Shanta
Shelke was a noted Marathi writer, journalist, professor and poet. As a writer,
her collections include – poems, children works, translations, stories,
character sketches and many more. She was a song composer also and her songs
were sung by great names like Lata Mangeshkar, Kishori Amonkar and Asha Bhosle.
During her working career in Mumbai, she also served in
Film Censor board, Theatre examination board and Govt. book award. She used to
translate English movies for newspaper columns. She has worked as assistant
editor of the weekly Navyug for 5 years.
Shanta
was born on 19 Oct 1922 in Indapur, Pune. She was educated in Sir Parshurambhau
College, Pune. Later she did post graduation in Sanskrit and Marathi and was
the first rank holder of Mumbai University.
She also won the Na. Chi. Kelkar and Chiplunkar awards during the same period.
Then she worked as assistant editor of the weekly Navyug. After 5 years, she
moved to Nagpur and
worked as Marathi faculty in Hislop College. She retired after long service
from Dayanand College, Mumbai and settled in Pune.
Her
works in Marathi include - poems, stories, novels, character sketches,
interviews, critiques and introductions. She used to translate English films
for Marathi newspaper columns and a few of them have been later published as
books. Ek pani, Madarangi and Janta Ajanata are a few such translation works.
She also produced lalit literature like Anandache Jhad (The tree of happiness),
Avad Nivad (Likes dislikes), Vadildhari Manase (Father figures),
Pavsaadhicha Paus (The rain before the rains), Sansmarane (memories) and Dhool
Pati - an introspective autobiography.
Her
published novels are Dharma, Odh, Chikkhaldrayancha Mantrik, Vijhti Jyot,
Nararakshas, Punarjanma and Majha Khel Mandu De. Some of her famous song
collections include Godaan, Varsha, Kalyanche divas fulanchya rati and
Purvasandhya. She has never attempted playwrights and comedies.
Sandra Cisneros
Born on
December 20, 1954, Cisnero grew up in Chicago, Illinois. Cisneros’ father
developed a travelling proclivity and her family had to constantly move back
and forth between Chicago and Mexico City. Due to constant travel they had to
keep switching school and find new place to live every time. The instability in
the family made six of Cisneros’ brothers to form a bond among themselves
excluding their sister. The feeling of isolation aggravated as her father
looked at his children as six sons and a daughter. In fact, the growing
loneliness played a key role in developing her interest in writing. Her mother
was the only one around her with an avid reading habit and social awareness and
she made sure that her daughter would become an independent woman unlike
herself.
Cisneros received
her early education from a Catholic school Josephinum Academy. Here she
polished her writing skills under a teacher’s supervision. She wrote poems on
the Vietnam War when she was ten and won recognition for her work. According to
herself, she truly began writing when she got enrolled in a creative writing
course in college. In 1976, she graduated from Loyola University, Chicago and
two years later she earned Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa.
She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was struck by a sudden
realization that she had an advantage over her fellow writers for her rich
cultural heritage. Being a Mexican woman instead of making her an outsider gave
her the benefit to write differently without conforming to literary style of
American canon which her classmates adopted. Her cultural diversity became a
model for her writing in which she shared her experiences living in the Puerto
Rican neighborhood of Chicago.
In her novel The House on Mango Street she drew inspiration from Mexican and
Southwestern popular culture. She tried to depict the lives of the people she
could relate to. Her stories were drawn from real life conversation she had
heard from the people, especially the ones who were trivialized. She even
confessed to recording the conversation in writing she had with people which
she would later adapt into her writings. Another aspect that contributes to her
unique writings style is her bilingualism and biculturalism treasure. Being
familiar with two cultures enriched her work as she employed an array of
experiences, thoughts and feelings with the help of diction from two different
languages.
The publication of
Cisneros’s first novel earned her huge popularity and Writer-in-Residence posts
at US universities. She taught at a number of universities which include
University of California and University of Michigan. Subsequent to writing her
first novel, she published a collection of stories, titled Woman Hollering Creek and Other
Stories, in 1991. It
contains 22 stories and incorporates a wide range of narrative techniques. Each
story employs different narrative style such as, first-person and third-person
and omniscient narration. Besides that the theme of her works often addressed
construction of female identity and sexuality which was repressed during her
time by the patriarch society.
Sandra Cisneros
contributions to American literature include; My
Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987),
Loose Woman: Poems (1984), Have
You Seen Marie?(2012) and other notable works.
Kamala Surayya
Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin was a Russian Romantic author who is considered to be the
greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature Pushkin
pioneered the use of vernacular speech in his poems and plays, creating a style
of storytelling—mixing drama, romance, and satire—associated with Russian
literature ever since and greatly influencing later Russian writers.
Born in Moscow, Pushkin published his first poem at the age of fifteen, and was
widely recognized by the literary establishment by the time of his graduation
from the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin gradually became committed
to social reform and emerged as a spokesman for literary radicals; in the early
1820s he clashed with the government, which sent him into exile in southern
Russia. While under the strict surveillance of government censors and unable to
travel or publish at will, he wrote his most famous play, the drama Boris
Godunov, but could not publish it until years later. His novel in verse, Eugene
Onegin, was published serially from 1825 to 1832.
