Bishop Kallistos Ware
from The Orthodox Way (SVS Press, 1995), p. 19

Wherever we look, we see not only confusion but beauty. In snowflake, leaf, or insect, we discover structured patterns of a delicacy and balance that nothing manufactured by human skill can equal. We are not to sentimentalize these things, but we cannot ignore them. How and why have these patterns emerged? If I take a pack of cards fresh from the factory, with the four suits neatly arranged in sequence, and I begin to shuffle it, then the more it is shuffled the more the initial pattern disappears and is replaced by a meaningless juxtaposition. But in the case of the universe the opposite has happened. Out of an initial chaos there have emerged patterns of an ever-increasing intricacy and meaning, and among all these patterns the most intricate and meaningful is man himself. Why should the process that happens to the pack of cards be precisely reversed on the level of the universe? What or who is responsible for this cosmic order and design? Such questions are not unreasonable.

Updated

My other blog, with a sentence from St Gregory of Nyssa.

Pat Buchanan loses his cool



.. while discussing Ferraro's remarks about Obama with Keli Goff (at whom he directed his impatience) and Rachel Maddow.

Not his most glorious moment, but hardly a hanging offense.

Whatever happened to a cup o' joe?

wonders the blogger at June Cleaver After a Six-Pack.

I'm linking to this, because I don't want to scandalize my few remaining readers by posting the obscenity-laden YouTube featuring an eight-minute Denis Leary rant on the exact same subject.

For the record, I have never patronized a Starbucks.

An elastic use of words?

The blogger at The Daily Eudemon wonders if the definition of "pro-life" has become a bit ... undefined.

I'm thinking

that "Client 9" would be a great name for a band.

Of course, this is much graver matter.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Scipio blogs "Ars Poetica?" by the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz.

Also from Scipio ...

... ein theologischer Limerick in English and German.

There was once a very lovely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.

a drop of water

ven a tocar el fuego del azul instantáneo,
ven antes de que sus pétalos se consuman

-- Pablo Neruda, sonnet 24

in the translation of Stephen Tapscott:

come touch the fire of this momentary blue,
before its petals wither

Scenic Boston Common

Mud. Defaced statues. Downed fences. And mud.



The Public Gardens in summer: much, much better.

Via Mere Comments

Hymns for the Sunday of the Last Judgment in the Orthodox Church.

TSO

posts the words to one of my favorite hymns.

O little forests, meekly
Touch the snow with low branches!
O covered stones
Hide the house of growth!

Secret
Vegetal words,
Unlettered water,
Daily zero.

Pray undistracted
Curled tree
Carved in steel! --
Buried zenith!

Fire, turn inward
To your weak fort,
To a burly infant spot,
A house of nothing.

O peace, bless this mad place:
Silence, love this growth.

O silence, golden zero
Unsetting sun

Love winter when the plant says nothing.

-- Thomas Merton

The title of this song



came to mind as I was reading the lamentation linked-to immediately below ...

Sullivan's correspondent

Andrew Sullivan blogs some correspondence from someone who laments the fact that some Catholic bishops are actually, you know, Catholic. It's the end of the world, selon lui.

Every plant that stands in the light of the sun is a saint and an outlaw. Every tree that brings forth blossoms without the command of man is powerful in the sight of God. Every star that man has not counted is a world of sanity and perfection. Every blade of grass is an angel singing in a shower of glory.

-- Thomas Merton, from "Raids on the Unspeakable," via The Pocket Thomas Merton (New Seeds Books, p. 169)

Verse was a special illness of the ear

-- W. H. Auden, "Rimbaud"

Tapscott's liberties

Am reading through Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets for a second time. A lot of the Amazon customer reviews for this book mentioned that the translator, Stephen Tapscott, produced English versions laden with inaccuracies and liberties and errors. I must admit: I haven't studied Spanish since elementary school, but I think I can glean enough from the en face Spanish of Neruda's original language that I can safely agree with this assessment.

Tapscott routinely renders singulars as plurals, and plurals as singulars. The same Spanish word, rocío, is rendered "dew" in one place and "soft rain" in another. In sonnet IX alone, we have "restless" for indócil (are restlessness and indocility the same thing?), and "dazzling lurch of the sea" for deslumbrante movimiento marino.

Allowing for the fact that a translator must occasionally use synonyms and avoid cognates, is "lurch of the sea" really the best choice? The alliteration is lost, and the meaning is changed to something that, perhaps, Neruda would not want. "Marine movement" would be equally unacceptable; it is flat, and "movement" sounds a little odd. "Motion," perhaps? "Maritime motion." I'm not equipped to translate Spanish into an English that can be called poetry, but I'm fairly certain that "lurch" is a mistake, as it gives us more Tapscott than Neruda.

Having said all this, Tapscott is brave enough (was brave enough: this translation was first published over 20 years ago) to give us Neruda's original sonnets, so we can compare Tapscott's English to the Nobel laureate's Spanish. It is perhaps inevitable that Tapscott would suffer in the comparison. And these translations, however flawed, do open up the Sonnets to those of us who are Spanish-impaired.

