Poetry Session – Oct 30, 2025

Of the ten poets read at this session only one was new, Ryan Teitman. All the others from Ben Jonson to W.H. Auden, and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish had been selected for previous readings. Had Priya been present we would have had one more new poet to add, George Sze.

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes - illustration

It began with the highly atmospheric and haunting ballad The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. The poem tells about the gallant outlaws of olden times and begins with the line

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

…

And the highwayman came riding—

         Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

Ben Jonson invites a friend to supper

Ben Jonson the great rival dramatist to Shakespeare, came up with a feast for his patron that is described in lush terms, more poetic and detailed than any modern Michelin starred restaurant could muster:

An olive, capers, or some better salad

Ushering the mutton; with a short-legged hen,

If we can get her, full of eggs, and then

Lemons, and wine for sauce; to these a cony

Is not to be despaired of, for our money;

And, though fowl now be scarce, yet there are clerks,

The sky not falling, think we may have larks.

The spirit of conviviality and shared enjoyment at the supper makes for delightful reading.

St. Cecilia with an Angel by Orazio Gentileschi (father of the renowned woman artist Artemesia Gentileschi). The organ is the symbol of St Cecilia

Auden was a fortuitous choice occasioned by Joe’s desire to remember his sister, Cecilia. Auden wrote the lyrics of a chorale that was composed by his friend Benjamin Britten whose birthday fell on the feast day of St. Cecilia on Nov 22. The refrain has the lines:

Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions

To all musicians, appear and inspire:

It ends with an instructive line:

O wear your tribulation like a rose.

Ada Limón, the current poet laureate of America, was read in a simple poem, The Conditional. The poem imagines all the malign things that can happen but reminds us it is enough that tomorrow comes, and we are still alive to enjoy the day:

Say we spend our last moments staring

at each other, hands knotted together,

clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.

Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be

enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,

right here, feeling lucky.

Robert Frost – man peering into a well

Robert Frost, a perennial favourite among our readers, is here represented by a strange poem in which a man peers constantly at the still water in a well, seeing himself reflected – but one day Something happens. That something is what disturbs this proto-Narcissus from succumbing to his enduring fancy for himself. Readers were reminded of another modern, sitting atop the world with only himself to admire!

Darwish, the poet of Palestine, who made it his calling to defend his land against all comers ready to snatch it from his compatriots, writes:

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: 

on this earth, the Lady of Earth,

mother of all beginnings and ends. 

She was called Palestine. 

Her name later became

Palestine. 

My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.

Imtiaz Dharker reminds us that to be in a minority is no disaster, indeed it builds one up to resist all encroachment on one’s freedom and meet others on an equal footing. She writes:

I don’t fit,

like a clumsily-translated poem;

She has become a prescribed author for school children in UK.

Bob Dylan delivers his Nobel lecture finally – photo by Lester Cohen

Bob Dylan has been a favourite songster-poet of Thomo’s and this time one of his signal recordings, Mr. Tambourine Man, was sung by Thomo, paying homage to one of the greats of the modern world who is still going strong at age 84.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me

…

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship

My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip

My toes too numb to step

Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’

It is a song about seeking inspiration and escape from the mundane through a mystical, musical figure, often interpreted as a muse. The real Tambourine Man was musician Bruce Langhorne, who played a large Turkish frame drum that looked like a giant tambourine on several covers of Dylan's recordings; Dylan confirmed Bruce was indeed the inspiration. 

Bruce Langhorne – Tambourine Man

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin – Sept 19, 2025

 

Giovanni’s Room, first edition, Dial Press, NY, 1956

Giovanni’s Room (GR) tells of a white American who in those postwar days shipped out to Paris, intent on finding out who he was and what he wanted to do. In his quest to escape from the preset world of America and take a fresh view, David begins with the holdover of an American girlfriend who sort of wants to partner him, but has yet to decide and goes off to Spain. 

David is left to himself and having no associates except a well-off older man who likes younger men and lends them money, goes pub crawling. There he meets and takes a shine to a man who is described only as the ultimate exciting homosexual man would be:

in slow motion … carried a glass, … walked on its toes, the flat hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness. … glittered in the dim light; the thin, black hair was violent with oil, combed forward, hanging in bangs; the eyelids gleamed with mascara, the mouth raged with lipstick. The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the navel

The inevitable happens – thrown from an absent American girl to a foppish Italian youth, an unsure David can’t decide. Thus David, still ashamed of his homosexual propensities, is captivated by the tragic youth Giovanni who is ill-treated by his bar employer, Guillaume.

