Did something get lost in the översättning?

The photo above is of Gamla Stan (Old Town) in Stockholm, Sweden. It is the oldest part of the city, dating from the 13th century. The green-roofed building on the left is the Royal Palace where King Carl VI Gustav lives. I was in Stockholm in 1969, from February 1 to March 1, when King Gustav VI Adolf lived in the palace (Carl is his son). I've retained a warm place in my memory for a very cold month during which I visited Drottningholm, Hötorget, Stadhuset, Östermalmstorg, Strandvägen, Lidingö, and other things Swedish.

I'm showing Gamla Stan to you because of a strange thing (strange to me, at least) that I found on the Internet: Edgar Allan Poe's poem, “The Raven,” in Swedish. The poem was first published in 1845 (in English), and at one time thousands of American schoolchildren were forced, forced I tell you, to memorize part of it along with “Annabel Lee” and “The Village Blacksmith” and “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” and “Flower In The Crannied Wall (I Pluck You Out Of The Crannies).” Maybe you remember the first stanza of Poe's “The Raven”:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more.”

Well, in Swedish, the title becomes “Korpen” and the first stanza is:

Trött en natt jag satt och drömde vid en gammal bok, där glömde,
bakom seklers förlåt gömde tankar hägrade förbi.
Knappt jag börjat slumra, förrän något knackade på dörren,
något pickade på dörren, ticketick det ljöd däri.
Upp jag blickade och sade, väckt ut ur mitt drömmeri:
“Nå stig in! Vem söker ni?”

Excuse me. Vem söker ni? Vem söker ni? I don't see a question mark in the English version of the first stanza. Do you? Underneath the Swedish title on the Internet page were the words “Översättning av Viktor Rydberg” which I presume mean “translation by Viktor Rydberg.” Maybe Viktor should go back to the drawing board; something of the essence of Edgar Allan Poe seems to have been lost in the översättning.

The celebration continues!

As part of the ongoing observance of Queen Elizabeth's eighty-second birthday, which lasts from her actual birthday on April 21st until the official celebration of it sometime in June (at least in these parts), I have written a poem. After Elizabeth's father, King George VI, died in 1952, there was a period of about a year when England had three living queens: Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Mother Elizabeth (George VI's widow), and Dowager Queen Mary (George V's widow and Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother). It apparently was considered a sign of Divine favor for the reigning monarch that three queens were alive at the same time.

My poem is about one of those women and is written after the style of Ogden Nash, or at least how I think Mr. Nash would write it if he had written it. The rhyme scheme is AABBCCDDAA, which I discovered afterward and didn't impose beforehand. I have dubbed the meter “limerick on steroids, appended with some nice double dactyls, unless they are anapests,” which is to say, it is irregular.


Dowager Queen Mary, or 'Tis A Gift To Be Simple
by Robert H. Brague

There once was a girl with a long, slender neck,
Who from all appearances kept her true feelings in check,
She was the mother-in-law of Wallis Warfield Simpson, whose third husband was King Edward VIII of England, whom Mrs. Simpson married after he had abdicated the throne in order to have the help and support of the woman he loved and had become the Duke of Windsor, and rather than referring to her new daughter-in-law, if she referred to her at all, as the Duchess of Windsor, probably felt like calling her “Her Royal Hagness,”
Plus she carried the burden of having been given at birth, by her parents, a long string of names the like of which few people have ever been forced to bear, namely, Victoria Mary Augusta Louise Olga Pauline Claudine Agnes,
So she had every right to look pained and aloof
When waving from Buckingham Palace’s roof;
It’s also no wonder that when she was grown,
And wed to George V, and come to the throne,
She thought to herself, “Golly, gee, what the heck,”
And said, “Call me, simply, Queen Mary of Teck.”

That picture up there is not Queen Elizabeth II, by the way. It's her grandmother, Queen Mary of Teck. Quite the family resemblance, eh, what? Here's another picture of Queen Mary when she was younger, taken during her husband's reign (1910-1935).




Stay tuned for more celebratory items.

Post #100: Things you will never see on my blog

Seven months ago today, on September 28, 2007, rhymeswithplague was born and this blog began. And now I am posting my one hundredth post. Unbelievable! Still going strong! Who woulda thunk? Actually, it isn't such a phenomenal feat. One hundred posts in 214 days is an average of just under one post every other day. Some bloggers post to their blogs several times a day, until their lives become all blog, all the time, like the History Channel and Hitler. My blog is small potatoes compared to theirs.

But today I make you a pledge, a promise. On my blog, you will never see anything about the following:

• The World Wrestling Federation or its cousin, the WWE.
• Ted Turner and Jane Fonda.
• Angelina Jolie.
• NASCAR racing.
• Beer (which looks, and probably tastes, like it has already been through the horse).
• Madonna.
• Rosie O'Donnell.
• Dancing With The Stars (not because I'm against dancing, I'm just against that kind of dancing).
• Tractor pulls.
• Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa.
• The Beijing Olympics.
• Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain.
• Moto-cross racing.
• Pimp My Ride.
• Chewing tobacco.
• The Bachelor.
• Desperate Housewives.
• Butter beans.

I realize this will cramp my style considerably, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

If you have a list of your own of things you never want to see on this blog, tell me about them in a comment.

The Trinity Window

This photo was taken by a woman who lives in Iowa who comments sometimes on this blog. She has given me permission to use it in this post, for which I am grateful. It caught my attention when she posted it on her blog a few days ago. The photo is of a beautiful stained glass window in the balcony of the Lutheran Church in Iowa that she attends, an edifice built in 1873. It is called “the Trinity window.”

