It occurs to me . . .
. . . that I may have been in one of them hypnagogic states you hear tell of.
story of my life, five layers of translation, something seriously wrong
“ऐसा नहीं है कि डीन [मेरे मित्र] रोंआर असभ्य खुद के ठीक है. मेरा मतलब है, तो यह लगता है कि उनके विचार जंगली आर्गाइल जुराबें है. लेकिन यह अच्छा है, मैं चाहता हूँ कि लोगों को प्रत्यक्ष, मैं कभी नहीं जाना चाहते हैं ताकि जो किसी के साथ गैर जिम्मेदाराना के रूप में मुझे. अधिकांश लोगों को मैं जानता हूँ कि वास्तव में उच्च अधिकार और नौकरियों के लिए खो दिया जब वे समय के कार्यालय में नहीं हैं. Beserk के बाद क्लब का काम है. मुझे लगता को आकर्षित करने में उन्हें बड़े पैमाने पर, इन सभी लड़कों में पॉल स्टुअर्ट सूट के साथ छह अंक वेतन और hellfire पर स्विच मंदक उनकी दृष्टि में है. ”
• “मेरे अनुभव से यह एक बड़ी समस्या है बड़े लड़कों के साथ, वे उनकी सहजता में खो शुरू करने के लिए उनके तीस, जल्दी करने का कहना है कि वे कहते हैं कि वे क्या सोचते हैं कि वे क्या महसूस की बजाय, क्योंकि एक तरह का सख्त की धमनियों. जैसा कि हम सभी को कम या अधिक बच्चों के रूप में raving maniacs है, लेकिन उसके बाद सब कुछ प्राप्त हमें परम्परागत. मुझे ऐसा नहीं है, इसलिए मैं जानता हूं कि मैं एक महान अभिनेत्री जाएगा एक दिन में, मैं पूरी तरह से मेरे बच्चे के साथ संपर्क में हैं. ”
• “पुरुषों. किसी भी मैंने पहले कभी नहीं मिले हैं. वे सभी लड़के थे. मैं चाहता हूं मैं नहीं करना चाहते हैं …. मैं उन्हें इतनी नफरत को अकेले ही, लेकिन जब मैं जाग में कुछ आदमी के बिस्तर के साथ शुष्क पर पत्रक खर्राटों की तरह था और वह एक ट्रक कचरा, मैं रॉम - मुझे यहां से बाहर है. ”
• “एक बात Fucking है. में किसी के चेहरे पर तुम crotch - छुरेबाजी मेरा मतलब है, यह वास्तव में अंतरंग.”
A Public Apology to Mr Phil “Terrorkitten” Bebbington,
whose witty and tongue-in-cheek comment on my Show and Tell: Ephemera (I) post I undermined by my tone-deaf follow-up comments.
Mr Bebbington’s comment was clever and (moderately) subtle and English. My response was that of an American chick with an intellect subtle as a flying mallet.
“Hunh? Whaddya mean? Whaddya talkin’ about? I don’t GET it!”
Mr Bebbington, I apologize for having lowered the tone of discourse, and I do hope we will be seeing you* ’round these parts again soon.
With profound respect, I remain
Sheila Ryan
“Born that way and had a relapse”
____________________
* Reference to tag line featured regularly in The Prisoner, the television series starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan. Well-loved by Anglophiliac American chicks.
Dialogue I Must Steal
“I want to neglect the remainder of my life with you.”
From Matt Sloan’s A Wicked Deception (toward the very end), posted to clusterflock by Our India.
