Our Favorite Quotes

John Marston read Shakespeare.
Who reads John Marston? Now if he had written these gems -

A WOMAN'S POEM:
Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray for a man who's not a creep,
One who's handsome, smart and strong.
One who loves to listen long,
One who thinks before he speaks,
One who'll call, not wait for weeks.
I pray he's rich and self-employed,
And when I spend, won't be annoyed.
Pull out my chair and hold my hand..
Massage my feet and help me stand.
Oh send a king to make me queen.
A man who loves to cook and clean.
I pray this man will love no other.
And relish visits with my mother.

A MAN'S POEM:
I pray for a deaf-mute gymnast nymphomaniac with
big **** who owns a bar on a golf course,
and loves to send me fishing and drinking..
This doesn't rhyme and I don't give a ****.

 

I have always liked a line from the poem "Orientations" by Odysseus Elytis:

"And the sea that plays with its accordion..."

 

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Chaplain Forgy

 

That's a wonderful phrase, and it sent me off on an interesting google search. But I don't generally bother with poets outside my native language, because in a good poem the sound and cadence of the words, along with the background or secondary associations of those words, is as important as the literal meanings.

Most good poems work on several different levels, and even the best translations rarely get past the first one. Although there are exceptions... Edward FitzGerald's translation of Omar Khayyam being a notable one.

To be fair though, FitzGerald isn't particularly true to either the literal meanings or the general feel of the original stanzas. It would be more accurate to say his verses were inspired by Omar Khayyam, rather than calling them a translation.

That's OK; I love him anyway. Maybe it's a genetic thing. I still have a beautifully tooled leather handbag my dad made for my mother in 1948, a year before I was born. Inside the flap he inscribed:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

She carried that purse for more than fifty years, and only put it away when the clasp finally broke.

 

You we have gone from mail to email, from tech to etech and we have gone from now to enow!

You crack me up!

 

C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.
(It's magnificent, but it's not the railway station).

 

Apres moi, la deluge

- Charles de Gaulle
- Louis XV or perhaps Mme. de Pompadour
- Sir Roger Bannister
- everyone and his dog

 

Le calembour est la fiente de l’esprit qui vole.
Victor Hugo

 

"The pun is the lowest form of wit"

- my senior grade English teacher (quoting Johnson I believe)

 

The bun is the lowest form of wheat.

-Frank Muir

 

LOVE AND TENSOR ALGEBRA - STANISLAW LEM

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any BooE or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

 

Must have been a bear to translate. At first I thought you meant Stanislaw Ulam. Such a shame he couldn't mention his talented countrymen who were working in the US. Must still have been subject to censors when he wrote that.

 

I'm not sure who you mean when you say "his talented coutrymen".
Lem was scathing about a lot of scifi writers. To him many were just writing
cowboy stories in space.

I agree, though, that the translation is simply remarkable.
In another story, an electronic bard is asked to write a poem. Not just any poem...

But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet
heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every
word beginning with the letter "s"!

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.

That would have been tough to translate from Polish!

 

Lathered, lucky Lazauskas lingered.
Leo laughed lamely. Lazily licked,
Lately lashed leprechaun, Lizard leered,
Loudly loathing,
Listlessly lounging
Loosely lashed, leaving Lismore.

 

Oh, "L" . . . !