Pushkin and his wife Natalya Goncharova, whom he married in 1831, later became
regulars of court society. In 1837, while falling into greater and greater debt
amidst rumors that his wife had started conducting a scandalous affair, Pushkin
challenged her alleged lover, Georges d'Anthès, to a duel. Pushkin was mortally
wounded and died two days later.
Because of his liberal political views and influence on generations of Russian
rebels, Pushkin was portrayed by Bolsheviks as an opponent to bourgeois
literature and culture and a predecessor of Soviet literature and poetry.
Although Bogan
attended Boston University for only one year in 1915-1916, her early education
at Boston Girls' Latin School gave her a rigorous foundation. She was already
writing poetry and reading Poetry:
A Magazine of Verse in its
first issues in 1912. While modernism in literature and the arts was gaining in
momentum and shape, Bogan was quietly mastering metrics and defining her style.
She later wrote passionately about her artistic awakening, describing a visit
to her mother in the hospital. There in the room she saw a vase of marigolds:
"Suddenly I recognized something at once simple and full
of the utmost richness of design and contrast that was mine." Design and
contrast are at the heart of her formal poetry, and the style that she crafted
early did not vary much throughout her later years.
She married Curt
Alexander in 1916, but the marriage was not a happy one. They had one daughter,
born just a year later. By 1920 Bogan was a widow (she had earlier separated
from her husband), left with a child to care for and without a reliable income.
After moving to New York City, where she would live for the rest of her life,
Bogan started to piece together the life of a working writer. She soon met
other writers in the city's thriving literary community: William Carlos
Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Lola Ridge, John Reed (1887-1920), Marianne Moore,
and, most important, Edmund Wilson, who became her early mentor. Wilson,
already a man of reputation, urged her to write reviews of literature for
periodicals, and this eventually became a steady source of income.
A year after
modernism peaked in 1922 with T. S. Eliot's The
Waste Land, Bogan published
her first book, Body of This
Death. In contrast to Eliot's
expansive, associative, free verse, Bogan's lyrics were brief, limited in
theme, and highly formal. The volume, which was well received although many
reviewers found the poetry obscure, speaks eloquently about love and grief,
Bogan's twin themes. At this time she was seeing a psychiatrist to help her
battle the depressions that relentlessly beset her and occasionally
hospitalized her. Her life and her lyrics are intimately intertwined, although
Bogan would be the last person to elucidate the connection. She was intensely
private; for years many of her friends did not know she had a daughter.
Bogan had married
again in 1925, this time to the writer Raymond Holden. This marriage, like the
first, was troubled and did not last. Despite the personal turmoil, the 1920s
and 1930s were Bogan's most productive poetic years. She published Dark Summer in 1929 and her third volume, The Sleeping Fury, in 1937. Other books that followed
mainly collected previously published work and added a few new poems. The
writing process for Bogan was painful and exacting; poems came rarely and at a
cost. Her poem "The Daemon" depicts her muse as a monster demanding
revelations again and again. Much of her work, in fact, draws upon the themes
of silence and language as well as upon the failure of love.
During the 1930s,
when many of her writer friends turned to the left, Bogan fought a lonely
battle for literary purity. She was adamant that politics had no place in
poetry; art called for something grander and more honest. Additionally, she saw
the temporary defection of her friends (Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, Léonie
Adams) as evidence of intellectual and emotional weakness and as a betrayal of
the authority of the self.
During this decade
she began reviewing poetry for the New
Yorker, a job she held for
thirty-eight years. Many of these reviews, as well as others, are collected in A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on
the Literary Art and Vocation (1970).
Her prose is direct, nonacademic, and sharp. The series of articles on her two
favorite poets, William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, is particularly
insightful. The poet W H. Auden thought she was the best critic of poetry in
America.
Her occasional
teaching stints, which began in the 1940s, were another, more direct way to
influence the minds of young people. As the strain of writing poetry increased,
Bogan turned more and more to criticism and education. In 1951 she was
commissioned to write a short history of American poetry, eventually published
as Achievement in American
Poetry, 1900-1950, in which
she does not once mention herself. She also translated poetry and prose and
worked with younger writers (William Maxwell, for example) to help them distill
beauty and truth from their writing.
The reviews of her
last collections were admiring, if quietly so. Her second collection, Collected Poems, 1923-1953 (Poems
and New Poems had come out in
1941), won a shared Bollingen Prize in 1955. Nonetheless, for most of her
writing life she felt invisible in the literary world. Late in her life
financial burdens eased somewhat, helped in large part by a monetary award from
the Academy of American Poets in 1959 and another from the National Endowment
for the Arts in 1967. Her final and most complete collection, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968), contains only 103 poems.
She died alone in her New York apartment, fighting the familiar depression she
had wrestled with all her life.
Interest from
feminist circles in the hidden lives of women writers has prompted new
assessments of Bogan. The "mosaic" of her autobiographical pieces, Journey around My Room (1980), and the Pulitzer
Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise
Bogan: A Portrait (1985),
have introduced her to the general public. Yet Bogan remains a poet's poet,
yielding beauty to those whose ear, mind, and heart are open to the demands of
her poetry. Her work is particularly important in light of her place in the
company of other modernists. In a time of experimentation, of a general
loosening of structures and subjects, she held the line for formal poetry and
for the precise blend of emotion and intellect to enliven that poetry.
