latin translation to english: Kasım 2012

30 Kasım 2012 Cuma

The World Is Turned Upside Down

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Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), The Broken Balance, Part III:

That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow
Fire licking the sides of the gray stones,
Has a more passionate and more pure heart
In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;
But he is betrayed by his own courage,
The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.

Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;
The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock
With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills
The red-shafted woodpecker flying,
A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,
Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.

These live their felt natures; they know their norm
And live it to the brim; they understand life.
While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked
Their natures until the souls die in them;
They have sold themselves for toys and protection:
No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys.

Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
But in the eyes and mouths that surround them,
Having no function but to serve and support
Civilization, the enemy of man,
No wonder they live insanely, and desire
With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.

Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsmen,
But now the world is turned upside down;
The good do evil, the hope's in criminals; in vice
That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.
Through wars and corruptions the house will fall.
Mourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.

Feast of St. Andrew

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From Eric Thomson:

Today is St. Andrew's Day, but as any laudator will tell you, the veneration of saints isn't what it used to be. Hats off to the forty-five gentlemen of the St. Andrews Society of Philadelphia who on November 30th 1788 downed 38 bottles of Madeira, 27 of claret, 8 of port, 26 of Porter, 2 of cider, and 2 bowls of punch. At what human cost, who knows? But 'glasses broke' cost them 5 shillings. An Historical Catalogue of the St. Andrew's Society of Philadelphia 1749-1881 (Printed for the Society, Philadelphia, Sherman & Co., 1881), p. 19. Just divide this mighty vat of booze by 45 to calculate your allowance.

The previous Bill for Dinner conserved in the records (pp. 17-18) dates from 1765:
4 Turkeys
8 Ducks
6 Fowls
6 Partridges
Gammon
Tongue
Beef
Geese
Puddens
Custards
Tarts
Whip Syllabubs
"Collerds Fouls"
"Sollomon Gundy"
Celery and salad
Pickels
Bread
Nuts
3 Five shilling Bowls of Punch
4 Three Shilling Bowls of Punch
Sounds like a fine recipe for gout, but I think I'd take the risk.

Computer translation of 'Ships with Butterfly Wings'

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Une larme tombe pour le sableVagues et vent soupirent en deuilAu-dessus de la mer dans un pays lointainJusqu'Ã l'horizon, puis une pauseEt puis il est partiLa chaleur du soleil n'a jamais cessÃ©Cris plaintif de goÃ©lands sans causeEspoir, desesperee, ne s'arrÃªte jamais de chanterClignotant dans l'Ã©blouissement, elle attendLe rÃ©sultat doit avoir une causeLorsque les navires avec papillon ailesBat dans le vent sur une quÃªte fineAmants dÃ©chirÃ©s pendant un certain tempsPersonne ne peut dire le pourquoi de ces chosesLes liaisons ont Ã©tÃ© libÃ©rÃ©s Chacun est libre d'Ãªtre leur propreC'est une graine qui doit Ãªtre semÃ©eEt personne ne peut dire Ã son destinParfois, il n'y a aucun moyen de gagnerMais seulement Ã endurer.Lorsque les navires avec papillon ailesCoups dans le ventTransporter votre cÅ“ur Ã travers l'ocÃ©anC'est tout que vous pouvez faire, parfoisD'attendre et de prÃ©senter un grief et Ã prier.

Art for art's sake.

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As a boy, I wanted to be a great painter.
Even now canvases like Monet’s “Water Lilies,” impress my soul although there’s not much clarity. I can even paint – I have sketches like old naval victories, paintings in the style of Picasso or Cezanne, Thompson, although Rembrandt’s detailed soul-analysis is a stretch. It’s not even that hard. Not really.

