Monday, 21 July 2025
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – July 14, 2025
Wednesday, 25 June 2025
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
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"
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.
Wednesday, 4 June 2025
The Vegetarian by Han Kang - May 23, 2025
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.
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.
Monday, 5 May 2025
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.
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:
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.
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.
‘Die’ was Elizabethan slang for orgasm – Antony’s death throes mirror an erotic climax.
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.
‘rose’ symbolises both beauty and the fleeting nature of youth (like a flower that withers).
Sunday, 13 April 2025
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – March 28, 2025
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 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.
Sunday, 9 March 2025
Poetry Session - 24 February, 2025
We had Devika reciting from Rudyard Kipling who has been chosen numerous times. The poem about a lost road through the woods is a recollection of something lost:
where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Geetha’s choice was Jiddu Krishnamurti who was brought up to be a seer and mystic and later threw off that persona and freed himself. In this poem he discovers the entire tree from a single leaf:
The entire tree, its great trunk,
Its many branches, and its thousand leaves,
And an immense part of the sky.
I swore there there was no other tree, no other part to the sky –
His schools survive as a legacy of an approach to eduction through nature, the most famous being the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalle, AP. There is a rock, I am told, where students go to meditate. Birdwatching is a particular activity that is encouraged.
Joe had recourse to a poem by a poet who lamented the great calamity of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Refaat Alareer who foresaw his own death left a death poem about what should happen afterward. It would cause a little boy to look up and see hope in the sky. The poem If I Should Die has been translated into hundreds of languages, and Joe preferred to recite it in a simple Hindi version with the original English alongside.
Kavita’s choice of Sarojini Naidu as a poet was a poem that describes bangle sellers who brought a ray of golden light:
Who will buy these delicate, bright
Rainbow-tinted circles of light?
Lustrous tokens of radiant lives,
For happy daughters and happy wives.
Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was known as the ‘Nightingale of India’ because of her lyrical poetry. She was a political activist, and freedom fighter too.
KumKum chose two poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a favourite of Bobby Paul George who was a co-founder of KRG. They are humanistic poems and both have a sad ring, one extending empathy for a cripple, and the other for a lonely star that seems to call out to him:
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
Pamela chose a poem by a young black poet Amanda Gorman who was called on to celebrate the inauguration of Mr Biden as President in 2021 by reading a prose-poem titled The Hill We Climb. Her costume (a red Prada headband and yellow Prada coat) was more striking than the words, mostly a borrowed feel-good kind of rhetoric:
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.
She became a fashion influencer immediately afterwards with a photo-shoot for the Vogue magazine.
The moment when Poetry struck Pablo Neruda and changed his course in life is celebrated in a poem of that name that Saras read:
it came from, from winter or a river.
…
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
Shoba selected poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, author of a score of books and the first black woman to serve as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, at the Library of Congress. Sadie and Maud tells the story of two sisters, and though Maud is the one who avoided trouble she is described at the end thus:
Is a thin brown mouse.
She is living all alone
In this old house.
Thomo selected the uncle of the folk singer Pete Seeger, singer and composer of famous songs like Where Have All The Flowers Gone and We Shall Overcome. The uncle, Alan Seeger, was one of the many poets sacrificed on the vast fields of massacre which the fields of Belgium became in WWI – Ypres, Passchendaele, and so on. Like Alareer in modern Gaza, Alan Seeger had a premonition of death when writing his poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death:
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.
…
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
Th final poem was by the poet and diplomat who wrote those unforgettable lines in To My Coy Mistress, but here he provided for Zakia, The Definition of Love. This poet knows the intimate geometry of love:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
Marvell had the gift of stating in rhyme pithily and inimitably the essence of human experience.
Sunday, 2 February 2025
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025
The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke
When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day