It fires my heart with the flame extreme
Via Tom Christensen’s Rightreading, which is always chock-full of goodness.
from the contact form
Barry Kwok writes:
On a hot summer day, Barry went to the said beach with his family thinking of having a cool dip in water. However, Barry admired Bruce Lee, the greatest Kung Fu fighter and martial arts movie star in the world, he was eager to have a tanned complexion like Bruce so he spent 4 hours lying on the beach enjoying the burning sunbath without applying suntan lotion to his body. It was really a painful experience to him. A few days later, Meaco, his younger sister, who was ten-year old then, took 90 minutes to peel off from his chest the largest skin in the world (8.5 x 4 inches) off my chest with her hands (without using any equipment) in the shape of a China map representing Hong Kong residents are patriots and very much longing for returning the sovereignty to the mainland China. The feeling is so warm, which seems like an adopted child having a reunion with his bioparents. The skin specimen has carefully been kept in a stamp album for more than 27 years and will be passed from generation to generation.
Semi-detached
Camera-phone snap viewed from a distance. 26 May 2008.
it’s only — a year — a-way!
Y’all. We’re a year away from clusterflockstock.
On Ehrman’s book– Misquoting Jesus
Yes, I’m right on top of things–recommending a book that was on the bestseller lists in 2005. I bought Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why after hearing Ehrman interviewed by Terri Gross and on The Diane Rehm Show, but it entered a large stack of books and I just now got to it. It’s a fine book, in my view, for many reasons. I particularly like Ehrman’s introduction, in which he sets forth the autobiographical details of how he came to write the book, and how he eventually came to call himself a “happy agnostic” (”happy” being an answer to those who wrote to express saddness over his “loss” of faith). In an end note he speaks of his readers’ response to the book and notes that although it was emotionally wrenching to make such a transition, he now feels that he understands “the human race, religion–the whole shooting match” much better than he ever did.
Ehrman points out that much of what he explores is not news to scholars, but much of it has been tucked away in footnotes, with many Christians typically not being encouraged to examine and ask questions about them. Many Christians don’t seem to realize that we don’t have “original texts” of the books of the Bible, and the source manuscripts we do have vary greatly at many points, having been altered innocently, accidentally, and sometimes deliberately for hundreds of years. This should be particularly relevant to those who profess the word for word inerrancy of the Bible–a view that Ehrman notes is a completely modern idea. Naturally the differences (and the fact that the King James version so widely used is based on some of the worst manuscript copies) are underplayed as mere spelling errors and the like by believers, but Ehrman points out that:
“From my point of view, the stakes are rather high: Does Luke’s Gospel teach a doctrine of atonement (that Christ’s death atones for sins)? Does John’s Gospel teach that Christ is the ‘unique God’ himself? Is the doctrine of the Trinity ever explicitly stated in the New Testament? These and other key theological issues are at stake, depending on which textual variants you think are original and which you think are creations of early scribes who were modifying the text.”
Perhaps my own pleasure in reading this book derives from my having made a similar journey (though not by way of such an admirably rigorous study). These days, another book I am comforted to read is The Portable Athiest, a great collection of writings selected and with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens. Many things in this book leave me a little more encouraged to think that reason is not entirely dead in the land. I like to see the thoughts of people who have realized that an honest search for Truth can never proceed from the required confirmation of a view that is already held. One’s desire or need for something to be true cannot be the thing that makes the truth what it is, and until this is realized there is no real inquiry being made at all.
A message from your translator
The poet is not a teacher of morals, he invents and forms figures, he brings past times back to life, and people can learn from that just as easily as they can by studying history or observing the events going on around them in their everyday lives. If they really wanted it that way [i.e. that his plays should be more moral in nature], then you wouldn’t be allowed to study history, for a great number of immoral things are recounted there, you would have to cross blindfolded to the other side of the street, for fear of seeing various obscenities, and hue and cry against God who has created a world in which so much wantoness and libertinism may be found. And if they try to tell me that the poet should not depict the world such as it is, but rather as it ought to be, then I shall respond that I do not wish to do better than the good Lord, who surely made the world just as it ought to be.
Just Finished
Stephen Mitchell’s version of Gilgamesh.
