How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn July 21, 2022

 

How Green Was My Valley, first edition cover 1939

How Green Was My Valley (HGWMV) was quite a phenomenon as a novel in 1939, and later as a film directed by John Ford in 1941. The novel kept the author, Richard Llewellyn, in clover. He who once worked as a dishwasher in Claridges Hotel, later lived in a suite at the same hotel after his commercial success.

He claimed to be Welsh, a miner’s son, but inquiry has shown he was born in London to an innkeeper and had no first-hand experience of the life of coal miners. His real name was Vivian Lloyd. What knowledge he had of Welsh miners came from a family who ran a bookshop in London. Their three sons would regale Llewellyn with stories of their father's experiences in a Welsh coal mine. More remarkable even is the fact that it was written in India while the author was stationed there with the British military just before WWII.

Richard Llewellyn did his research, as novelists are meant to do. These days critics look askance at authors or musicians appropriating from cultures other than their own. But this may be shortchanging the imaginative artist who can be from anywhere, but with sufficient gathering of knowledge and study can enter into a different time, a different culture and dwell so long in imagination there that it becomes their own. 

The village highlighted in How Green Was My Valley may have been based on Gilfach Goch in southern Wales

Th novel does romanticise the miserable lives which real miners led in those times in the pits, but that is an author’s prerogative to spin a story with imaginative recreation. The factual errors and the varnishing that the author wilfully wrote to make the novel more appealing is documented in this article in The Guardian. 

Clearly the story as told attracted the public even if the Welsh miners did not recognise themselves in the novel. It not only charmed the readers who have kept it in print, but it also became a multiple Oscar winning film in 1941. The novel has been translated into scores of languages. The film starred Maureen O'Hara (as Angharad) and a young Roddy McDowell as Huw, and was filmed in Malibu, California. It won six Oscars and was adapted twice for BBC television. A musical was also made.

Maureen O'Hara as Angharad, Walter Pidgeon as the pastor, Mr. Gruffydd

In the modern context of Climate Change, coal is the worst fossil fuel that causes global warming. Where it once was the major source of power generation in UK, new policies such as European Union’s directives for clean air have succeeded in limiting coal to a few percent in terms of power generation in UK. It is as good as dead there although it thrives in markets like India where the percentage of power generation from coal was ~80% in 2021, in China ~64%, and in the United States ~20%.

A brooch, set with a garnet, on a lover's knot of gold – the present that Huw gave Bron

Some of the readers noted the bucolic scenes of nature painted in words by Richard Llewellyn. They make good reading. But all the romances in the novel are ill-fated and presage the unhappy ending. Three sequels followed but none had the success of HGWMV. 

Several of the readers were familiar with the novel from their youth, but reading it again decades later made the poignancy of the story and the complexity of the inner lives of the characters stand out. There was humour too and everyone enjoyed the readings and discussions … many thanks to Shobha and Zakia who selected the novel.

Dai Bando and Cyfartha Lewis are appointed to teach Huw how to box

Poetry Session – June 30, 2022

Nabaneeta Dev Sen

Two of the poets presented were in translation, one from Bangla and the other from French. The Bangla poet Nabaneeta Dev Sen who wrote a small number of her poems in English, left a useful guide for translators in her essay Translating Between Cultures: Translation and Its Discontents. Her questions to guide translators were these:

– Should one prioritise the content or the spirit of the poem?
– Should the translation remain faithful to the text, or is a freer version required?
– How should the quirks of an author’s unconventional syntax be rendered into the target language?
– What to do with cultural and linguistic details like rituals, gestures, dialectal colloquialisms and idioms?
– Should footnotes be used to explain allusions to history, mythology, and prior literature?
– If the original poem has a formal structure such as meter and rhyme, is it necessary to retain that and if so, at what cost?
– Should divisions such as line breaks and stanzas be followed?