Where is the market? I mean, why bother?
Art teachers, jealous as they were, always assumed I was some kind of expert, a “ringer” who just showed up to show off and make fun of the untalented but sincere persons who take lessons and pay the bills.
They were right. Like the guy who can really play the drums, but makes a living selling shoes – not enough courage to get out there in the trenches, or get one’s head stomped in by critics and fans alike. I figure in order to succeed, i.e. make money, one would have to grab the world’s attention and hold it long enough for someone important to decide you are “in fashion” as a painter. That you are “marketable,” and “collectible” and “in vogue.” Like as in “Good Investment.” Maybe I was just too lazy to do it—to put the time into learning the craft.
Hey! If I was to get some frames, and stretch huge expanses of white cotton over them. Rent the Public Library and Art Gallery – how much could it cost? Bolt or screw them up on the walls, put paint in pots on tables, or on the floor in buckets. O.K. I know what you’re thinking. “It’s already been done! Lots of artists have public participation in their painting projects, and the Old Masters had half of their work done by apprentices…and so called installation art consisting of neat rows of bricks, toilet seats, or even buckets of paint on a table is old hat.”
Yeah, you’re right. But then…you always are. (I’ve never heard you ask a question, or even express an opinion. You know everything.) It is abstract, and expressionistic, and therefore derivative. It’s even nihilistic, and therefore anti-Canadian.
The very first guy that walks in there and says, “Bleep! Any bleep-bleep could do that!” I’m going to grab him by the scruff of the neck, dip his head in the paint pot and bounce the mouthy bleep off the bleeping walls for a while.
It may not be entirely original. One heck of a piece of performance art, eh?
“I couldn’t do it without your help.” Eventually we’ll get this work of art finished.
I may even be able to sell a couple of them. But that’s not really important right now.
Try to think of it as “art for art’s sake,” and you have to admit; the medium of performance art has really been lacking in some essential quality lately. You know – like violence? Think of it as a great naval victory without the water; ships and smoke and stuff.
From quiet contemplation comes chaos.

Coming November 1. 'The Art of Murder.'

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Marketing image for my new mystery novel, 'The Art of Murder,' which will be published November 1/2012.

I would love a critique, an impression, a scathing commentary, a few words on a related subject,* for someone to go off on a tangent, or even a few unsolicited compliments on this, my first attempt at a marketing image.

Ahem. That bein' said, (and I'm just sayin',) please tell me all about how bad covers don't sell good books, and all that short-story long crap.

Hello to all of you in Russia. Russia is a great country, and I hope you all learn English very, very soon, so that you all can read a whole bunch of my books. Spacebo comrades.

More on this later.

Thank you very much and good day. Oh, and I promise to put the skull back in the ROM tomorrow before Curly the minimum-wage unarmed security guard wakes up just in time to go home.) -louis

P.S. Yes I know my signature begins with a lower case letter. It's like a little peccadillo.

*But I ain't going to get it, am I?

This is the end of this post. Stop reading it.

29 Kasım 2012 Perşembe

The Hereafter

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Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), "Old Mr. Flood," in Up in the Old Hotel (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 375-436 (at 375):

[H]e comes from a long line of Baptists and has a nagging fear of the hereafter, complicated by the fact that the descriptions of heaven in the Bible are as forbidding to him as those of hell.

Id., p. 383:

Twain and Broun are Mr. Flood's favorite writers. "If I get to heaven," he once said, "the first Saturday night I'm up there, if it's O.K. with the management, I'm going to get hold of a bottle of good whiskey and look up Mr. Twain and Mr. Broun. And if they're not up there, I'll ask to be sent down to the other place." A moment later he added uneasily, "Of course, I don't really mean that. I'm just talking to hear myself talk."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment (Part IV, Chapter 1, tr. Constance Garnett):

"I don't believe in a future life," said Raskolnikov.

Svidrigailov sat lost in thought.

"And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort," he said suddenly.

"He is a madman," thought Raskolnikov.

"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that."

A Gift for Pan

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Georg Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca ex Lapidibus Conlecta (Berlin: Reimer, 1878), p. 326, no. 802 (Rome, Julian Basilica, 2nd century A.D.):

Σ]οὶ τόδε, συρικτά, ὑ[μνη]πόλε, μείλιχε δαῖμο[ν,
  ἁγνὲ λοετροχόων κοίρανε Ναϊάδων,
δῶρον Ὑγεῖνος ἔτε[υξε]ν, ὃν ἀργαλέης ἀπὸ νούσου
  αὐτὸς, ἄνα[ξ], ὑγιῆ θήκαο προσπελ[ά]σ[ας·
πᾶσι γὰρ [ἐν τεκέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς ὰνα[φ]ανδὸν ἐπέστης 5
  οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλὰ μέσους ἤματος ἀμφὶ δρόμους.

There is a similar text, also by Kaibel, in Inscriptiones Graecae XIV = Inscriptiones Italiae et Siciliae (Berlin: Reimer, 1890), p. 268, no. 1014.

