A Night at the Opera (1975) is the fourth studio album by the British rock band Queen, named after the Marx Brothers’ film of the same name.
A Night at the Opera is a 1935 American comedy film starring the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo and Chico).
Among the first few songs (in English) that I had memorized as a teenager was:
Death on Two Legs.
“Death on Two Legs” is the song that’s considered to be Freddie Mercury’s “hate letter” towards the band’s former manager, Norman Sheffield. It incorporated a vast range of vicious lyrics, and described by Mercury as being, “so vindictive that Brian May felt bad singing it.”
Here are the lyrics:
You suck my blood like a leech
You break the law and you breach
Screw my brain till it hurts
You’ve taken all my money – you still want more,
Misguided old mule
With your pigheaded rules
With your narrow – minded cronies who are fools of the first division-
Death on two legs –
You’re tearing me apart,
Death on two legs
You never had a heard of your own –
Kill joy, Bad guy,
Big talking, Small fry
You’re just an old barrow – boy
Have you found a new toy to replace me,
Can you face me –
But now you can kiss my ass goodbye
And, yeah, it goes on, escalating in its insults!
Of course, as I write this, I am Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, and, instead on focusing on just one Alfa Romeo, I am in Love with My Car(s): see True Grip: Lucid v McLaren v Ferrari. This album also has the mega hit:
“Bohemian Rhapsody” is a song by the British rock band Queen, released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, A Night at the Opera (1975). Written by lead singer Freddie Mercury, the song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. It is one of the few progressive rock songs of the 1970s to have proved accessible to a mainstream audience. Following the release of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century.
Now to IPF, International Poetry Forum, see also In Praise of Poetry, where Emily Wilson performed to a mesmerized audience – at Carnegie Music Hall on Friday October 13th – several pieces from her translations of Iliad and Odyssey, focusing on the theme of
Recognition.
I was instantly transported, but not just to Ancient Greece, but also to Ancient India:
Kalidasa’s The Recognition of Shakuntala is a play that scarcely needs introduction. Among the first works of Sanskrit literature translated into European languages, its skillful plot of thwarted love and eventual redemption has long charmed audiences around the world. It attracted considerable attention (from Goethe (1749-1842), among others), and, indeed, pained surprise that such a sophisticated art form could have developed without the rest of the world noticing.
Kalidasa lived around 450 CE, during the Golden Age of the Gupta Dynasty. The stories of the Maha-Bharata took place in the Dwapura Yuga – per Puranic history – which was the age before our current Kali Yuga (which began 3105 BCE) when Gods, Demons and Humans interacted seamlessly, traveling between Heaven, Hell and Earth (and other in-between regions) with considerable ease. Kalidasa’s Version is a modification of the original mini-story in the Maha-Bharata, in that he introduces the Curse of Durvasa to explain (and justify) Dushyanta’s memory loss, thus putting Dushyanta in a less negative light than in the original. Kalidasa also focused his story on the hermit girl Shakuntala, the daughter of the sage Vishwamitra and the celestial nymph (Apsara) Menaka, and not on King Dushyanta, or their son Bharata, who is the emperor whose rule gives India its Sanskrit name: Bharata.
Some years back, I had enjoyed reading Simon Armitage’s Version of Odyssey – commissioned by BBC Radio in 2004, where he recast Homer’s epic as a series of dramatic dialogues, a book version has been available since 2006 – and so when I picked up Emily Wilson’s (2018) Version a couple of years ago, I was excited to read a differently enjoyable retelling, loving it from its very first line:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
When he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
…
Find the beginning.
Contrast that with Simon Armitage’s Version that has this preamble:
Remind us, Muse, of that man of many means,
Sent spinning the length and breadth of the map
After bringing the towers of Troy to their knees;
…
Muse, daughter of Memory and Zeus,
Where to start this story is yours to choose.
I had the opportunity to briefly speak with Emily Wilson (thanks to Jake Grefenstette) at the reception that preceded her performance:
I have read your book on Tragic Overliving. I wrote a blog post called Comic Underliving.
She chuckled: You are one of the very few people who has read that book.
Was that your first book?
That was: Mocked by Death.
I really liked your opening line of Odyssey, calling him a complicated man.
…
As she wrote in her Introduction:
Homer is usually described in Greek sources not as a singer (aoidos) or rhapsode (“song-stitcher”), but as a poet, poetes – a word which means “maker.”
Here is my Tayurian Rhapsody (with help from ChatGPT):
I am not a complicated man.
I am a man of simple needs and ample means, blessed with leisure, considerable and serene.
My line descends from gods of Vedic lore—
Varuna, sovereign of celestial seas,
A kin of Ouranos, Poseidon’s peer.
Through Vashistha, the poet, sage of fame,
Whose songs adorned the Seventh Mandala’s flame.
My first great journey to Ithaca
Was fraught with trials: the hurdles of my youth—
IIT-Madras, the entrance won through toil,
The GRE conquered, its analytical and quantitative peaks subdued,
And in my studies, love by chance I found—
Operations Research, its charm profound.
My latest voyage back was no Odyssey:
A private jet bore me with swiftness near—
A mere thirty-seven minutes in the air,
Untouched by struggles or mystery.
