"The Bard"

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the 16th century. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.

Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. (read more)

His Arms Wide

"Darmok on the ocean.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

The beast at Tanagra.

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh.

Kiteo, his eyes closed.

Temba, his arms wide/open.

Temba, at rest.

Mirab, with sails unfurled.

Shaka, when the walls fell.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered/opened.

The river Temarc in winter.

Zinda, his face black, his eyes red.

Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani.

Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya.

Ubaya of crossroads, at Lungha.

Lungha, her sky gray.

Uzani, his army with fists open.

Uzani, his army with fists closed."

The Language of Love

We welcome with utmost humility 

Mashal Sahir

a brilliant and inspiring Pakistani poet.


Her principal asset is knowledge combined with compassion , something extremely rare in Pakistan.


The real word to describe her does not exist in Urdu but a Farsi word "Dilsoz" describes her.


She possesses both a mind which can analyse and a heart that  feels so she sees both the tragedy and the comedy that Albert Camus described life as .

Her subject matter are the weak , the oppressed , the nameless ! Not Pakistans shameless elite both civil and military that only deserves to be shot without a trial !


Her book is available in market :--


Love The Un Spoken Language A Poetic Love Story
By: Mashal Sahir
ISBN: 9698238166
Publisher: Pak Book Empire
Price: PAK. Rs 250 = PAK Rs. 250
You Save : PAK Rs. 0 .
Special Price: PAK Rs. 250


SAEED BOOK BANK
F-7 MARKAZ, JINNAH SUPER, ISLAMABAD. PAKISTAN.
PH # 92-51-2651656-8(3Lines), FAX # 92-51-2651660
Email: info@saeedbookbank.com, sales@saeedbookbank.com
Website: http://www.saeedbookbank.com








Reproduced below is a book review about her book of poems written by Mr Intizar Hussain in Daily DAWN:--

Agha H Amin-


books-and-authors Column: The language of love By Intizar Husain
Sunday, 10 Jan, 2010 | 09:48 AM PST |

This book of love poetry ends with the realisation that:

Love can never be expressed in words
It can only be felt, for love truly is an unspoken
language

But this truth only dawns on the poet or the lover after a long discussion about love. In fact from time immemorial poets and lovers have been talking much about love as they experienced it. And each time they realise in the end that the experience has remained unspoken.

But let me first say a few words about the writer of these poems. She is a 17-year-old girl named Mashal Sahir whose collection of poems has been published under the title Love, the Unspoken Language. But as we go through these poems we are wonderstruck. These love poems give the impression that the author of these lines is a seasoned person, who has seen much of life and is now in a position to probe the depth of the emotion of love which holds a central place in the scheme of human emotions.

But this is nothing to be wondered at. The factors of age and experience of life are not very relevant in this respect. You may wonder who else but a lover is competent enough to talk wisely about this phenomenon of love. But lovers have rarely been seen to gain the status of poets competent enough to produce genuine love poetry. Poets are the ones who have taken upon themselves to unravel this mysterious phenomenon of human life.

As is evident from these poems, Mashal is really a poet; emotionally capable for delving deep in the phenomenon of man-woman relationships and feeling intensely. She is possessed with a poetic imagination which helps her to identify with the souls entangled in the maze of such emotions.

The poems have been conceived in a way that the soul in love undergoes a number of emotional stages, which taken together go to make a coherent love story. The first is the stage when the two souls coming nearer to one another feel intensely and develop a love relationship. But soon comes the stage when the girl develops a fear, the fear of losing him:

The reality that I will have to let go of you someday is my greatest fear Soon comes the day when she feels:

Distances are growing
between us
I don’t know what to do.


Also comes the moment she was apprehensive of:


I wish it didn’t have to end this way
I wish breaking the heart was a crime
Let’s not waste these precious moments we are left with;
after all this is the last time

It is transference from the bliss of intimacy to the pangs of separation. It is now she realises that ‘love knows not its depth till the hour of separation.’

What has been defined as hijr in Persian and Urdu poetry and birha in Hindi songs is the most painful period in the process of love. But at the same time it is the most fruitful season in the ever-changing seasons of love. It is during this season that the birhan finds herself in an acutely pathetic situation. But at the same time, while under the sway of the ebb and flow of emotions, she discovers in herself the depths and intricacies of the mysterious emotion called love.

In the present collection too this emotion finds a more effective expression in poems devoted to the depiction of separation. The poor soul suffering from the pangs of separation is being tossed among the cross-currents of emotions. While in a fit of anger she feels ‘I wish I did not love you.’