The ideal is that translations should not read as translations, but as “poems, a new voice perfect in their own right, transcending the barriers …” (Wendy Doniger)

 While Nabaneeta Dev Sen had the close collaboration of her daughter to create the translations, in Victor Hugo’s case (poem A Sunset chosen by Zakia from the collection Feuilles d'Automne or Leaves of Autumn), the translator was the original poet and mystic, Francis Thompson, well-known for his poem The Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

 We had two Welsh poets represented, Alun Lewis the war poet who wrote two small poetry collections and two short books of prose which have stood the test of time. He was dead at 28 in a brutal war he despised but which he joined, ignoring a long history of mental depression and a strong pacifist bent.  He said: “I’m not going to kill. Be killed perhaps, instead.”

 Geetha’s choice was an eloquent rendering of Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas, the more famous hard-drinking poet of Wales who was considered too Welsh to be English in England, and had the simultaneous misfortune of being too English for the Welsh. Everybody remembers him for his villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

To reciprocate Joe’s choice of a Bangla poet, KumKum chose a Malayali poet, though one who wrote all his poems in English, having been brought up outside Kerala. Apart from writing poems, the best experience in his life was getting married to a wonderful doctor, Kavery Nambisan, from Kodagu (Coorg) who is a literary person, in addition to spending a life of service as a doctor in remote areas.

Kavery Nambisan who works in rural hospitals has written seven books novels and children's books

Thomo was true to form in choosing a lyricist and song-writer, the front man of the Led Zeppelin rock band. He sang for us one of the famous numbers, Stairway to Heaven, which delighted everyone. But having to go off on a rescue mission to a wedding, he could not be present. Readers must be thankful he sent a recording which is permanently theirs to listen to from a link below within this blog post.

Arundhaty chose a poet, Suniti Namjoshi, who is in the forefront of the feminist movement, but began her professional life as an officer in the Indian Administrative Service before pursuing higher studies abroad. She wrote poems and stories and became a noted academic in Canada, USA and UK. The poem chosen was somewhat dark:

… a poet lives
like any other creature, talks perhaps
more than is normal, her doom no brighter,
nor her death less dismal than any other.

We had Devika reciting an elegy for Africa (a continent of countries she loves) by one of its famous sons from Sierra Leone who overcame racism and prejudice to contribute at the highest level of academia, medical science and poetry – Davidson Nicol. Africa, he describes, as a continent for loving:

… the hibiscus blooms in shameless scarlet
and the bougainvillea in mauve passion
entwines itself around strong branches
the palm trees stand like tall proud moral women
shaking their plaited locks against the
cool suggestive evening breeze;

Shoba recited an astrophysical poem by Marie Howe, inspired by black holes and the singularity (infinity) Einstein found as one possible solution to his famous equations of Gravitation in 1916. Black holes were made popular by Stephen Hawking (to whom the poem is dedicated), although it was the physicist John Wheeler who first used the term in 1967. The poem is titled Singularity and written in the form of an interior monologue, reflecting on the origin of the universe and humans.

Singularity by Marie Howe

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - 26 May, 2022

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, original edition 1845 in 6 volumes

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo) was published in serial fashion in the Journal des Débats starting in 1844 and was published in book form in 1846. Dumas cunningly devised the ending of each chapter so the readers would wait captivated, in expectation of what would happen next week in the adventures. 

The Count of Monte Cristo – First English edition, 1846

The Count of Monte Cristo was translated into all modern languages and has never been out of print. More than thirty films have appeared based on it. Two may be mentioned, the first starring Richard Chamberlain in 1975 is fairly faithful to the book (1h 41m):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=TUCk9jK-xsU

Richard Chamberlain as The Count of Monte Cristo and Kate Nelligan as Mercédès in the 1975 film.

The second is much longer version which appeared on TV in France as a series, featuring the formidable French actor, Gérard Depardieu starring in a 6-hour version of the unabridged novel in French with English subtitles :

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rnAWw7MAN3U

Gérard Depardieu as Edmond Dantès and Ornella Muti as Mercédès in the French TV mini-series.

This issue of Classic Comics, published in March 1942, was No. 3 in the series, cost a mere 10 cents, and featured an adaption of The Count of Monte Cristo. The cover art was by Ray Ramsey

The particular abridged translation chosen was a great success, both for its prose style, and it’s hewing to the essential storyline without distractions. 

