Editor’s Note
Shubhang Ojha’s graphic adaptation of Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) places the poem’s luminiscent questions and thoughts into a desolate space just large enough to hold a dead child. Personally, this was one of those situations where it was difficult to create that intellectual distance large enough to consider aesthetic issues. I’m glad to report the reader needn’t be so concerned. Word and image, thought and feeling, all come together harmoniously to form that mirror, “the little god, four-corned, silver and exact”, as Sylvia Plath described it, in which we are able to see, if only for the span of summer’s days, ourselves in others.
—Anil Menon
The Bombay Literary Magazine
By William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Author | Shubhang Ojha
Shubhang is a multimedia storyteller and self-taught artist, with a background in Literature, Creative Writing and Media Studies; as well as Urban Studies and Research.
He seeks to engage with the unique apparatus and tropes of each form of art (such as comics, film, theater) to translate the complex and plural realities of our uniquely befuddling times into accessible stories that lead an audience to think, question, empathise and expand their worldview.
His other works include an ongoing comic-book on the shaping of meat politics in India; a theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet set within Bangalore’s contested slaughterhouses; and illustrations for a documentary film on the survivors of the partition of 1947.
In his free time, he enjoys reading, hiking, screaming into the void and cooking. [Text source: Shubhang Ojha]