The Power of a Poem

Miroslav Holub, whose name always caught my ear because it was so exotic, has long been a favourite poet of mine. He was not only a poet and a writer but also a practising scientist in the field of immunology. Consequently, his poetry tends to be intellectual, hard-hitting and precise. M.H. was born in Plzen, in Western Bohemia (later called Czechoslovakia.)

His dates are 1923 - 1998, so he lived a moderately long life. An aspect of literature that has always captivated me is the war-time experiences of the authors and how those experiences have shaped the works that they have written. So, having completed his secondary school studies, Miroslav Holub could not go on to university study (during the Nazi occupation, the Germans closed down Czech universities) and he worked as a labourer at a warehouse and at a railway station. After the Second World War, Holub studied at Charles University in Prague, first at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, then from 1946 at the Faculty of Medicine. After this he became a notable immunologist and an international poet.

In the Irish language revival we had a return to "caint na ndaoine" ("the talk of the people")  with the likes of An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire, Pádraig Mac Piarais and Pádraig Ó Conaire.  Wordsworth sought to do the same with the language of English poetry - using the language of ordinary people. Together with S.T. Coleridge he wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they sought to use the language of ordinary people in poetry.  Likewise Holub maintained that "only by capturing life around us we may be able to express its dynamicism, the immense developments, rolling on around us and within us."  This also meant that it was necessary to give up regular, rhymed and melodious poetry and to adopt irregular and free verse. This was the poetics of Holub's first collections, especially Denní sluzba (Day duty, 1958) and Achilees a zelva (Achilles and the tortoise, 1960), His later collections developed it further.

The poem I would like to share with my readers is called The Door.  My father used always quote the old saying, "God never closes one door unless he opens another."  Opening a door is a very positive image or metaphor, letting the air of liberty and imagination in.

The Door


Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there's
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.


Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog's rummaging.
Maybe you'll see a face,
or an eye
or the picture
of a picture.


Go and open the door.
If there's fog
it will clear.


Go and open the door.
Even if there's only
the darkness singing,
even if there's only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing is there,
go and open the door.


At least
there'll be
a draught.


(translated by Ian Milner)

In praise of the homemaker

“The triumph of man was due entirely to the female of our species.” ~ Harold Klawans MD

I wonder when ‘child rearing’ was relegated to a lesser role than tax-preparer. Maybe we need a new word for it. I’m proposing ‘director of development’ and I am putting it up there with medical doctor and other workers in the helping professions. I mean, the farther I went in life, the more I realized how essential motherhood is to the vitality and continuity of the human species. The mother’s heartbeat is the first language we learn. Outside the womb, the mother’s voice shapes the formation of language centers in the brain. Neuroscience informs us that the development of the brain takes place mostly outside the womb. The role of child rearing is to nurture this development. Messages conveyed by speech, touch and human interaction actually guide the growth of nerve-pathways to their destination. Without this, the human species would have become extinct a long time ago. We have to shake-off the stereotype that child rearing is somehow an unproductive activity .. little more than a burdensome ‘maternity leave’ in the workplace. Otherwise, we treat our own children like second-class citizens.

Chomsky’s Review of Verbal Behavior

Chomsky's review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior has been hailed as the most influential document in the history of psychology. This is especially true in the field of language development.

In his book Verbal Behavior, psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that language development occurs when: “..differential reinforcement shapes relatively unpatterned vocalizations into grammatically correct forms”. Linguist Noam Chomsky refuted this claim, declaring that principles of ‘differential reinforcement’ cannot ‘shapewell-formed sentences, but rather a system of rules from which they can generate an infinite set of well-formed sentences. Chomsky was so persuasive that psychologists adopted his linguistic principles as a method for observing language development. Chomsky’s ‘transformational grammar’ is a system of abstract rules designed to produce sentences of varying complexity starting from a simple conceptual-base. Sentences can be ranked in order of ‘derivational complexity’. Derivational complexity refers to the number of transformation rules required to produce complex forms from simpler forms. For example, a passive rule transforms a simple declarative sentence like “John hit the ball” into “The ball was hit by John”. A possessive rule transforms it into “My ball was hit by John”, adding another degree of complexity, and so on. Turned out that Chomsky was right. Transcripts of early speech show a definite trend. Development does, in fact, occur in stages that correspond to levels of derivational complexity.