My rough translation of the Greek as printed by Kaibel:

For you, player on the pipes, composer of songs of praise, gentle god,
holy leader of bathing Naiads,
Hygeinos made this gift. From a painful disease
you yourself, lord, cured him when you came near;
for among all my children you appeared openly,
not in a dream, but at mid-day by the pathways.

Cf. the Latin translation in Ed. Cougny, Epigrammatum Anthologia Palatina cum Planudeis et Appendice Nova Epigrammatum Veterum ex Libris et Marmoribus Ductorum, Vol. III (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1890), p. 33, #214:

Tibi hocce, fistulator, hymnos-tractans, placide deus,
  pure lavacra-fundentium rex Naiadum,
donum Hyginus (i. est Valentinus) fecit, quem gravi ex morbo
  ipse, princeps, validum fecisti accedens:
omnes enim inter liberos meos palam adstitisti
  non somno, sed medium diei per cursum.

I haven't seen J. Bousquet, "Epigrammes romains," Klio 52 (1970) 37–40, but according to Georges Daux, "En marge des Mélanges Klaffenbach," Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 95 (1971) 267-275 (at 269-272), Bousquet proposed the supplement Π[ὰν αἰ]πόλε (goatherd Pan) for ὑ[μνη]πόλε (composer of songs of praise) in the first line. Daux p. 270: "La lettre Π, déchiffrée dans le premier vers par J. Bousquet sur la reproduction photographique, est un gain assuré; les restes visibles excluent tout autre signe, alors que les éditeurs successifs adoptaient une lecture Y (d'où ύ[μνη]πόλε), sans hésitation ni réserve."

In line 5, Kaibel attributes the supplement [ἐν τεκέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (among my children) to E. Curtius. There have been a number of other proposals to fill the gap:

H. van Herwerden, "Coniecturae Epigraphicae," Mnemosyne 10 (1882) 386-399 (at 394), conjectured [ἐγγενέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (to my kinsmen), because he found the preposition ἐν otiose.
W. Drexler, "Die Epiphanie des Pan," Philologus 52 (1894) 731-732 (at 732), suggested [εἰν ὀΐ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (among my sheep), assuming that Hygeinos was a shepherd. Daux (op. cit.) approves this supplement, because the number of letters fills the gap precisely, but prefers a slightly different interpretation, with πᾶσι standing alone, not modifying ὀΐεσσιν. Daux translates (p. 272): "Tu t'es manifesté aux yeux de tous, présent au milieu de mes moutons; ce n'était pas un songe, cela se passait vers le milieu de la course du jour, en pleine lumière" (p. 272).
Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Ephialtes. Eine pathologischmythologische Abhandlung über die Alpträume und Alpdämonen des klassischen Altertums (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1900 = Abhandlungen der Philologisch-Historischen Classe der Königlich Sächsische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-Historische Classe, XX, 2), pp. 45-47 (at p. 45), proposed either [ἐν κτήν]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (among my flocks) or [ἐν σκυλάκ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (among my pups), assuming that Hygeinos was either a shepherd or a hunter.
According to Daux (op. cit.), J. Bousquet suggested [υἱή]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (to my sons).
According to Daux (op. cit.), Kurt Latte conjectured [ἐν παθέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (amid my sufferings). I don't know where Latte made the conjecture. Examination of photographs by W. Peek, "Epigraphische Lesefrüchte," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 31 (1978) 271-274 (at 273), tends to confirm Latte's supplement. Johannes Geffcken, Griechische Epigramme (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1916), p. 140, no. 351, had already suggested [οὖν παθέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς as an alternative to Richard Wünsch's [οὖν ἄλγ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς.
Someone else, whose identity is unknown to me, proposed [ἐν θυέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς (as I was sacrificing), since that is the reading that appears in the Packard Humanities Institute's Searchable Greek Inscriptions.

I'm tempted to adopt Bousquet's supplement in line 1 and Latte's supplement in line 5. With these supplements the Greek would read thus:

Σ]οὶ τόδε, συρικτά, Π[ὰν αἰ]πόλε, μείλιχε δαῖμο[ν,
  ἁγνὲ λοετροχόων κοίρανε Ναϊάδων,
δῶρον Ὑγεῖνος ἔτε[υξε]ν, ὃν ἀργαλέης ἀπὸ νούσου
  αὐτὸς, ἄνα[ξ], ὑγιῆ θήκαο προσπελ[ά]σ[ας·
πᾶσι γὰρ [ἐν παθέ]εσσιν ἐμοῖς ὰνα[φ]ανδὸν ἐπέστης 5
  οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλὰ μέσους ἤματος ἀμφὶ δρόμους.