                                              

The Count of Monte Cristo (abridged), cover of the Château d'If, the prison where Edmond Dantès was held captive – with an Introduction by Luc Sante.

The prison is situated on the Île d’If, which is a tiny island, only three kilometres from mainland France, west of the old port of Marseille. The entire island is heavily fortified; high ramparts with gun platforms surmount the cliffs, which rise steeply from the surrounding ocean. It was built in 1524-31 on the orders of King Francis 1, apparently to defend the coastline from sea-based attacks. The isolated location and dangerous offshore currents of the château made it an ideal escape proof prison much like the island of Alcatraz in modern USA. Its use as a dumping ground for political and religious detainees soon made it one of the most feared and notorious jails in France. Over 3500 Huguenots, i.e. Protestant Christians were sent to Château d’If. This novel has made it internationally famous since 1844. Dantès makes a daring escape from the castle. In reality, no inmate is known to have made it out of the prison. The modern Château d’If maintains a roughly hewn dungeon in honour of Dantes, as a tourist attraction.

As was common practice in those days prisoners were treated differently according to their class and wealth. The poorest were placed at the bottom, up to twenty or more per cell. The wealthiest were able to pay for their own private cells higher up, with windows and a fireplace.

It is evident why this novel remains a best-seller in its many translations after almost 200 years: it provides adventure, a gripping storyline, and a great variety of characters and scenes from different regions of Europe with the local flavour imparted well. Something dramatic is always happening. It has all the ingredients for success: a mysterious hero with superhuman powers; and portrayals of jealousy, cupidity, love, and revenge. 

Major characters when the story begins – Dantès, Mercédès, Caderousse, Danglars, Villefort, Fernand and the ship Pharaon (Classic Comics)

The reader will find many passages that are worthy of attentive reading, all inspired by the grand style of Alexandre Dumas; some filled with pathos, some menacing, others full of swashbuckling braggadocio, still others soft and romancing. Some of the relationships border on adoration, impossible to find in contemporary humans with their egalitarian outlook. 

Map of Monte Cristo Island and Elba, where Napoleon was imprisoned

Monte Cristo – Christ’s Mount in English – is a tiny Mediterranean island, south of Elba. Here, Dantès discovers a treasure hinted at in the instructions given by the Abbé Faria, which helps him slip into high society as a wealthy Count. 

Monte Cristo Island, viewed from the north

In real life, Dumas celebrated the success of this novel by building himself a château he named Monte Cristo, where he played host on a scale matching that of his fictional hero.

The pearls of Guzerat and the diamonds of Golconda also find mention in the novel, indicating how famously wealthy these places were!

Corsica

Corsica features as an island in the novel; Bertuccio, the servant of the Count is Corsican.

Corsica  in the seas lies 90 kms west from Tuscany in Italy and 170 kms south and east from Côte d'Azur in France. It is the most mountainous island in the Mediterranean, a veritable ‘mountain in the sea.’ It is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean, after Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus. Mountains comprise two thirds of the island, forming a single chain. Forests make up 20 % of the island. The total surface area is 8680 square kilometres of which 3500 is dedicated to reserve parks. It is governed by France.

In this novel, the island is thematically important as Napoleon’s birthplace. The island is supposedly, the home of the Italian blood feud known as vendetta. This theme connects the Count’s complex plot and his Corsican servant Bertuccio’s simpler vengeance.

One of the bon mots in the novel occurs when Monte Cristo addresses Maximilian, the son of his former patron, M. Morrel thus:

The friends we have lost do not repose under the ground; they are buried deep in our hearts.

The original French is more poetic:

... les amis que nous avons perdus ne reposent pas dans la terre, ils sont ensevelis dans notre cœur ...

Which deserves an appropriate couplet in English:

The friends we’ve lost live in our hearts –
They do not lie in grassy parks.

