Posts filed under 'language and movement'

Movement and Stagnation: On Virgula by Sasja Janssen

March 28, 2024 | in Reviews | by Areeb Ahmad

The comma is . . . perpetually in motion . . . a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable.

Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, 2024

I write to you because you hover in the corner of my eye
I write to you because you never answer
I write to you because, like me, you dislike stagnation

In Wit, Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning one-act play, the main character, English professor Dr Vivian Bearing, re-lives crucial moments of her life while undergoing an experimental chemotherapy treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer. In one instance, she remembers a comment made by her college professor, Dr E M Ashford, reprimanding her for taking language too lightly in an assignment on Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”; Ashford is quick to point out that the edition Vivian consulted contained faulty punctuation, and surmises that the simple message of the poem—“overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life”—gets sacrificed to the ‘hysterical’ punctuation of semicolons and an exclamation point. Vivian’s iteration—“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”—distorts what is conveyed by a single comma: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” One can clearly see the importance of one simple symbol: how it can make or break a poem.

The Dance of Śiva

August 9, 2023 | in Essays, Retellings | by Kanya Kanchana

Śiva moves in dance, in sculpture, in painting, in poetry, in ritual, in physics . . . And still he is not done. What are we to do?

In our new column, Retellings, Asymptote presents essays on the translations of myths, those enduring stories that continue to transform and reincarnate. In this essay, Kanya Kanchana follows the whirling story of Śiva through dance, science, and myth.

“A life in which the gods are not invited is not worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.”

– Roberto Calasso,
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

There was sound and the sound was colossal. From within the pulsing sound, from the heart of the creation and dissolution of the cosmos, a single beat could be heard—ḍam. Incantatory, the beat started to repeat—ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam ḍam. The beat was coming from the ḍamaru, a small handheld drum. There was a god and he was dancing. He was Śiva and he shook all the worlds.

His matted locks flew wild. Gaṅgā, the holiest of rivers who was nestled in them, swelled in spate, tried in vain to keep him cool. The lambent crescent moon that adorned them, intoxicating soma, now glinted crazily. Vāsukī, the great serpent coiled around his blue, kālakūṭa-holding throat, reeled. Śiva’s locks were a forest (jaṭa, matted locks; aṭavī, forest, as the asura king Rāvaṇa sings).

Once upon a time, another forest: a forest of cedars (devadāru, wood of the gods, Cedrus deodara), into which Bhikṣāṭana Śiva, the mendicant, wanders naked, deep in despair for the sin of having killed Brahmā, his outheld palm an escutcheon, Brahmā’s skull still stuck to it somewhat like an alms bowl. The illustrious sages in the forest are not pleased to see this beautiful beggar who drives their women mad with desire. They send a tiger to shred him to bits; he flays the tiger and wears its bloody skin around his waist. They throw venomous serpents at him; he wraps them around himself as sinuous ornaments. They send a demon dwarf, the malign Muyalaka. Śiva steps on him and breaks his back. And then he dances. He dances until it dawns on them that he is none other than Śiva.