Going Meta with Sopranos and Ghalib

I’m a big Sopranos fan. Sopranos was a hugely popular HBO series in the late nineties that depicted the life of an Italian mafia family in New Jersey. Not surprisingly, violence is a constant backdrop of the series but Sopranos is not about mafia violence. It’s about the complexity of human nature, of humans grappling with human frailty and finding their humanity in unexpected places. Most of the characters are cold blooded killers, yet the character development is so good that we quickly develop empathy for these killers as they reveal their deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities. 

Now more than twenty years after the show first launched, two of the actors from Sopranos - Michael Imprioli and Steve Schrripa have launched a podcast called ‘Talking Sopranos’. On each episode of the podcast they invite an actor or writer from Sopranos and discuss a particular episode of the show. We get to know about the guests of course; how they got onto the show etc. , but what struck me was how the artist and art can at times merge into each other and become indistinguishable. On the podcast, when Edie Falco speaks about Carmela Soprano or Lorraine Bracco talks about Dr. Melfi, they are not talking about a character they played. They are describing life they’ve actually lived for a decade. Prompted by Michael and Steve’s questions, they ponder over some obscure detail about the character in some episode and try to make sense of it. Of course, unlike the creator of the show, actors in an unfolding TV series are a series of dots and connecting dots is not as easy for them. It’s certainly not easy trying this after twenty years - yet here they are,  standing out of the body of their character and looking at themselves dispassionately - trying to fit that last piece of the puzzle in the right place for it all to make sense. It’s like going meta on yourself. 

But before there was Sopranos (or HBO), there was Ghalib and Urdu poetry. 

In Urdu poetry, the ghazal is a set of two liner couplets (known as Sher) that ends with what’s called as Maqta. It is in this maqta that the poet ends the ghazal by self-referencing himself (the artist) within, and puts that final piece of the puzzle - for it all to make sense. 

ġham-e-hastī kā 'asad' kis se ho juz marg ilaaj 

sham.a har rañg meñ jaltī hai sahar hote tak

None but death can cure, Asad, the sorrows of this life,

The taper anyway shall burn, till the morning’s birth. 

-r

PS: Asad is the nom de plume of the poet Ghalib