Life and Works of Shakespeare Celebrated - April 29, 2022

             

The dedication by Thomas Thorpe's of Shakespeare's Sonnets 

The reading started with plays from Shakespeare, Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew.  Macbeth is one of the shortest and most intense plays of Shakespeare with everything to make it a dramatic thriller, from blood and murder, to ambition, insanity and war. The metaphors in the blank verse are startling and one wonders that ordinary mortals could speak in such forceful tones, that elevate into pathos and poetry. There are many throwaway lines of bird lore like this from Act 1, Scene 6:

Banquo:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate.

But the scene staged by Priya and Arundhaty has Macbeth gaping in horror at the bloody ghost of the murdered Banquo during a feast at his manor. You can see enacted at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiSISGY8Yy8

Macbeth – ‘I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me.’ – Act 3 Scene 4

Devika took up an old favourite, The Taming of the Shrew.  Recapping the final speech when Katharina the shrew has turned into Katharina the obedient wife, Devika observed that for once Shakespeare goes against the grain of his known penchant for strong independent women. In the scene Devika chose, Katharina is instructing the other ladies on the duties of a wife in Act 5, Scene 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnd2lpe-rW4

Katharina – ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.’

Zefirelli’s 1967 film version has yet to be surpassed. It has Richard Burton as Petruchio, Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina, Michael Hordern as Baptista, and Michael York as Lucentio.

“The world’s most celebrated movie couple in the motion picture they are made for!” was how this film was advertised. This version shows the play as funny and entertaining, the way WS probably intended. The gorgeous colour in the sets and costumes is characteristic of Zefirelli, and is seen again in his production of Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespearean verse sounds quite believable as daily conversation in the actors’ mouths. This film is a great introduction to Shakespeare for anyone who hasn't seen his plays before. It is the perfect antidote for those who have been intimidated into thinking that Shakespeare is only for experts and scholars.

The Plays are central to the legend of Shakespeare’s universality. The Sonnets, however, can vie with the Plays in their smaller compass, for they are so compressed in thought and filled with vigorous speech that they merit reading several times – not just by lovers, but all who want to learn the variety of torments a human goes through in life, quite apart from the anguish of love. The Plays are wonderful. But once you get into the Sonnets it takes on the ageless quality that Shakespeare himself attested to in Sonnet 18 when he said.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The sentiments expressed are entirely contemporary and the language too. With a little familiarity that comes from frequent reading, the language also becomes contemporary — gender, sexuality, love, self-loathing, anguish, hate and everything else find their truest chronicler in WS.

Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are concerned with ‘love’, of course, but they also reflect upon time, change, ageing, lust, absence, infidelity and the yawning gap between the ideal and reality when it comes to love. 

Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, and the first 17 encourage the youth to marry and father children. Then the subjects diversify. Some are erotic, while others reflect upon the anguish caused by love. 

Sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespearean legend. This woman is elusive, often tyrannous, and causes the speaker great pain and shame. The two final sonnets (Sonnets 153 and 154) focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail desire and longing. 

The Sonnets were probably written, and perhaps revised, between the early 1590s and about 1605. Sonnets 128 and 144 were printed in the poetry collection called The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. They were first printed as a sequence in 1609, with a mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’ 

The dedication has led to intense speculation: who is ‘W.H.’? Is he the young man of the sonnets? Various candidates have been proposed, such as William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. No conclusive identification has been made, and it may never be, because the poet may not even have been writing about historical individuals, but giving free rein to his imagination, founded on his lived experience. We don’t know if Shakespeare was involved in the 1609 printing of his Sonnets, because the dedication was written by the printer, not by Shakespeare.

Shakespearean sonnets are composed of 14 lines of iambic pentameters:
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

and most are divided into three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet form and rhyme scheme, taken together, are known as the ‘Elizabethan’ sonnet. 

