I love English dearly. It's my life and my world. But it doesn't do everything better than every other language. One of the tradeoffs for our enormous and finely differentiated vocabulary is that it's much harder to create such multiple equivalently ambiguous meanings. English can give you dozens of renderings of la muerte me esta mirando desde las torres de Cordoba, but every one of them tips the meaning in one direction, and consequently away from all the others.

I loved the "My Cat Jeoffry." I had stopped reading Eve's blog last year some time as St. Blog's Parish exploded and there were so many things to read, I couldn't read them all. So I would have totally missed this otherwise.

Berni, my theory is that the person who has been reading the Bible to George has not got past Joshua at Jericho. Jesus is going to come as a great shock to him.

http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1945.html

On the subject of translation, there's a very interesting book called Le Ton Beau de Marot, by the guy who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach. One of his theses in the book seems to be that if poem can be fully translated, it isn't really poetry. The book contains dozens of different translations of a brief poem by the eponymous poet; all the English ones are quite different, and each one leaves out some point or resonance that another expresses.

One of his examples of translation at its most brilliant is that when GEB (as his first book is often called) was translated into Chinese, the translators took his subtitle ("an eternal golden braid") and rendered it culturally as "a collection of rare jade;" they found Chinese characters to mean this, characters which, in Mandarin, are pronounced "jee ee bee."

I am thunderstruck with admiration for those translators.

It's not just poetry that doesn't translate, of course. Chinese dissident artist Xu Bing's magnificent Book from the Sky installation totally loses its effect on me because I can't read Chinese and therefore don't get the weird Borgesian reaction from a lovingly and expensively hand-crafted edition of a completely plausible but utterly unreadable text. His edition of the Bible incorporating romance novel cutups was good, but didn't pack nearly the same oomph.

In return, here's the translation from the ND book, by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili:

Cordoba.
Far away and alone.

Black pony, big moon,
and olives in my saddle-bag.
Although I know the roads
I'll never reach Cordoba.

Through the plain, through the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death is looking at me
from the towers of Cordoba.

Ay! How long the road!
Ay! My valiant pony!
Ay! That death should wait me
before I reach Cordoba.

Cordoba.
Far away and alone.

I tried to confirm mirar could mean "to wonder," but that seems to have migrated from Latin mirari to Spanish admirarse. However, my dictionary did give one meaning of mirar as "to aim."

After all, do we not say to other countries "We have democracy; it is the best system ever; and our governments do what we tell them to"? (If we don't say it, that's OK; our media do it for us.)

[On a side note, I am sicked by the media-driven canonisation of New York's mayor. This is the man who insisted that the emergency control centre budget be spent on one big flashy facility, rather than on three separate ones as everyone else wanted; and as a result, that one centre (conveniently put in the WTC complex) was unavailable on 11/9/2001, which is the sole reason for the lack of communications that was the main reason for deaths of rescue workers.

I suppose that making heroes of firefighters, or other people who actually did something, would have been "unfair", because not all of them could be heroes...]

Personally, I'm listening to Fish's Firestorm, and considering how appropriate it all seems.

I remember Smart's verse, in symmetry, also having a section for the mouse (very roughly quoting):
For this is a true thing
Cat takes female mouse
Male mouse says "I will fight you, big as you are."
Bush et al., in their ideas of shock and awe, don't seem to have thought of this.

While I agree with your feelings about the war (and your sorrow at Tobin's remarks), this is a very unfortunate argument, reminiscent of '30s society ladies saying "My dear, nobody we know supports that dreadful Roosevelt!" I'm sure if you give it a moment's thought you'll realize that you're reflecting the limits of your circle of acquaintances rather than the nation at large -- which is what polls are designed to do, and do quite well. The sad fact is that a lot of Americans support both Bush and the war, and it's more productive to figure out how to change that than to wish away the problem.

Millay's essay is well worth reading. She talks about the need to have some sympathy with and understanding of the culture using the language from which you are translating, and cites, by example, Baudelaire himself. (He apparently was almost solely responsible for the reputation of Poe in France -- according to Millay -- but -also- dearly loved Longfellow's "Hiawatha" ... which he translated. Into Alexandrines.

I am now going to contemplate my shelf of Stoppard, representing a writer who uses English far better than I, when English is not his first (nor I think his second) language.

-- LJM

http://www.kokonino.com/jubilate/

Inextricably linked in my mind with "My Cat Jeoffry." (I typed 'inextricatly' the first time.)

Poems are good, he said thoughtfully.

Thanks!

"Song of the Rider"

Cf3rdoba.
Distant and alone.

Black horse, big moon,
and olives in my saddlebag.
Though I know the roads
I will never come to Cf3rdoba.

Through the plain, through the wind,
black horse, red moon.
Death is watching me
from the towers of Cf3rdoba.

Oh, the long road!
Oh, my brave horse!
Oh, that death awaits me
before Cf3rdoba!

Cf3rdoba.
Distant and alone.