Five stars out of five for Neruda's sonnets (memorable lines from which are quoted below), three stars for Tapscott's translations.

It's a good thing

for Mr Cutts that the jury didn't consist of twelve of me.

RIP

William F. Buckley, Jr. dies at 82.

Well, breakfast at 10:02 am sounds good ...

... but I am usually up at seven.



Via Oblique House.

Addendum : I re-took the quiz, giving totally different (but equally feasible) answers to most of the questions, and still got 10:02 am. Odd.

Finally

Finally, there's something worth reading at the Poetry Foundation blog "harriet": A. E. Stallings on poetic diction, on poets who change diction within the same poem, etc. By way of illustration, Whitman's astronomer poem and a sonnet by Marilyn Nelson.

Ya no habrá sino todo el aire libre,
las manzanas llevadas por el viento,
el suculento libro en la enramada,

y allí donde respiran los claveles
fundaremos un traje que resista
la eternidad de un beso victorioso.

-- Neruda, the last six lines of sonnet 100

in Stephen Tapscott's "free" translation :

There won't be anything but all the fresh air,
apples carried on the wind,
the succulent book in the woods:

and there where the carnations breathe, we will begin
to make ourselves a clothing, something to last
through the eternity of a victorious kiss.

"Hope of the entire world"

I dunno. With supporters like these ...

"Anyone Else but You"

Speaking of songs from movies, it's a mystery to me why this quirky number wasn't nominated for something ... it's by the Moldy Peaches, from the film Juno :

"Falling Slowly"

By Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. From the 2007 film Once. Winner of this year's Academy Award for Best Song :



A deserved win, imho.

More confessional advice

from Fr Powell at Domine, da mihi hanc aquam!

A very fascinating section on resisting temptation :

When you resist temptation on your own you are rejecting God’s grace and denying the victory of the Cross. There is no reason to resist temptation. You are perfectly free not to sin. Rather than steel yourself against temptation and fight like mad to resist the sin, turn and face the temptation square on. Name it. Hand it over to God. And move on. Resistance is actually the first step we take toward the sin. Be honest: how many times have you resisted a temptation only to submit to it eventually? What you are doing is habituating yourself to surrendering to sin. Break the cycle here by taking control of the temptation itself. Let’s say you are being tempted to lie to your professor about cheating on a paper. Say to God, “Lord, I am being tempted to lie to Dr. Jones about my paper. I give this temptation to you to deal with. I’m going to the library. Amen.” This is both an act of the intellect and an act of the will. Habituate yourself to using Christ’s victory over sin and stop resisting temptation!

(Link spotted at Mark Shea's blog.)

Disclaimer
I'm not turning (back) into a leftist

With my defense of Mrs Obama over the "really proud" comment, my putting up a YouTube clip of my senior senator belting out "Ay, Jalisco" (in which he garbles the lyrics) at an Obama rally, and my posting some beautiful lines of a Stalinist poet ... some readers might have cause to wonder.

With Neruda, it's the writing, not the politics, that magnetizes. And with Teddy K, well, that was just irresistibly bad.

tus ojos se cerraron como dos alas grises

-- Neruda, sonnet 81

your eyes closed like two gray wings

*

una copa en que cae la ceniza celeste,
una gota en el pulso de un lento y largo río

-- Neruda, sonnet 84

a chalice filling with celestial ashes,
a drop in the pulse of a long slow river

[trans. Stephen Tapscott]

Yo pagué la vileza con palomas.

-- Pablo Neruda, sonnet 78

I repaid vileness with doves.

Una canción

Auden's birthday!

To commemorate, some light verse by the master.

They're all OK

A helicopter with Sens. Biden, Hagel, and Kerry on board makes an emergency landing in Afghanistan.

Keats and Yeats are on your side ...

... a Smiths lyric for your Thursday.

Addendum : Here's a video that a couple of guys (not the Smiths) made for the song. Was going to post a clip of a live performance of the song, but it pains me to say that Morrissey is a horrid vocalist in live performances.

There's a moment in the video that strikes me as being, well, a little mean-spirited. And it seems they couldn't find a headstone with the date 1804 on it.

Mrs. Obama's minor gaffe
or, much ado about not much

“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she told a Milwaukee crowd today, “and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."

A minor gaffe, if a gaffe at all. Some have gone so far as to demand an apology, which is ridiculous. Call me unpatriotic, but I just don't see the big deal.

Get on Mr. and Mrs. Obama's case for their support of infanticide. That's an issue. If McCain tries to make too much hay out of this "really proud" comment, he'll seem like an aging jingoist throwing sand against the tsunami of youth and charisma.

Remember when Gov. Clinton in a 1992 debate referred to the sitting president as "Mr. Bush" (instead of "Mr. President") ... and four years later, with Clinton as president, Bob Dole was still harping on it? How effective was that?

Michelle Obama's gaffe, if a gaffe it can be called, is the approximate equivalent of Bill Clinton's "Mr. Bush" moment. Let it go.

"Dancers Exercising"

A poem by Amy Clampitt (1920-94).