My translation would change as follows:

For you, player on the pipes, goatherd Pan, gentle god,
holy leader of bathing Naiads,
Hygeinos made this gift. From a painful disease
you yourself, lord, cured him when you came near;
For in the midst of all my sufferings you appeared openly,
not in a dream, but at mid-day by the pathways.

I learned of the inscription from H.S. Versnel, "What Did Ancient Man See When He Saw a God? Some Reflections on Greco-Roman Epiphany," in Dirk van der Plas, ed., Effigies Dei: Essays on the History of Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1987), pp. 42-55 (at 48).

The inscription is in Luigi Moretti, Inscriptiones Graecae Urbis Romae, I (Rome: Istituto Italiano per la Storia Antica, 1968), pp. 165-167, no. 184, but I can only see a few disconnected snippets of the inscription and Moretti's notes in Google Books.

Computer translation of 'Ships with Butterfly Wings'

Art for art's sake.

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Coming November 1. 'The Art of Murder.'

28 Kasım 2012 Çarşamba

Indical Learning

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Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), The History of the Worthies of England, new ed., Vol. II (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg, 1840) p. 460 (on Alan of Lynn):

Great his diligence in reading many and voluminous authors; and no less his desire that others with him should reap the fruit of his industry, to which end he made indexes of the many writers he perused.

An Index is a necessary implement, and no impediment, of a book, except in the same sense wherein the carriages of an army are termed impedimenta. Without this, a large author is but a labyrinth without a clue to direct the reader therein. I confess there is a lazy kind of learning which is only indical; when scholars (like adders which only bite the horse heels) nibble but at the tables, which are calces librorum, neglecting the body of the book. But though the idle deserve no crutches (let not a staff be used by them, but on them;) pity it is the weary should be denied the benefit thereof, and industrious scholars prohibited the accommodation of an index, most used by those who most pretend to contemn it.

Claude Raguet Hirst, The Bookworm's Table

Dear Mike,

I can't resist pointing out that Fuller's Worthies itself has no index. This want was only supplied after the author's death, with a 12-page An Alphabetical Index to Fuller's Worthies of England (London, 1737).

As ever,

Ian Jackson

Four Judgments on Student Performance

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R.P.G. Williamson, quoted in Caroline Jebb, Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1907), p. 189:

Then came the formula, varying only with the book that was being read and the particular student addressed: 'We begin, this morning, gentlemen, Herodotus, Book IX, page 64, section 23: Mr Smith, bench 12, will you begin, please?' I wish I could give the cadence of these words; it is clear enough in my own ears, and every old student who reads this will recall the well-known tones.

The words were spoken most precisely, slowly, and distinctly, and the request to Mr Smith was given in a gradually ascending pitch but in as gradual a diminuendo of loudness so as not to alarm that gentleman unduly. Mr Smith, it must be remembered, did not expect the honour, for Jebb went through the class in such a way that no one knew when he was to be invited to exhibit his power of translation and his scholarship. After Smith had got through his translation he was asked some questions and then followed one of four judgments by the professor. If he had done first-rate he received the encomium, 'Thank you, Mr Smith; very well' (the last two words in a gentle murmur of appreciation); if he had done pretty well, he was greeted with, 'Thank you, Mr Smith' (the voice still genial); if his performance was moderate, he escaped with the words, 'That will do, Mr Smith' (the voice indicative of slight boredom), and if he had muddled through, the awful sentence came, as if from Olympus, 'Sit down, Mr Smith.' No one who heard these unvarying judgments and the delicate and deliberate shading of the tones of the voice in which they were pronounced will ever forget them.

Rejoicing in Common Things

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Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind 9 = Moralia 469 D-E (tr. W.C. Helmbold):

Antipater of Tarsus, on his deathbed reckoning up the good things that had fallen to his lot, did not omit even the fair voyage he had from Cilicia to Athens; so we should not overlook even common and ordinary things, but take some account of them and be grateful that we are alive and well and look upon the sun; that there is neither war nor factious strife among us, but that both the earth grants cultivation and the sea fair sailing to those who wish it; that we may speak or act, be silent or at leisure, as we choose.