Presented at seminar in language learning

Another language

A survey of the literature on language suggests that the process of learning another language is no different than learning the first. If the focus of instruction is on communicative intent, rather than phonological repetition, then learning a foreign language recapitulates the stages that children follow when learning their native language. Contrary to popular belief, adults have an advantage over children when learning a second language. It’s just not apparent because repetition drills are so dissimilar to the language environment of early childhood. I think language instruction should include beaucoup more exposure and social interaction.

Presented at seminar in language learning

On closer inspection

“The meaning of a sentence is derived from the original words by an active, interpretive process. The original sentence which is perceived is rapidly forgotten and the memory is then for the information (meaning) contained in the sentence.” ~ J. Sachs, 1967.

In the 1960’s, psychologists broke away from the long-standing traditions of behaviorism, and the field of cognitive psychology emerged. This act of secession was inspired by advances in fields such as neuroscience, cybernetics and linguistics. In the area of language development, psychologists adopted linguistic principles, introduced by Noam Chomsky, as a method for measuring verbal learning and behavior. These principles were more consistent with natural observations of language development. Chomsky’s model recognizes that language is expressed on at least two different levels ~ a ‘surface structure’, representing the audible/visible properties of a sentence (i.e. morphemes and syntax) ~ and a ‘deep structure’, representing the underlying semantic relationships conveyed by a sentence.

What they found is that the deep structure of a sentence is what people retain. Surface-structure is purged within milliseconds and no longer available for recall. The resulting memory is not a literal transcript of written or spoken language. It is more like a coded network of related concepts and ideas derived from the original sentence, as well as from the past experience of the listener. What we come away with is a feeling of resonance and familiarity, based largely on beliefs and experience ..and not necessarily the meaning intended by the speaker.

I Love English!

While lying awake last night, I got to thinking about my love affair with the English language. Growing up in Montreal, I was equally at home in English and French and our family's private language, Frengjabi. I could sorta, kinda communicate in Punjabi, but never really comfortably.

Most people think that French is a beautiful language and it is! Truly it is the language of love and all you women out there who have never had a man make verbal love to you in French, you are missing a treat. And, no, it doesn't seem to work the other way around.

For sublime poetry, Punjabi is unequaled. Although my Punjabi fails me this day, still the sound and the cadence of Sri Guru Granth Sahib pierces straight into the soul, elevating one's being to the sublime.

All that said, for communication, I love English. I love its devil-may-care attitude toward itself, the way it never takes itself too seriously. ( [English teachers] take it seriously, but that's another matter. No Henry Higgins I, I am pure 'Enry 'Iggins.) This is a robust tongue in need of no language police to protect its purity, for it has no purity to protect.

For those of you learning English as a second language or those still learning the fundamentals, nothing takes the place of knowing the proper use of the language and, certainly, it is absolutely necessary to have full mastery of standard English, its grammar and structure.

(Now that I have partially placated any English teachers who may be reading this. I proceed to the important stuff.)

But once that mastery is achieved, the fun begins. English should come with instructions saying, " Please fold, spindle and mutilate; I can take it and come out the better for it." I love to try new things with English. One of my favourites - English teachers, get out those red pens - is to verb nouns. These two people flanking me as I write now turban every day.

Amrit always has, but Suni just started after they got married. (See how smoothly that flows and how perfectly understandable it is?)

It is one thing however to do this on purpose and another to do it out of carelessness or ignorance. There are a couple of mistakes that really grate on me. People, hear me! 'It's' means it is. 'It's' always means it is. 'It's' is not a possessive. The possessive form is its (no apostrophe). Its possessive form is 'its.' Clear? Likewise 'you're' means you are, a contraction. 'Your' is the possessive form. 'Your' never means you are. Of course, in nonstandard English ur can mean either. I'm not sure this is an improvement, as some meaning is lost.

I think my least favourite word is 'enthused.' It makes me cringe right from my cramping toes to the crown of my head. It sounds ugly, rhymes with ooooooooozed. I am not opposed to back formations, but I am opposed to gratuitous ugliness.

I can also dangle participles and modifiers like a champ, but I usually edit them out, unless I find them amusing. (While running to the store to shoplift some more Sudafed, my boiling pot of meth exploded, contaminating the whole neighbourhood.)

Here, as I close, I mention a new favourite piece of nonstandard English I came across a couple days ago. Eleanor Bloom, listen up! I CAN HAS MORR COKE PLZ, follow the link; you won't be sorry!

And now, for those of you who have actually gotten this far, some real fun with English:

Metaphors

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. Here are some examples:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a
pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of e-coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 P.M. Instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just likemaggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 P.M. Traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 P.M., at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two humming-birds, which had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap; only it was one that had been left out so long and it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a day.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up