Sonnets arrived in England from Italy where they had a slightly different form called Petrarchan (after Francesco Petrarca 1304 – 1374). Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), translated Italian sonnets into English as well as composed some of his own. Many later English writers used this sonnet form, and Shakespeare seemed to have revelled in its potential for invention. The final couplet always provides a forceful and memorable conclusion to the argument. It is strange to think of a poetic form as an argument, but that is what the sonnet is in English. For it lays out a thesis and then suddenly inverts it or subverts it in what the Italians call a volta (a change in direction or reversal) after the eighth line. Sonnet 130, for instance, builds up a picture of the speaker’s mistress as defective in all the conventional standards of beauty, but the concluding couplet remarks that, while all this is true:

And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

For further reference see: https://www.bl.uk/works/shakespeares-sonnets

Also see: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/an-introduction-to-shakespeares-sonnets

One of the standard references for Shakespeare’s sonnets has been written by Helen Vendler, Professor Emerita at Harvard University:
The Art of Shakespeare′s Sonnets 

https://www.amazon.in/Art-Shakespeare%E2%80%B2s-Sonnets-Paper-Belknap/dp/0674637127/

Another commentary is by Don Paterson:
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary 

https://www.amazon.in/Reading-Shakespeares-Sonnets-New-Commentary/dp/0571245056/

Here below is the link to the transcript of a short lecture on what the Sonnets tell us about Shakespeare himself. It is by the distinguished Sir Stanley Wells, general editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and former director of The Shakespeare Institute:

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/what-was-shakespeare-really/what-sonnets-tell-about-shakespeare/

The Sonnets have been set to music by many singers and composers. Paul Kelly has set seven of them to contemporary pop song rhythms. According to him the sonnets work naturally as lyrics. The fact that they are composed of metrical lines (each with 10 syllables), and rhymed, has many parallels with modern songs. Here he is singing Sonnet 18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj0kGzuL-cA

Sonnet 18 as a pop song by Paul Kelly from his album ‘Seven Sonnets & A Song’.

Our two readers, Thomo and Geetha, presented Sonnets 73 and 87 in song, and readers of this blog can listen to their recorded voices below.

Alice Walker - The color Purple, March 24,2022

The Color Purple, first edition cover, 1962.

The Color Purple takes place in rural Georgia, where the lives and tribulations of the life of African-American women in the 1930's is laid bare. It starts in a very despairing manner exposing wide-scale family abuse and rape of women at home as a result of male domination. 

Celie is the central character, abused by her husband Albert who treats her as his chattel and discards her after sex. Celie was raped by her stepfather and bore two children who subsequently disappeared. Nettie is her sister who escapes the dismal situation by going to London and joining a missionary group. She has a decent husband and lives a joyous life in Africa.

Albert takes on a mistress named Shug who is at first contemptuous of Celie, but later grows fond of her and establishes a bond. It all starts with Celie nursing Shug back to health when she falls sick. It grows into a lesbian affair and a few pages of this are the cause for demands that the book be banned in school libraries in USA.

Celie has no one to sympathise with her and confesses her troubles in letters addressed to God. This is how the first half of the story is told. She writes letters to Nettie but never gets a reply until she later discovers with Shug’s help that Nettie’s replies to her had been hidden, stashed away by her cruel husband in a trunk. From those letters, we learn of Nettie's voyage to Africa and her spiritual conversion, after finding that the white missionaries did not really care for the Olinka people or respect their traditions. In the end, the message is one of hope.

The Color Purple was turned into a musical in 2005 and played to sell-out audiences on Broadway during 2005 to 2008, earning eleven Tony Award nominations. 

                          

Scene from the musical The Color Purple – Fantasia Barrino, playing Celie, was wailing through her climactic solo, ‘I’m Here.’

The passage by Saras has the line from which the title of the novel is taken:

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

Joe’s passage has another comforting quote from a letter of Nettie:

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Poetry Session – Feb 25, 2022

T.S. Eliot at age  10 in 1898 – he was never young according to Robert Crawford, his biographer

This was the year to celebrate two literary centenaries, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Appropriately a section of Eliot’s poem was read at the February session. But since Joyce’s poetic works are not as celebrated as his other works, here below we wish to remember the light touch Joyce had with lyric poems when he started out:

STRINGS in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
 
There's music along the river
For Love wanders there,
Pale flowers on his mantle,
Dark leaves on his hair.
 