Ἀντίπατρος δ᾽ ὁ Ταρσεὺς πρὸς τῷ τελευτᾶν ἀναλογιζόμενος ὧν ἔτυχεν ἀγαθῶν, οὐδὲ τὴν εὔπλοιαν παρέλιπε τὴν ἐκ Κιλικίας αὐτῷ γενομένην εἰς Ἀθήνας. δεῖ δὲ καὶ τὰ κοινὰ μὴ παρορᾶν ἀλλ᾽ ἔν τινι λόγῳ τίθεσθαι καὶ χαίρειν, ὅτι ζῶμεν ὑγιαίνομεν τὸν ἣλιον ὁρῶμεν· οὔτε πόλεμος οὔτε στάσις ἐστίν· ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ γῆ παρέχει γεωργεῖν καὶ θάλασσα πλεῖν ἀδεῶς τοῖς βουλομένοις· καὶ λέγειν ἔξεστι καὶ πράττειν καὶ σιωπᾶν καὶ σχολάζειν.

Art for art's sake.

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Coming November 1. 'The Art of Murder.'

27 Kasım 2012 Salı

Rich and Poor

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John Ruskin (1819-1900), Unto This Last (Essay IV, § 65):

[I]n a community regulated only by laws of demand and supply, but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just, and godly person.

To Laugh is Better than Learning

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James Shirley (1596-1666), St. Patrick for Ireland (London: Printed by J. Raworth, for R. Whitaker, 1640), from Act V:

I neither will lend, nor borrow,
Old age will be here to morrow,
'Tis pleasure we are made for,
When death comes all is paid for:
    No matter what's the bill of fare,        5
    I'll take my cup, I'll take no care.

Be wise, and say you had warning,
To laugh is better than learning,
To weare no cloathes, not neat is,
But hunger is good where meat is:        10
    Give me wine, give me a wench,
    And let her Parrot talke in French.

It is a match worth the making,
To keepe the merrie thought waking;
A song is better than fasting,        15
And sorrow's not worth the tasting,
    Then keep your braine light as you can,
    An ounce of care will kill a man.

'Tis in line 3 is my conjectural emendation for 'This in the 1640 printed text. Most modern editions and anthologies seem to have This.

Computer translation of 'Ships with Butterfly Wings'

Art for art's sake.

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Coming November 1. 'The Art of Murder.'

26 Kasım 2012 Pazartesi

Cast Away Care

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John Ford and Thomas Dekker, The Sun's-Darling: A Moral Masque (London: Printed by J. Bell, for Andrew Penneycuicke, 1656), pp. 30-31 (from Act IV, Scene 1):

Cast away care, hee that Loves sorrow,
Lengthens not a day, nor can buy to morrow:
        Money is trash; and he that will spend it,
        let him drink merrily, Fortune will send it.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, Oh ho.        5
Play it off stiffly, we may not part so: merrily &c.

Wine is a Charme, it heates the blood too,
Cowards it will arm, if the wine be good too;
        quickens the wit, and makes the back able;
        scornes to submit to the watch or Cunstable.        10
Merrily, &c.

Pots fly about, give us more Liquor;
Brothers of a rowt, our braines will flow quicker;
        emptie the Cask, score up, wee care not,
        fill all the Pots again, drink on, and spare not,        15
Merrily, &c.

Line 6: OED s.v. play, under "Phrasal Verbs," defines "to play off" as "to drain or finish (a drink, esp. an alcoholic one)." On "stiffly" cf. OED, s.v. stiff, sense 13.b "Of a drinker: 'Hard'"; one of the citations is to Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or, The Drunkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (London: Printed by Robert Raworth, 1635), p. 44:

To title a drunkard by, wee (as loath to give such a name, so grosse and harsh) strive to character him in a more mincing and modest phrase, as thus:
He is a good fellow,
Or,
A boone Companion,
A mad Greeke,
A true Tojan [sic, read Trojan],
A stiffe Blade...

A "stiff drink," i.e. a strong or potent one, apparently doesn't occur until the 19th century (OED s.v. stiff, sense 17).

Lines 8-10: see Some Effects of Wine.

Title page of Heywood's Philocothonista

Reading in Bed

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J.W. Robertson Scott, The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette, of its first editor Frederick Greenwood, and of its founder George Murray Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 45:

All of us who read in bed have our little dodges. Smith made a point of not putting a marker in a book to show where he had stopped reading before falling asleep. The last page or two, he considered, might have been read in a half-drowsy state, so, noble fellow, he 'began reading the next night at the point at which my memory of the book held good'.

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), Crackers in Bed
Hat tip: Ian Jackson.