Category: Literature

Translating Basho…April 21, 2018

The Friday Reading Group gathered to translate a Basho haiku from the Japanese. “Old pond…new frog…water jump-in sound”  is how one translator renders it, but every rendering renews both poem and poet because the poem is the poem of poems. The readers rendered the haiku this way:

There is an old pond/A frog jumps in/spash (Ben Blum)

ice pond just melts ssssshhh/frog jumps ripple (circle) green/green (circle) green green (Lin Haire-Sargeant)

Ancient pond, ancient/ silence–until a frog leaps/ down and up leaps splash! (Debra San)

An old pond lies still./A springing frog awakens/Shattering water. (Josh Cohen)

A quiet old pond/Frog jumps into the water/The quiet pond sings (Hu Hohn)

A pond full of frogs;/A jumping and one goes in;/Kersplashing echoes. (Albert Lafarge)

Constant Readers : Les Murray—”The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”

“June 30, 1922. Washington policeman Bill Norton measuring the distance between knee and suit at the Tidal Basin bathing beach after Col. Sherrill, Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, issued an order that suits not be over six inches above the knee.” National Photo Co.

October 28, 1985. The Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Les Murray reads aloud “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”

 

Quotation for today, March 17, 2020: Treasure Island

And I was going to sea myself, to sea in a schooner, with a piping boatswain and pig-tailed singing seamen, to sea, bound for an unknown island, and to seek for buried treasure!

Robert Lewis Stevenson: Treasure Island (1886)

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“I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth in attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil.”

Read in Memory of Noel Ignatiev at the Noel Ignatiev Memorial Ceremony, January 20, 2020, Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York


Sung In Memory of Noel Ignatiev at the Noel Ignatiev Memorial Ceremony, January 20, 2020, Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York

“Hard Times Come Again No More,” Stephen Foster, composerr, The Chieftans, performers

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Summer Afternoons..

One perfect afternoon we spent at Bodiam–my first visit there. It was still the old spell-bound ruin, unrestored, guarded by great trees, and by a network of lanes which baffled the invading charabancs. Tranquil white clouds hung above it in a windless sky, and the silence and solitude were complete as we sat looking across at the crumbling towers, and at their reflection in a moat starred with water-lilies, and danced over by great blue dragon-flies. For a long time no one spoke; then James turned to me and said solemnly: “Summer afternoon–summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)