

He says:

"...The ordering of words in Camus’s first sentence is no accident: today is interrupted by Maman’s death. The sentence, the one we have yet to see correctly rendered in an English translation of “L’Étranger,” should read: “Today, Maman died.”"

काफ्का आणि कोविड ...When Would It Be Less Stressful for Gregor Samsa?

जी ए कुलकर्णी: "...मला वाटते, फार मोठी नाव घ्यायची झाली तर Kafka, Camus and Dostoevsky हे अतिशय morbid होते. त्याच्या उलट तर मला वाटते , की अनुभवाने जर लेखकाला जीवनविषयक एखाद्या आकृतीची सतत जाणीव होत राहिली नाही , तर त्याचे लेखन मोठेपणी जरीची टोपी घालून हिंडणाऱ्या माणसाप्रमाणे बालीश वाटते. मराठीतील पुष्कळशी कथा अशी अगदी फुटकळ उथळ वाटते याचे कारण तेच. कोणते तुकडे हाती लागले यावरच आपले इतके समाधान असते, की तो कशाचा तुकडा असावा याकडे आपले लक्ष नाही. Kafkaची मते पटोत अगर न पटोत, Hardy देखील असाच , पण त्यांच्या लेखनावर अशा या universal reference चा शिक्का आहे. ..."

(२८/८/१९६३, पृष्ठ १२०, 'जी एंची निवडक पत्रे', खंड २, १९९८)

विलास सारंग: "…मला कधी वाटतं, १८९० साली हरिभाऊनी जरा विचार केला असता: 'आपण कशाला ब्रिटीश वाङमयाचं शेपूट पकडून राहायचं?' आपलं कथाकथन विकसित करायचं. एवढं काही कठीण नाही. काफ्काच्या 'मॅटॅमॉर्फसिसचं पहिल वाक्य घ्या. 'पंचतंत्रातल्या एखाद्या गोष्टीत ते फिट बसलं असतं. एवढी फँट्सी झाली. उरलेल्या कथेत वास्तववाद आहेच…इ. स. १९०० पासून आजवर पाश्च्यात्यांनी आपल्या वाङमयाकडे ढुंकून बघितलेलं आहे का? त्यांना आपल्या कथासाहित्यात वेगळ, नवीन काही आढळल नाही … " ('लिहित्या लेखकाचं वाचन', 2011)

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 1915:

"... One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

"What's happened to me?" he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out—Samsa was a travelling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.

Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge—made him quite melancholy. "Why don't I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness," he thought. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn't get himself into this position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before...."

 

  Artist: Roz Chast, The New Yorker, January 2021

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....

स्पॅनिश साहित्यातील समुद्र अनुपस्थिती आणि समुद्र न पाहता समुद्र...Marathi Literature is Not Alone

दुर्गा भागवत:
"…देशबंधू दासांची आणखी एक गंमत सांगते. त्यांनी 'सागरसंगीत' म्हणून समुद्रावर कविता लिहिल्या आहेत. समुद्रावर चाळीस कविता लिहिणारा हा जगातला एकुलता एकच माणूस. त्या कवितांबद्दल साने गुरुजींनी इतक सुंदर, इतक सुंदर लिहिलंय, की ते वाचल्यावर मला बंगाली भाषा शिकायचा मोह झाला. मी शिकले बंगाली आणि मूळ बंगालीतून 'सागरसंगीत'च मराठी भाषांतर केल…" ("ऐसपैस गप्पा: दुर्गाबाईंशी", लेखक : प्रतिभा रानडे, पृष्ठ: 59, 1998) 
जी ए कुलकर्णी : 

"... समुद्राचा अवजड करडा पडदा स्थिर आहे. त्याच्यात आपली प्रतिबिंबे आहेत म्हणून आपण अस्तित्वात आहो  असे निःशंकपणे खडकांना वाटते. व  ते अलिप्तपणे उभे आहेत. 

        समुद्र केवळ निरीक्षक आहे..."

('अस्तिस्तोत्र', १९७१, 'सांजशकुन', १९७५,२०१५) 

विलास सारंगांचे खालील विधान केंद्रस्थानी ठेवून मी 'Marathi Literature at Sea!...मराठी साहित्यात समुद्राच वास्तव किती सातत्याने दुर्लक्षित केलं आहे' नावाची पोस्ट ऑगस्ट ५ २०१३ रोजी लिहली. ती जरूर पहा आणि त्याखालील कमेंट्स पण पहा.  

: "… 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", २०११, पृष्ठ ६६-६७)

नोव्हेंबर २०१७ मध्ये मी हॉर्हे लुईस बोर्हेस (Jorge Luis Borges) यांचे 'Conversations, Volume 1', २०१४ पुस्तक चाळत होतो.  बोर्हेस यांच्या दीर्घ मुलाखतीचे हे पुस्तक आहे.     

"... FERRARI. The sea.

BORGES. The sea, yes, that’s so present in Portuguese literature and so absent in Spanish literature. For example, Quixote . . .

FERRARI. Set on a tableland.

BORGES. The Portuguese, on the other hand, the Scandinavians and—yes—the French since Hugo, feel the sea. Baudelaire felt it; Rimbaud in his ‘Le Bateau ivre’ felt a sea that he had never seen. Coleridge wrote ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ without having seen the sea; when he did see it, he felt betrayed. And Rafael Cansinos Assens wrote an admirable poem about the sea. I congratulated him and he answered, ‘I hope one day to see it.’ That is, the sea in Assens’ imagination and the sea in Coleridge’s imagination were superior to the mere sea of geography (laughs)...."

कोलेरिज यांनी समुद्र न पाहता त्यांची जगप्रसिद्ध कविता लिहली होती! म्हणजे समुद्र न पाहता सुद्धा एखाद्याला मोठ्या प्रभावीपणे समुद्राबद्दल लिहता येते. 

Engraving of a scene from 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

'The frozen crew and the albatross' by Gustave Doré (1876)