James Baldwin’s 1951 address book includes the names of other artists, such as Richard Wright, with whom he interacted

Giovanni’s room turns out to be a shabby place where David seems to enjoy a measure of devotion and love from his male partner, but is unable to commit himself fully. Recall the maxim of the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, “Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing,” – the name of a book he wrote. David is unable to achieve that and after his girl friend Hella returns from Spain, his double-minded wavering leads to his unhappiness and Giovanni’s self-destruction. The sunny hopes of a Parisian summer sink into an abyss. 

Henry James – signed picture hung over his desk in Paris

People have drawn all kinds of lessons from this novel, about shame and guilt, about having the courage to be oneself in the face of societal disapproval, and so on. A different conclusion would be that though happiness in human love towards a particular person, arises often from the thrill of sexual attraction, its long term persistence depends on a bond of loyalty. The thrill may abate but the bond will still keep pouring out quiet happiness.

James Baldwin working at his desk in Paris

In the modern world it would help to build oneself when young, acquire competence in some chosen sphere and a measure of independence, before committing to emotional love with another person. Then when it happens it will be between two equals. On the other hand, committing to love from a position of inferiority or lack of attainment, leaves one partner weak and dependent on the other. Does one need to marry to achieve happiness? That's another question many could answer in the negative. 

Baldwin – ‘The story of the Negro in America is the Story of America’

Baldwin’s writing is superb in painting the overheated atmosphere of the bars in Paris where much else happens besides emotional connections. The rambles in Parisian streets and the interjection of French slang frames the novel intimately. Baldwin gives space for Hella to appear sympathetically pliant to David’s moods, ready to take the plunge and make babies for him. 

The devotion of Giovanni to David was remarked on by readers as one of the beautiful things in the novel. His mental clarity contrasts with David’s hesitation; the guilt David feels in the end for Giovanni’s degradation underlines the tragedy for both. Though the novel has a large theme of homosexuality, it only serves to set up the disappointment that awaits those who are not willing to take the risk and follow their own interests, setting aside the conformist demands of the social culture around them. 

Arundhati Roy launches her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me on Sept 2, 2025 in Kochi

 

Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes To Me – front cover photo by Carlo Buldrini

The global launch of Suzanna Arundhati Roy’s memoir of her mother, Mother Mary Comes To Me (MMCTM), took place on Sept 2 at Mother Mary Hall of St Teresa’s College in Kochi. Ms Roy came down from New Delhi with a host of friends and admirers, publishers and editors, to ensure that the book would take off on its world-wide exposition from Kochi, her home ground, so to speak. Her last launch from here was of the Malayalam translation of The God of Small Things (TGOST) by Priya A. S. from an open air site on the Marina close by. 

Arundhati Roy in green saree and red choli – Feb 3, 2011

On that occasion Ms Roy arrived looking distant and stately in a lovely blue-green saree, the colour of the river Meenachal, wearing a trim red choli with a necklace of black string attached to a pendant of square metal secured to a fragment of nondescript red fabric. On this day, fourteen years later, she arrived in a floppy red top over blue jeans, relaxed and ready to mingle with the crowd gathered to celebrate her literary presence in the city. It was the middle of the Onam season and the roads were crowded but those who wanted to meet her arrived an hour and a half in advance of the slated 6:30 pm event to find the venue three-quarters full. There were more than a thousand attendees, with the overflow from Mother Mary Hall necessitating the setting up of a second hall to accommodate the crowd. Former students of her mother’s Pallikoodam School were there in strength as a special contingent.

Arundhati Roy in red top and blue jeans at Mother Mary Hall, Sep 2, 2025

The audience was a diverse mix of people, young and old, along with friends, family, movie stars, and publishers. It was organised by DC Books and Penguin Random House India. The event bore the typical marks  of an Arundhati Roy event, filled with emotion, wit, and political discourse. “Almost everyone that I love is gathered in this room. That’s a pretty dangerous thing, given our government,” laughed Ms Roy. 

Arundhati Roy with her mother Mary Roy

Ms Roy identified the origin of the book to a time after her mother’s death on Sept 1, 2022 – “I was walking in London one day with my agent, and I said to him that my mother was my shelter and my storm.” He turned around and said “So when are you writing this book?” 

