BookTalk.org

Talking about excellent translations of poetry between languages, which seems an amazing feat to me because so much depends on sound and aliteration in poetry:-

Recently, it was Burn's Night and on the TV was a lovely Scots comedian who recited the address to the Haggis, which begins:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang's my arm.

Apparently, the Germans' translated this into their language and then back into English and for 'Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!' they had 'Great fuhrer of the sausage people!'

Penelope wrote:for 'Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!' they had 'Great fuhrer of the sausage people!'

youkrst wrote:

Penelope wrote:for 'Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!' they had 'Great fuhrer of the sausage people!'

Penelope wrote: Apparently, the Germans' translated this into their language and then back into English and for 'Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!' they had 'Great fuhrer of the sausage people!'

Penny: That is lol funny ... one can just about picture these two .. the chieftain and the fuhrer --- side by side with their puddin and sausage. I guess puddin is a fair description of haggis (not sure?) but sausage? Interesting thing about translations is that they illustrate how meaning is not just derived from words/language but from cultural context as well. So when a poem or other work is translated it is really travelling back and forth between cultural settings as well as between languages. In this case, the funnier part of this translation may result principally from the cultural shift.

I love listening to foreign tongues, even when I don't know what they are saying. I am usually able to discern from where on the globe they originate. Although I did hear a couple talking in our local co-op checkout queue a year or two ago and I was so intrigued that I had to ask them what language they were speaking and where they were from.....It was Mongolia. That language didn't sound like any other to me.

I love listening to opera in Italian, because I usually know the English translation of the arias. I once went to a cathedral in Brittany and listened to the Communion service in French...that was lovely since the words in English were so familiar to me. I do speak French fairly well, but of course the church service is in an archaic form. When we went to Crete, I spoke some of my minute smattering of schoolgirl Greek and the people fell about laughing - apparently it was ancient Greek.



I thought this was funny

Windows is Shutting Down by Clive James

The Guardian, Saturday April 30 2005


Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg. So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.


Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.


The meteor have hit. Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.


Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break. Windows is shutting down.

It is a somewhat bleak February day today. I'm having a poetry day to cheer myself up so I thought I'd share this:-

Ballade of True Wisdom

it's by Andrew Lang

While others are asking for beauty or fame,
Or praying to know that for which they should pray,
Or courting Queen Venus, that affable dame,
Or chasing the Muses the weary and grey,
The sage has found out a more excellent way -
To Pan and to Pallas his incense he showers,
And his humble petition puts up day by day,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

Inventors may bow to the God that is lame,
And crave from the fire on his stithy a ray;
Philosophers kneel to the God without name,
Like the people of Athens, agnostics are they;
The hunter a fawn to Diana will slay,
The maiden wild roses will wreathe for the Hours;
But the wise man will ask, ere libation he pay,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

Oh! grant me a life without pleasure or blame
(As mortals count pleasure who rush through their day
With a speed to which that of the tempest is tame)!
O grant me a house by the beach of a bay,
Where the waves can be surly in winter, and play
With the sea-weed in summer, ye bountiful powers!
And I'd leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray,
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

ENVOY.

Gods, grant or withhold it; your "yea" and your "nay"
Are immutable, heedless of outcry of ours:
But life IS worth living, and here we would stay
For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers.

Not all poems have to rhyme.

Terry said:

Not all poems have to rhyme.

No, but some poems are like the peace of God....they pass all understanding.

It's 'Mothering Sunday' tomorrow, here in the UK.

Our Paper printed this Poem for Mother's Day by Gillian Clarke and I do love it so thought I'd share.

The Habit of Light

In the early evening, she liked to switch on the lamps
in corners, on low tables, to show off her brass,
her polished furniture, her silver and glass.
At dawn she'd draw all the curtains back for a glimpse
of the cloud-lit sea. Her oak floors flickered
in an opulence of beeswax and light.
In the kitchen, saucepans danced their lids, the kettle purred
on the Aga, supper on its breath and the buttery melt
of a pie, and beyond the swimming glass of old windows,
in the deep perspective of the garden, a blackbird singing,
she'd coem through the bean rows in tottering shoes,
her pinny full of strawberries, a lettuce, bringing
the palest potatoes in a colander, her red hair bright
with her habit of colour, her habit of light.

