poem – Page 40 – don't confuse the narrator

not by bread alone

If of thy worldly goods thou art bereft
and of the store two loaves alone are left,
sell one and with the dole
buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

I seem to have known that verse all my life, and always associated it with the phrase “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Of course the latter is from the Bible; the verse, it seems, is by Rumi. Presumably the original wasn’t written in English, which would account for the variations I found when I went looking to see where it came from.
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I could care less

This week I had to fill in a form to register for a new doctor. Last time I registered was when I returned to the UK after 25 years living abroad; that was a fairly painless process, the only confusion being when they asked for my National Health number and I gave one in a format that they stopped using last century.

This time, although I had the right format number, I had to fill in a ten page questionnaire with all sorts of slightly bizarre questions. The one that caught my attention most was:

If someone cares for you, what is their name and telephone number?

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no poetry

Traffic delays possible - road warning sign

There’s no poetry
in traffic jams:
we edge forward
foot by foot. Caught
behind a juggernaut
with no opportunity
to scan ahead for a turn,
we’re stressing
in the fast lane,
going oh
so
slow,
syncopated with
the nearside flow;
we can’t even
reverse.

fortunes

Three – four – nine – two; three – one:
random magpies map my life
in black and white.

transcreation

Catalonia coastline — Catalonian coastline

After I posted about poetry translation last week, Ben came by and left a comment. So off I went to look at his blog, the recently started Project Poesía, an Anglo-Catalán poetry project.

I started tinkering with one of the pieces he had there, making a translation based on La Barceloneta, an original by Alexandre Plana; Ben has now added my draft translation to his blog as a guest post. (You can also read the original and Ben’s translation)

I’ve always thought that you need to feel some empathy with a poem to make a good translation. But now I’m beginning to wonder what happens if you feel too much empathy.
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