In a way, Ms Roy had been writing this book all her life; whether she was spending her fatherless childhood in Kerala or going to college in Delhi – her mother was an inescapable presence in her mind. She went away at age eighteen and gradually discovered who she could be and flowered in her multitudinous ways far from the critical eye of her mother. But she had been taking notes all the while, as writers do. And here after a difficult journey she was ready to present to public gaze the persona of her mother and her own relationship along with the myriad battles she fought along the way, mirroring several that caught her mother up in a different storm 2,600 kms away.

Israeli airstrikes destroy buildings in the Gaza Strip. Photo: © UNRWA/Ashraf Amra – more than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, half of them women and children; the total Israeli death toll has risen to nearly 2,000

But Ms Roy noted that the troubles of the world constantly knock on our doors for desperate attention; she made special mention of the horrors of the war in Gaza, linking the ongoing suffering there to the feeling that “someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in another room” when she receives recognition. She emphasised that her awareness of the crisis isn't triggered by guilt but by a genuine understanding of the interconnectedness of suffering: “Wherever you look, things are happening, and you can't just think of your own story,” she said. 

Reading the Romantic Poets – Aug 8, 2025

The Romantic Poets session is always interesting since it deals with poets who inaugurated new ways of writing about nature and the human response to beauty. Four of the Big Six were represented – Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley – in addition to three women, one Italian poet and one Irish  poet of the romantic period.

It was significant that Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William, who overshadowed his sister’s contributions to his poetry and eclipsed her poetry as well, was given her voice in this session. 

And Emily Brontë, sister of Charlotte, whose novel Jane Eyre we read last month, appeared in a sensitive poem recounting a night long vigil watching the stars, a worthy accompaniment to van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.

Van Gogh – Starry Night

Thomas Moore, the Irish poet of the Romantic period, is even better known as a composer of music with his multivolume work A Selection of Irish Melodies. A reader recited a poem of his and discussed his important works such as A Minstrel Boy and Lalla Rookh. Another reader wanted to present him also, but was prevented by lack of an Internet connection.

Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, was excerpted in a long piece by Geetha. He Was the poet labelled “Bad, Mad, and Dangerous to know“ by one of his admirers, Lady Caroline Lamb. The poem gave Byron instant fame as it sold very well before he left on his fatal expedition to win the independence of Greece from Ottoman rule. Statues of his have sprung up in Greece, and streets and schools are named after him in a grateful country:

Statue of Lord Byron in Athens

A rather tragic tale by William Wordsworth recounting the pastoral story of a farmer (Michael) who lost his land was read in excerpts; it served to remind us of what is lost by ordinary people tilling the land when urbanisation overtakes a country.

There is a straggling heap of unhewn stones! 

And with that faint memorial, the tale 

Ends.

One of our readers wished to illustrate how well the current Large Language Models perform by putting forward its translation of the romantic poem L’Infinito by Giacomo Leopardi; but readers uniformly declared their preference for a human translation that rendered the poem into sonnet form in English. Chalk one up for mere mortals! But we must regret not knowing the identity of the mysterious ‘Z.G.’ attributed as the author of this translation of the famous Italian poem about infinity, solitude and the sublime – although it appeared as far back as 1910 in the Oxford Book of Italian Verse.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – July 14, 2025

 

Jane Eyre An Autobiography first edition 1847

Charlotte Brontë wrote the novel Jane Eyre and published it in 1847 under the male pseudonym, Currer Bell. It became a classic of literature over the years, both for its tender love story and its portrayal of a fiercely independent woman who would not brook male patriarchy, or other kinds of domination by family members, school directors, upper class nobility, and assorted tyrants and bullies. As the novel makes clear the qualities genteel women were expected to master were only these – stitching, playing the piano, reading and speaking French, and painting. 

Ultimately, a novel depends on strong portrayal of its cast of characters, and Charlotte Brontë gave to each of them the coloration of a novelist who enters into the story and creates vibrant portraits of villains, heroes, and the miscellaneous folk who play their role in what is now labelled as a Bildungsroman, a novel that runs the course of  a person’s formative years and development. Jane Eyre has become an essential part of English literature and this exposition by Benjamin McEvoy is an excellent introduction, to what he calls “one of the most riveting love stories ever penned in English Literature.”  It also takes you on the journey of Charlotte Brontë’s life story, which is partly sublimated in the novel.

