Saudamini
@thesapphirebook
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Deo, non fortuna / writing, translating, etc. / part Bengal part Rajasthan / editor @ricjournal
Jaipur, Rajasthan
Joined June 2009
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Thinking tonight of Sharmila Tagore in Satyajit Ray films
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Jhumpa Lahiri, the Bengali-American writer, with her husband Alberto Vourvoulias on their wedding day in Calcutta.
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Simone Weil wrote, "The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it."
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Clarice Lispector wrote, "Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?"
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Tomas Tranströmer wrote, "Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side."
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1956 Russian poster of the Indian film Mirza Ghalib, based on the life of one of the greatest Urdu poets.
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Roland Barthes wrote in Lover's Discourse, "To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, "age-old pastime of humanity."
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Satyajit Ray at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 1967. Photographed by Mike Wilson.
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Pratima visarjan, (immersion of the Durga idol at the end of Durga Pujo), water colour, Gaganendranath Tagore, 1915.
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"We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed."
- Agnes Varda
(1928-2019)
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Marguerite Duras wrote, "That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion."
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Postcard from Delhi which is sometimes a city, sometimes a Japanese scroll painting.
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Merci to Milan Kundera who wrote, "In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting."
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I return to this poem by Cavafy like one returns to a prayer:
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Kafka, the boyfriend we all deserve.
Just you, just as you are, including that terrible paragraph in your letter, that’s the way I want you.
Franz Kafka, 1914.
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Italo Calvino wrote, "There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name ..."
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Postcards from Benaras that is sometimes an ancient city, sometimes a fever dream, and sometimes a river.
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W.G. Sebald wrote, "We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it."
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Dostoyevsky describing the state of mind of a Twitter user.
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Postcard from a yellow solitude that is sometimes known as the city of Jaipur.
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Postcard from Varanasi where, on the Manikarnika Ghat, the burning bodies remind us that today it is them, tomorrow it will be us. Aiz maca, falea tuka.
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Four books to get to know me:
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Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in Zorba the Greek, “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.”
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Marina Tsvetaeva wrote, “For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.”
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Reading Italo Calvino tonight: “It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.”
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"The role of the translator is to madden a language, drive it insane, do unimaginable things with it."
For
@asymptotejrnl
, I recently spoke to Tristan Foster about language, my translation project, and the Hindi writer Rajkamal Chaudhary.
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Lawrence Durrell wrote, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”
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Italo Calvino wrote, "seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
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Still life with onions, potatoes, and summer vegetables / Jaipur
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Pandemic conversations.
(Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot)
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Italo Calvino describing a pandemic continuing for a second year.
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In 1936, Amrita Sher-Gil painted an almost melancholic portrait of her cousin, Sumair, dressed in a green-pink saree, her emerald or peridot earrings contrasting against the heavily rouged cheeks. The light, as if, turns her into a demi goddess.
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The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.
— Roland Barthes
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Anne Carson wrote, “sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.”
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Postcard from Jaipur where it is still possible to buy a loaf of melancholy from old bakeries.
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W.G. Sebald wrote in Austerlitz, "... the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision."
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Absolutely captivated by this image:
Devika Rani, the iconic actor, smoking on the sets of Franz Osten’s Izzat (1937), produced by Bombay Talkies. Photo taken by the German cinematographer Josef Wirsching who worked extensively in Indian cinema.
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Pleased to announce my translation of Rajkamal Chaudhary’s short stories will be published this fall by
@seagullbooks
.
The experimental Hindi writer, for the first time in English.
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"This is true happiness: to have no ambition & to work like a horse [...] To have the stars above, the land to your left & the sea to your right & to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale."
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Clarice Lispector wrote, "The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I’m subterraneously unattainable because of what I know."
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Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, "Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity."
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Postcard from a Jaipur that sometimes turns into an Edward Hopper city.
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Clarice Lispector wrote, "Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."
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Postcards from Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon. Where even now, in the museum, stands the half-damaged lion capital of Ashoka. A time so long ago and now. There is sunlight. Yellow wildflowers bloom in the echo of the ancient.
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Found at home this afternoon a selection of Marina Tsvetaeva’s letters and poems in Hindi. First edition, 1992.
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"A Kalighat line drawing of a cat with a fish in its mouth illustrating a Bengali proverb of Hindu priests publically abstaining from eating meat or fish but secretly indulging in private. Circa 1920."
May the Bengali humour and irreverence continue. Happy Bengali new year!
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Postcards from Jaipur, where one gets lost in the lanes like in the lines of a palm.
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Anne Carson wrote, "We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over."
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This morning I found my grandfather’s diary from 1968 where, in the midst of daily budget calculations, he had jotted down quotes from Horace, Mahadevi Varma, Premchand, Seneca, Confucius, Shakespeare, etc.
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In bed with Clarice Lispector tonight while the train, not named Lucknow Express, dreams towards Oudh. It’s dark but not for long. It will soon be darker.
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The new year resembles a new city. Italian Calvino wrote, “arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
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শুভ নব বর্ষ!
May we be like these paan eating and hookah smoking women this (Bengali) new year.
( 📷: Women, called Bibis, shown smoking hookah and eating betel leaves. Kalighat style of painting, 1875.)
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Postcards from Jaipur where the rains rewound the time. There were apsaras from Cambodia and faces from Pushkar. Pink flowers and gin. There were sounds from the sky and images from the future. Stars that said the universe is all black.
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Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “And you became like coffee, in the deliciousness, and the bitterness and the addiction.”
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Sumair, Amrita Sher-gill.
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I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.
- Wislawa Szymborska, born on this day.
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The gauze like, fading dream like beauty of a Dhakai jamdani saree.
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Postcard from Jaipur where summer is also known by its other name: gin and tonic.
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Thanks to
@SushmaSwaraj
, I just heard from the Rajasthan CM office. My contact details will be shared with the Police IG.
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Postcards from a Jaipur summer made entirely of mangoes: Dasheri mangoes, aam panna (a cooking drink made of unripe mangoes and mint), masoor daal with unripe mangoes, and Alphonso mango kulfi.
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International poster of Satyajit Ray's film Ganashatru (1989). It is an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 play An Enemy of the People.
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Postcards from Jaipur winters: homemade ricotta with jam and strawberries on toast, coffee, Korean instant ramen with stir fried bok choy, a kaleidoscopic fever dream of green, red, yellow, orange, pink, brown. A forest of vegetables. A dome of eggs. Sunlight.
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Postcards from Jaipur where the remains of a breezy evening are merlot, pear, and parmesan. Behind a shut eye, one sees the blue and pink of bougainvillea and the sea.
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Two black and white photos of the coolest Hindi poet, who also happens to be my father, who also happens to be celebrating his birthday today.
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Italo Calvino wrote, “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognises the little that is his, discovering much he has not had and will never have.”
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I think traditional marriage vows should be replaced by these lines by Euripides (in Carson's sublime translation).
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This season’s first alphonso mango reminded me of Wislawa Szymborska who wrote, “Not without its charms is this terrible world, not without its mornings worth our waking.”
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