LOLcat Wasteland
This is for those of us still harboring a smoldering hatred of whoever it was assigned us Eliot’s “atom bomb”:
1. IM IN UR WASTELAND BURYING UR DEAD
april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has. (1)
april in ur memoriez, making ur desire.
spring rain in ur dull rootzes.earth in ur winter, covered in snow
can has potato. PO-TA-TO.
INVISIBLE SUMMER! RAININGZES!
im in ur hofgarden, drinking ur coffeez.at archduke’s haus, invisible sled!
im in ur moutainz, holding on tight.
no can has cheezburger.
oral sex metaphors in ur poem.
Silly stuff
Via Jeremy Freese, the Backstreet Boys (and Yao Ming) win the hearts and minds of two godless Communists Chinese over to Our Way of Thinking. Still fun, even if you’ve seen it before.
Baby steps.
Via Andrew Sullivan, we had no idea just how bad things were in the Fuhrerbunker:
What’s Tom Cruise’s line from Magnolia? . . .
I make a strict point of never blogging anything in the nature of a student-teacher or colleague-colleague interaction, but when a civilian knocks on my office door, comes in and says something funny, it’s fair game boyo.
So this kid comes in the door. (And he’s not a student at my institution but he’s home for the summer.) And he wants to ask me about Wittgenstein and philosophy of language and ‘reclaiming Kant’. And so I ask him a bit about what he means by that (sounds reasonable.) And, well, there is a bit of confusion. And it turns out he said ‘reclaiming cunt’. That is, he is working on some sort of project about the Vagina Monologues, etc. I ended up telling him I didn’t think Wittgenstein was quite what he was looking for. Still, these sorts of linguistic questions are quite interesting. Anyhoo. There was a moment there.
“The one true translation”
Bruce Alderman comments on Mark Driscoll’s “theological reasons” for preaching from the English Standard Version of the Bible:
In point #3, Driscoll says, “Words carry meaning.” Unfortunately, he has forgotten about the Bible verse that says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” (I don’t recall the exact scripture reference for that one, but I’m pretty sure it’s somewhere between “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and “God helps those who help themselves.”
Anyway, my point is that a Bible translation with lots of pictures is therefore better than one without. And the ESV, whatever its strengths, falls woefully short in the area of color pictures.
New Aeneid
There are twin Gates of Sleep.
One, they say, is called the Gate of Horn
and it offers easy passage to all true shades,
The other glistens with ivory, radiant, flawless,
but through it the dead send false dreams up toward the sky.
And here Anchises, his vision told in full, escorts
his son and Sibly both and shows them out now
through the Ivory Gate.
Translating Virgil
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit,” Aeneas tells his exhausted, shipwrecked followers in “The Aeneid,” Book 1. “Maybe someday you will rejoice to recall even this.”
Barney and Beckett
Translating, he added, “is a job for a professional writer and one prepared to write in his own way within the limits of mine.”
Cooper Renner and Mario Bellatin
Cooper Renner, a contributor to this blog, and poet, editor, translator, and writer, is working on a translation of three texts from the Mexican writer Mario Bellatin. Below is a brief description from him describing the texts he is working from:
“Hero Dogs” is almost an allegory, written in a sequence of snippets, but he avoids making direct connections between his two announced topics*. He also uses terminology in a sort of deliberately clumsy way, always referring to his main character, for example, as “el hombre inmovil” [the immobile man] as opposed to “paralyzed man” or something that sounds more natural, and he doesn’t vary it. “Chinese Checkers” is full of bits of story, characters telling other characters what they are doing, the narrator telling us what he is doing, but it doesn’t “add up”, as it were. There is no artificial direction imposed onto the various narratives. And I still don’t know what the new one is going to do. If I remember correctly, he told me that it had not even been published in Spanish yet.
*He doesn’t make any direct connections between his two motifs once the story gets going, but the subtitle of the book and the initial paragraph tells you that the connection is there: then you have to decide how to play the “narrative” against his announced “meaning”.