Jane Eyre – ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me’

Of course, novelists base a lot writing on their life experiences, but they live a rich inner life too in the imagination; they also borrow from what they read. There’s clear evidence in Jane Eyre that Charlotte Brontë not only read a lot, but her mind became a storehouse of words from her wide reading. One of her correspondents a gentlemen called George Lewes (partner of Mary Evans, i.e George Eliot) advised her to eschew imagination in favour of life experience. Here was her answer:

Imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?' 

Anna Paquin as young Jane Eyre (1996 film)

We have Gothic elements too in Jane Eyre. The first premonition is the strange shrieking at night from the attic which forebode a disaster in the making. 

This was a demoniac laugh—low, suppressed, and deep—

The summoning of Jane from the remote moor dwelling of the Rivers siblings with a call ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ while the candle was dying and the room was full of moonlight, leads to the ultimate reconciliation with Rochester. 

What about the language of the novel? It has a tendency to be Latinate and elevated with a vocabulary that forces a modern reader to reach for the dictionary often. The sentence structures are intricate and impart a formal tone that requires some getting used to. An appeal to one of the Large Language Models (LLMs) elicited ~100 words that are now archaic, obsolete, or rare in usage in modern English. Joe could find another 35 examples, besides, from his own notes while reading. Jane Eyre is a hothouse of rare plants that have to be observed, savoured and studied. It’s no Mills & Boon romp.

Charlotte Brontë's  'Book of Rhymes' sold for £1m

Major influences are evident of the Bible and Shakespeare, two venerable sources that English authors mine. Often she uses the Bible to point out the hypocrisy of pontificating characters like Mr Brocklehurst who tirelessly quote scripture in defence of ill-treating children in Lowood School. But the most elemental use of the Bible by Charlotte Brontë, goes all the way back to Genesis and the words ‘ help meet for him (Adam)’ as a definition of woman. The absolute rejection of this imposed status governs Jane’s rejection St. John’s suit.

Significant hints of Shakespearean characters are sprinkled in Jane Eyre. For instance, Bertha Mason (the ghostly presence in the attic) prowls at night in the upper rooms like Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in her guilt. Rochester resembles King Lear, beginning in arrogance, and suffering losses (Rochester’s blindness/maiming; Lear’s madness), until he achieves humility through suffering.

A fitting summation would be this quotation from Chapter 33 when Jane spurns Rochester’s portrayal of her as a captive bird before she departs:

“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”

Poetry Session – June 20, 2025

The first image revealed by the Vera Rubin telescope shows the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae in the constellation Sagittarius 5,000 light years away. The stunning detail comes from its 3,600 megapixel camera

 

To our delight readers chose a varied collection of poets, from Nobel prize winners (Glück) to those even more distinguished (Auden) who failed the inscrutable Nobel test; from satirical modernists like Ferlinghetti to humorous poets who cast a comedic light on humanity (Milligan). At one extreme we had an astronomer-poet who sang lyrically about the furthest reaches of the universe (Rebecca Elson) and at the other, stately Victorian verse describing how the mythical god Pan crafted the Pan flute by notching the reeds in a river bed (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

The W.B. Yeats statue by Rowan Gillespie in Sligo has Yeats's poems inscribed on it – over 150 "cuts" from his poems are imprinted in positive relief on the statue's surface. One notable inscription is "I made my song a coat"

KumKum introduced a new class of poems called Ekphrastic poems, which respond to a work of visual art, creating a dialogue between the written word and the image. She took a famous example by W.H. Auden depicting the Fall of Icarus in a painting by Pieter Brueghel. As it turned out the poem Joe read before her could also be classed as ekphrastic, because it takes off from the visual imagery of Marc Chagall’s paining Equestrienne of a girl riding with a boy on a white horse with a violin in its mouth.

Equestrienne, 1931 by Marc Chagall, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Why do we advertise ourselves as “A group of readers of literature in English, poetry and fiction”? Is it because we wish to ignore other languages that flourish in India? Is it because our knowledge of other literatures is so slight that we dare not tread there?

Looking through the posts in our blog which have preserved a wealth of detail about our readings and discussions over the years, you will find poems and novels from five continents – exhibited in English translation. It is not that we are ignorant of the riches in the original. You will find in the blog original translations of verse from languages like Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali. Readers have sung ghazals. There are even original translations from French and Spanish. We encourage readers to read in the original language, so long as a translation is provided into English for common enjoyment.