Perusing for poems with numbers in them for the National Poetry Month game, I came across this gem!


Fish Fucking
by Michael Blumenthal

This is not a poem about sex, or even
about fish or the genitals of fish,
So if you are a fisherman or someone interested
primarily in sex, this would be as good a time
As any to put another worm on your hook
or find a poem that is really about fucking.

This, rather, is a poem about language,
and about the connections between mind and ear
And the strange way a day makes its tenuous
progress from almost anywhere.

Which is why I've decided to begin with the idea
of fish fucking (not literally, mind you,
But the idea of fish fucking), because the other
day, and a beautiful day it was, in Virginia
The woman I was with, commenting on the time
between the stocking of a pond and the

First day of fishing season, asked me if this
was perhaps because of the frequency with which
Fish fuck, and—though I myself know nothing at all
about the fucking of fish—indeed, I believe

From the little biology I know that fish do not
fuck at all as we know it, but rather the male
Deposits his sperm on the larvae, which the female,
in turn, has deposited—yet the question
Somehow suggested itself to my mind as the starting
point of the day, and from the idea of fish

Fucking came thoughts of the time that passes
between things and our experience of them,
Not only between the stocking of the pond and our
being permitted to fish in it, but the time,

For example, that passes between the bouncing
of light on the pond and our perception of the
Pond, or between the time I say the word jujungawop
and the moment that word bounces against your
Eardrum and the moment a bit further on when the
nerves that run from the eardrum to the brain

Inform you that you do not, in fact, know
the meaning of the word jujungawop, but this,
Perhaps, is moving a bit too far from the idea of
fish fucking and how beautifully blue the pond was

That morning and how, lying among the reeds atop
the dam and listening to the water run under it,
The thought occurred to me how the germ of an idea
has little to do with the idea itself, and how
It is rather a small leap from fish fucking to the
anthropomorphic forms in a Miró painting,

Or the way certain women, when they make love,
pucker their lips and gurgle like fish, and how
This all points out how dangerous it is for a
man or a woman who wants a poet's attention

To bring up an idea, even so ludicrous and
biologically ungrounded a one as fish fucking,
Because the next thing she knows the mind is taking
off over the dam from her beautiful face, off
Over the hills of Virginia, perhaps as far as Guatemala
and the black bass that live in Lake Atitlán who

Feast on the flightless grebe, which is not merely
a sexual thought or a fishy one, but a thought
About the cruelty that underlies even great beauty,
the cruelty of nature and love and our lives which

We cannot do without and without which even the idea
of fish fucking would be ordinary and no larger than
Itself, but to return now to that particular day, and to
the idea of love, which inevitably arises from the
Thought that even so seemingly unintelligent a creature
as a fish could hold his loved one, naked in the water,

And say to her, softly, Liebes, mein Lubes; it was
indeed a beautiful day, the kind filled with anticipation
And longing for the small perfections usually found only
in poems; the breeze was slight enough just to brush

A few of her hairs gently over one eye, the air was
the scent of bayberry and pine as if the gods were
Burning incense in some heavenly living room, and
as we lay among the reeds, our faces skyward,
The sun fondling our cheeks, it was as if each
time we looked away from the world it took

On again a precise yet general luminescence when we
returned to it, a clarity equally convincing as pain
But more pleasing to the senses, and though it was not
such a moment of perfection as Keats or Hamsun

Speak of and for the sake of which we can go on for
years almost blissful in our joylessness, it was
A day when at least the possibility of such a thing
seemed possible: the deer tracks suggesting that
Deer do, indeed, come to the edge of the woods to feed
at dusk, and the idea of fish fucking suggesting

A world so beautiful, so divine in its generosity
that even the fish make love, even the fish live
Happily ever after, chasing each other, lustful
as stars through the constantly breaking water.