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument. 
(From Chamber Music, 1907)

Since February is Black History month in America, KumKum chose to read a young contemporary poet, Amanda Gorman, who has been named the first Youth Poet Laureate of America. Another black poet, Alice Walker also figured, whose parting advice is:
… expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

She stands in contrast to those who wrote poetry in their youth in the sixties, the beat poets like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Thomo chose Ginsberg and read from his poem Howl.  

Though it is not the ‘cruellest month,’ the change of season that comes about in northern climes in February inspires many poets – some with prosaic thoughts about a ‘small pink bumhole’ (Margaret Atwood), and Boris Pasternak with more care-worn lines about
… the melting snow, instilling
Dry sadness into eyes that weep.

The variety among the poems is attested by there being a woman Dogri poet, Padma Sachdev, in English translation represented, as well as Milton from the opposite end of the spectrum, describing the Biblical strongman Samson, given the epithet Agonistes, i.e. one engaged in struggle.

A souvenir mug for KRG readers was designed by Joe. One side shows the mug shots of the current 12 readers:

The obverse depicts the favicon of KRG's blog – the design for which is a stylised form of the coat of arms purchased by William Shakespeare for his father, John Shakespeare:

Kiran Desai – Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard Jan 28, 2022

  Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard - first edition cover

The Sermon in the Guava Tree by Kiran Desai appeared as a short story on page 90 in the June 23, 1997 issue of The New Yorker. The novel appeared a year later.

The Sermon in the Guava Tree by Kiran Desai appeared as a short story in the June 23, 1997 issue of The New Yorker

The short story begins with Sampath moving into the Guava tree and the police being unable to trace him. Later he is found in the orchard. “We must formulate a plan. Only monkeys climb up trees,” says his father and a doctor is called in to examine him, but concludes, “Nobody except for God can do anything about him.”
A holy man is consulted, and he says all Sampath needs is a mate, for whom there is a standard roster of requisite qualifications. This was the subject of the passage Saras read from the novel. A talcum-powdered girl is found and she is hoisted up the tree to Sampath.

Sampath notices people he knew in the audience below, whose letters he had secretly read in the post office after steaming them open. He proceeds to divulge snippets and after a few such episodes of seeming clairvoyance, he is confirmed as a Baba, a god-man.

Mr. Chawla, has the racketeer’s epiphany: Sampath might make his family's fortune. They could be rich! “How many men of unfathomable wisdom possessed unfathomable bank accounts?” At this point begins the pampering of Sampath who is provided every comfort for his chosen arboreal existence:
“He made a lovely picture seated there amid the greenery, reclining on his cot at a slight angle to the world; propped against numerous cushions, tucked up, during chilly evenings, in a glamorous satin quilt covered with leopard-skin spots. On his head he sported a tea-cozy-like red woollen hat that had been knitted by his grandmother.”

Thus ensconced in his orchard bower, Sampath gave what came to be known as The Sermon in the Guava Tree. Sampath uses his secret knowledge from steamed (and steamy) letters to amaze the audience. Then he issues a series of wisdom sayings, which Kiran Desai attributes in the novel’s acknowledgement, to Bhargava’s Standard Illustrated Dictionary of the Hindi Language, compiled by R. C. Pathak, BA, LT.
– Many a pickle makes a mickle . . .
– When the buffaloes fight, the crops suffer.
– It is a hard winter when dogs eat dogs.
– Every cock fights best on his own dunghill.
Etc.

The short story ends with Sampath making the news:
POST-OFFICE CLERK CLIMBS TREE
“Fleeing tedious duties at the Shahkot Post Office, a clerk has been reported to have settled in a large guava tree. According to popular speculation, he is one of an unusual spiritual nature, his child-like ways being coupled with unfathomable wisdom.”

But the novel has a more mysterious ending in which a metamorphosis of Sampath takes place into a Buddha-like Guava with his own birthmark. The langurs then spirit him off, thus transformed, to a distant forest in the mountains.