At KRG we have a great desire to know and appreciate the vessels that hold human culture, of which language, music, and art form an irreducible distillate. For us language is the primary vehicle through which we engage in that quest; finding pleasure in it, we sprinkle it from time to time with music and art. 

Kamala Das - popularly known by her pseudonyms Madhavikutty and Ami. She is prominent in Indian literature for her poetry and short stories

There is a trend now among prominent politicians exuding an illiberal brand of ultra-nationalism to assert that Indians speaking in English will soon be cowering in shame. Presumably, reading is still okay, and if so, one cannot do better than point them to Kamala Das who wrote her short stories in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty, and her poems in English under her own name. Here’s how she refuted critics of English in her poem titled Introduction:

… Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
It is half English, halfIndian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. 

(https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2018/07/kamala-das-her-life-through-poetry.html)

The Vegetarian by Han Kang - May 23, 2025

The Vegetarian first edition English

Though the title of this Man Booker International Prize-winning novel is The Vegetarian, it is not about vegetarianism at all. Rather it is about mental health, child abuse, choice, and conformance to norms.

We follow a woman named Yeong-hye who decides to stop eating meat after having horrible dreams. This decision of hers, especially in a predominantly meat-eating culture like Korea, fragments the family with far reaching effect. The story is in three parts, each part from the perspective of three people in her life. The first part titled The Vegetarian is narrated in first person by her husband who is always referred to formally as Mr Cheong, in a way keeping him apart from the intimate family structure. The second part is from the perspective of her unnamed brother-in-law and is titled Mongolian Mark, and the third is in first-person narrative by Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.

Seoul panoramic view – a megacity of 10 million, pronounced 'soul’

Though it causes so much tumult in the family, no one tries to discover the reason for Yeong-hye’s decision to turn vegetarian.  Her family, especially her abusive father, tries to force her to eat meat with disastrous effect. She mentions many times that she has a dream, but we are left to discover the dream and the possible reason for the decision, in the few portions in the book where Yeong-hye is given a voice. 

The abuse she has suffered and the trauma that she has gone through comes out in bits and pieces. Her husband abandons her; her brother-in-law sexually abuses her when she is at her most vulnerable emotional point, and her parents refuse to have anything to do with her. At a time, when she needs the most support, she has only her sister In-hye who stands by her and attempts to make sense of her situation. As Yeong-hye descends further into her insanity, In-hye realises that it could have been herself in the same situation if the circumstances had been different.

The translation was very patchy with syntax errors and use of very British slang which jarred with the text. Translations of novels are always difficult to judge especially as we have no knowledge of the original text. Does the translator replace words in one language with those of another or does he/she smooth out the narrative with the usages of the translated language? Then what happens to the idioms and speech conventions of the original language? Whatever the case, the story should have a smooth flow, which was missing. It could have been subjected to a tighter editing, and that felt strange as the Man Booker International is for books in translation. One could not agree with the reviewer of the New Statesman whose commendation was: “elegantly translated into bone-spare English”

In the end, it is a disturbing book, which almost none of the KRG members liked, but it still led to very lively discussion and debate as we tried to make sense of it. 

Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare, April 24, 2025

 

The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra – from the first folio edition, 1623

This Roman play of Shakespeare has many similarities with Romeo and Juliet, which was also a tragedy about Italian lovers who end up committing suicide. But this play in contrast is about mature love among adults who have already been ‘ploughed’ and ‘cropped,’ had wives and lovers, and seen action at the head of their empires. The military history of the times is combined with the mutual attraction between Antony and Cleopatra which pervades the play.

Cleopatra Sculpture by William Wetmore Story, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

As usual Shakespeare borrows the story from a source, in this case, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Plutarch was a Greek biographer and historian who lived from AD 40 to about AD 120. Shakespeare mined the book (in a 1579 English translation by Thomas North) for his Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. How reliable Plutarch was as a historian is a matter of doubt; he was like today’s celebrity journalists, eager to pick up juicy morsels about the great figures of the past who were destined to govern the history of their times. 

Cleopatra – asp at her breast

Nick Walton of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust explains in a 12-min video how Shakespeare made Cleopatra the central character in his play. He says that “Shakespeare added significantly to the mythology around Egypt's last queen. He developed his historical sources to create a woman who is at once powerful, jealous, humorous, stern, intelligent, vain, courageous, vulnerable, stubborn, fickle, loyal, down-to-earth, and otherworldly.”

