223 The Bride Of Abydos. A Turkish Tale

A short history of the rainbow

“…If, as Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) points out in her novel To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, the rainbow represents the transience of life and man's mortality-''it was all ephemeral as a rainbow''-the cold physicomathematical representation of an optical phenomenon that is ''ephemeral'' and evanescent, unreachable and insubstantial, deprives the natural event of all the poetry of an event that strikes human imagination and fancy, opens the soul to hope and life and moves George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) to write ( [13], p. 45):…”

“…By measuring the angles of the rays getting out, he concluded that the primary arc was created by a single reflection inside the drop, while the secondary one may be caused by two inner reflections. To reach this result, Descartes expounded the theory of refraction-just as Snell 13 had done-and correctly computed the angles of incidence of light rays for both arcs. He established that the ratio of the sines of the incidence and the refraction angles was constant, for all incidence angles.…”

“…Descartes's reasoning about the rainbow is of a geometric nature, ridding the phenomenon of poetic or mystical overtones-a reproach that John Keats (1795-1821) Walford, 1704) 13 Snell's law, also known as Snell-Descartes law, describes how a light ray is refracted when passing from a medium to another one with a different refractive index; in general, it is valid only for isotropic substances, such as glass, and shows several similarities to Fermat's principle (due to Pierre de Fermat, 1601-1665) that ''the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time''. A first formulation of Snell-Descartes law can be found in a manuscript by the Arab mathematician Abū Sa'd al-'Alā' ibn Sahl (X sec.)…”

An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

“…Dating back to the seventh century, the story of the ill-fated lovers Laila and Majnu has been continuously retold, rewritten, and translated across cultural, spatial, and temporal borders, illustrating Sheldon Pollock’s claim that world literature often precedes vernacular and national literatures (2000: 590). It found an artistically sophisticated expression in a narrative poem by the well-known twelfth-century Persian poet Neẓāmi of Ganja and was celebrated by British Romantic poet Lord Byron as “the Romeo and Juliet of the East” (1814: 61). In this decolonial comparative scenario, which dismantles the alleged belatedness of non-European literatures, it is Anjum who establishes a tertium comparationis , and it is clear that both her transgender identity and the fact that her name is spelled backwards usher forth a number of twists.…”