Humorous Poems – Dec 3, 2021

 

Eliot originally wrote these poems for sharing with his godchildren, later collecting them in a book that used his nickname given by Ezra Pound.

The Covid19 virus continues to keep people apart but the readers were determined to use digital methods to meet over the Internet the entire year using the Zoom app. While we might have enjoyed each other's company more if we were physically close, the distance has not been an insuperable obstacle, as this session of humorous poems showed.

We dressed in fancy ways to illustrate the whimsical poems we were reading. We extracted all the humour that rhyme and nonsense encourage. How is it one may ask that a serious poet not given to rhyme, one whose fame arrived with The Waste Land expressing the sombre fears and brokenness of four years of the first world war, could write with freedom and comic verve on the threshold of yet another war? But that's exactly what T.S. Eliot did in one of the poems recited (The Naming of Cats)

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
     It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
     When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

...

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

Lear's original 1846 Book of Nonsense was composed of limericks. Later other poems like the famous Owl and the Pussy Cat were added.

There is no doubt that humour and nonsense bring out the best in poetry. How memorable these poems are; fortunate those who are introduced to them as children for they leave in their wake the unending joy of remembering and reciting them !

Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend, Nov 19, 2021

 

My Brilliant Friend – first edition of the English translation, 2012, by Europa Editions

“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of,” said The Economist in a review one year after Europa Editions brought out the English translation of L‘amica geniale as My Brilliant Friend.  In the years following 2012 three other novels were published that follow the two friends as they grow up – The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). The four novels constitute the Neapolitan Novels quartet by Elena Ferrante. The first two books in the series have been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.

The HBO Series starring Gaia Girace as Lila and Margarita Mazzuco as Lenù

Elena Ferrante, the author, has maintained a studied anonymity, although she is willing to answer questions by e-mail, via her publisher. Her translator into English, Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, did not have access to her directly; the film directors who transferred her novels to the screen had only the most fleeting help from her. Her attitude is summed up in a comment she made: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”

A collection of essays, letters and interviews by Elena Ferrante

In a collection of essays, letters and interviews called Frantumaglia (meaning ‘fragments’) the author answers questions her readers have asked her. She speaks of the joys, the hardships, and the anxieties of those who tell a story. We learn about the cities in which she has lived. Childhood, she says, is a warehouse for a thousand suggestions and fantasies. She also deals with motherhood and feminism. 

Elisa Del Genio (Lenù) and Ludovica Nasti (Lila) in the HBO series Season 1

It was James Wood in a review in The New Yorker in 2013 who brought to the attention of the English-speaking world the writing of Elena Ferrante. He reviewed the four novels available in English at the time, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and My Brilliant Friend. Wood noted that the “the material that the early novels visit and revisit is intimate and often shockingly candid: child abuse, divorce, motherhood, wanting and not wanting children, the tedium of sex, the repulsions of the body, the narrator’s desperate struggle to retain a cohesive identity within a traditional marriage and amid the burdens of child rearing.” 

For Ferrante’s heroines, life is a conundrum of attachment and detachment. Illustration by Annette Marnat in The New Yorker

Poetry Session – Oct 29, 2021

Shelley claimed poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their moral influence on politics is exemplified by the spoken words which struck the world’s conscience when a young Sudanese-American poet was invited to tell the gathered attendees of COP26 in Glasgow what was happening as a result of climate change to the voiceless people of the world.

Emtithal Mahmoud shooting her poem about the devastating impact of climate change – ‘Earth began to purge us too’

We are treated at every poetry session to a similar experience as our readers declaim their selections. The written and the spoken words inspire us and we return energised to our lives, grateful for a hour or two of the human spirit bursting forth in word and song (yes, we listened to Leonard Cohen, that twin of Bob Dylan).

Two of our readers are leaving the group for personal reasons. We shall keep in touch directly; and indirectly through this blog. On occasion we have had past members join us for particular sessions.

The next meeting will be to read Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, on Nov 19 via Zoom. For those who have purchased the 4-novel Kindle edition, MBF, the first novel, ends at Chapter 62 with the sentence: “It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”