april 23rd

Lance Tooks drawing from Sketches from Spain

And the date offers a number of reasons to celebrate:

It’s World Book and Copyright Day, it’s traditionally celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday and the day of his death, and it’s also the day Miguel de Cervantes died.

It’s St George’s Day, too, (San Jordi) and Castile Day – not to be confused with Bastille Day, of course – or, perhaps more accurately, El Día de Castile y León.

It seems to me quite apt to celebrate castles in Spain and the world of books on the same day, and it’s also appropriate that the picture accompanying this post is taken from Lance Tooks’ upcoming book Sketches from Spain, due out in May. (Thank you, Lance, for permission to use it!)
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white laburnum

Well, I thought it must be white laburnum, but I’ve had a look around the web, and find that it’s probably a black locust tree, which is also known as false acacia.

black locust tree blossom (white laburnum)
Whatever it is, the flowers are rather lovely, though I doubt there will many of them left after the torrential rain that seems to be obligatory in Semana Santa in Spain.

bird watching

cat watching swallow's nest

The cat in the picture – who, I’ve just realised, was one year old yesterday – would, presumably prefer to have dinner on the wing than settle for the supermarket kibble we bought last time.

The birds actually built the nest directly above the cat-house where the kittens were being nursed last spring, which seemed a little fool-hardy. I assume it’s the same pair that have come back this year and refurbished it.

If I thought long enough, I expect I’d come up with a pun on ‘swallow’, but since the blog has been a bit neglected recently, maybe I’ll leave that up to the readers.

religious education?

On a recent visit to Madrid I spotted the Colegio Arzobispal in the photo:

colegio arzobispal

I think it’s fairly obvious that not all the children who study there grow up to be archbishops, but do you have to have studied there to be considered a candidate for such a post?

It clearly is a school, not a theological college, as the yellow traffic sign in the wider view shows:
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notes about poetry

Looking back through old notebooks at the weekend, I found some notes I must have made after talking to Joan Margarit back in 2002, I think. The conversation was in Spanish, and the notes (made later in English) are my personal interpretation of what he was trying to say.

There were two points about translation that I hadn’t remembered:

Form, metre, rhyme etc. are superficial elements of a poem. What gets translated is something more essential.

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