What an unusual collaboration over 1,600 years between Plutarch and Shakespeare! The former merely mentions that Cleopatra came sailing “her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge.” 

WS turns that account into pure poetry:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,

The word barge is in Plutarch, but see how Shakespeare has added the alliteration of burnish’d, burned, and beaten.

The barge she sat in ... was of beaten gold

No less than other plays A&C is full of phrases you will remember once you read it,

– A lass unparalleled

– A morsel for a monarch

– I have / Imortal longings in me 

– Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale /Her infinite variety.

– The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch /Which hurts and is desired.

– My salad days, /When I was green in judgment

– There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned.

As in all the works of Shakespeare puns abound, some bawdy – meant to entertain the playgoers – some adding depth and a layer of added meaning to the play.

Bawdy:
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony

"Horse" refers to Antony’s warhorse (military might) and sexual prowess (horsemanship = riding a lover). The line drips with innuendo—Cleopatra envies the beast that carries him.

I am dying, Egypt, dying.
‘Die’ was Elizabethan slang for orgasm – Antony’s death throes mirror an erotic climax.

Clean:
The band that seems to tie their friendship together will be the very strangler of their amity.

‘band’ can mean both a unifying bond and a constricting noose.

He wears the rose / Of youth upon him
‘rose’  symbolises both beauty and the fleeting nature of youth (like a flower that withers).

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra (1963), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – March 28, 2025

A Thousand Splendid Suns, 2007 first edition dust jacket

The novel dwells chiefly on the fate of women in Afghanistan, seen through the intertwined lives of Mariam and Laila. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a rich man in Herat (close to Iran) too proud to bring her up in his household; he therefore gives her away in marriage to a shoemaker, Rasheed, in Kabul. The other woman, Laila, is a war orphan who becomes the second wife of the same shoemaker.

We follow them through decades of hardship and political turmoil in Afghanistan, as the author exposes their travails under puppets of the Soviet Union and the sectarian warlords, while the divisions in Afghan society tear it apart. The novel is about motherhood and sacrifice, and the resilience of these two women. Mariam as the senior wife harbours a resentment for Laila as the usurper. Then slowly, the relations thaw when a child is born to Laila and two women assume an uneasy alliance initially, which blossoms into a mother-daughter relationship as time goes on.

The sadness you feel for Afghanistan is because of the regime’s intolerance of all the arts and education, coupled with a systematic subjugation of women. The Taliban, so intent on banning, have all but forgotten the times when women were doctors, university faculty, and school teachers, playing an equal role in national life. Today we only view Afghan women as blue burqa-clad dolls silently tiptoeing behind a male family member.

The author, Khalid Hosseini, was an Afghan by birth who escaped at the age of 15 with his diplomat father and grew up in the West, settling in California as a doctor. The success of his very first novel impelled him to take up writing full-time. All three of his books have have reached the bestseller charts. He is also a UNHCR goodwill ambassador. A short profile of Khalid Hosseini is here.

The title of the novel is taken from a poem by the Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi who loved Kabul and wrote a poem about it in the seventeenth century; Laila’s father Babi quotes two lines in Chapter 26 when he is forced to leave Kabul: Tabrizi’s poem had been swirling in his head all day, but all he could remember were these two lines:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

The entire poem Kabul is a love letter to Kabul.

Tabriz is in the East Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran

Tabriz celebrates eight famous poets (including Shams-e-Tabrizi, Rumi’s spiritual guide) with individual mausoleums erected to them. There is a graveyard in Tabriz called the Maqbaratoshoara (‘Mausoleum of Poets’) where some 400 poets and mystics are buried with famous men. We can appreciate why Persia is the origin of so much poetry and the poetic forms that have permeated the culture of of West Asia and South Asia.

Maqbarat-o-shoara, also known as the Mausoleum of Poets, built in the 1970s in Tabriz, is a monument to honour the 400 or so Iranian poets, mystics, and notable persons buried in the grounds

However Saib-e-Tabrizi is buried in Isfahan, the magical city of culture with scores of famous monuments, palaces, and mosques.

1967 monument in Isfahan to Saib-e-Tabrizi (1592 – 1676) who was the greatest sonneteer of his time. It is home to a collection of around 120,000 couplets inscribed on the walls in marble