This is a very ancient Christian symbol that tries to describe the Triune God, Who (I think) is indescribable. In the center is a circle containing the Latin word Deus (God). Surrounding the circle is a triangle with the word Pater (Father) at the top, the word Filius (Son) on the left (actually, the Son is at the Father's right hand as the symbol is facing toward the observer), and the words Spiritus Sanctus (Holy Spirit) on the other side. Along each side of the triangle are the Latin words Non Est, which mean “is not” or “He is not.” So basically the window tells us that God, the center of all things, is a Trinity consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it tells us three other things. First, the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father. Second, the Son is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. And third, the Father is not the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. They are three distinct persons, making up one Godhead in what Dr. Scot McKnight, a professor at North Park University in Chicago, calls “a perichoretic dance of mutual interpenetrability.” I was valedictorian of my high school class, but I have no idea what that means. The Trinity is a concept I can't really get my head around. It is a mystery that three can be one and one can be three, a very great mystery. But because I can't understand it, I believe it.

People have used various illustrations through the years to try to help explain the Trinity. The Trinity, they say, is like an egg, which has three parts--a yolk, a white, and a shell--and yet is one egg. The Trinity, they say, is like a molecule composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, which exists in three forms--water, ice, and steam--and yet its molecular structure remains the same. The Trinity, they say, is like a candle, which has three parts--the wax, a wick, and a flame--and yet is one candle. And God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and yet is one God, not three. All of the illustrations help, but all fall short.

I especially like two other illustrations that use a human being to illustrate the Trinity. St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “And I pray your whole spirit and soul and body will be preserved blameless unto the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” We ourselves are a trinity. With our body we have world-consciousness, with our soul (that is, our mind, emotions, and will) we have self-consciousness, and with our spirit we have God-consciousness. At least we did before Adam fell. Man's spirit, the part of him that is conscious of God, is what died that day. When a candle is deprived of oxygen, there can be no flame. But when God's Holy Spirit is restored in our lives, the oxygen returns and the flame can burn once more. Without Him, we have only a capacity for flame (wax and wick, body and soul), but no flame. The other illustration explains it best to me. I am one person, but I have different relationships. With my children, I am a father. With my parents, I am a son. With my wife, I am a husband. Yet I am still one person. I like this explanation best, but it still falls short of explaining the Trinity.

There is a verse in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 6:4, which is called “the Shema” by Jewish people; it is at the core of Judaism and repeated often. In English, it says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” In Hebrew, the words are, “Shema Yisroel, Adonai Elehenu, Adonai Echad.” (Jewish people substitute the word Adonai, Lord, for the word Yahweh, Jehovah, in the verse because they consider God's name, which means I AM THAT I AM, too sacred to speak.) It is interesting to me that there are two words in Hebrew for the concept of “one.” Yachad means an indivisible, sole, solitary oneness, as in “Take your son, your only son Isaac.” But echad means a compound unity, a oneness consisting of multiple parts, as in “The morning and the evening were the first day” (“first” is the ordinal number corresponding to “one,” a cardinal number) or “The people stood up as one man” or “one cluster of grapes” or “the man and his wife shall be one flesh.” And in Deuteronomy 6:4 the word used is echad.

It is truly a great mystery. I believe in monotheism--I believe there is only one Supreme Being--and I believe in the Trinity.

antidisestablishmentarianism

When I was in school back in the Dark Ages, that word up there in the title, all 28 letters of it, was said to be the longest word in the English language. But this post isn't going to be about words, it's going to be about spelling. Or, rather, it's going to be about little tricks that we play on ourselves (okay, that I play on myself) to remember how to spell something.

Like “theres 'a rat' in 'separate'.”

Like “the word 'weird' starts with the word 'we'.”

Like “it's 'i' before 'e', except after 'c', or when sounded like 'a', as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'.”

Like “the word 'siege' is spelled with an 'ie' because in German (which is entirely irrelevant) 'ie' is pronounced 'ee' and 'ei' is pronounced 'eye' and there is a word pronounced 'seej' but there is no word pronounced 'syje'.”

Like “the word 'seize' is spelled with an 'ei' because in German (which is still entirely irrelevant) 'ei' is pronounced 'eye' as I said before and there is a word pronounced 'size' and also a word pronounced 'seez' which is the one I'm trying to spell.”

I don't know about you, but these all make perfect sense to me.

These helpful little tricks that we tell ourselves (okay, that I tell myself) are called “mnemonic” devices, from the Greek word mnémonikós, of, or relating to, the memory, unless it's from the Greek word mnémosýné, memory, akin to mnâsthai, to remember, from mnmōn, mindful, which reminds us (okay, reminds me) of Mnemosyne, pronounced nee-mos-uh-nee, the ancient Greek goddess of memory, a daughter of Uranus and Gaea, and the mother by Zeus of the Muses. (And thank you very much, dictionary.com, but I digress.)

I employ a couple of other mnemonic devices as well, but not to help me with spelling.

Like “Roy G. Biv” reminds me of the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Like “General Electric Power Company” helps me remember that Galatians comes first, then Ephesians, then Philippians, then Colossians.

Like “port” is left and “starboard” is right because we say (there's that “we” again) “the ship left port” but we don't say “the ship left starboard.” Also, there is a wine called port, but I haven't figured out yet how that helps me remember left and right.

Like my friend Stanley's birthday is in November and not October because his birthstone is topaz, and November starts with 'n' and topaz starts with 't', but the birthstone for October is opal, which starts with 'o' just like October. (To see how well that worked for me, refer to my post, “The memory is the first thing to go” of October 21, 2007.)

If you employ any helpful mnemonic devices, tell me about them in a comment.

Now if I could just come up with a mnemonic to help me to remember not to use so many parentheses....

Oh, and that word up there in the title, antidisestablishmentarianism, the one with 28 letters? Turns out it isn't the longest word in the English language. There are longer ones. I just happen to forget what they are at the moment.

I never tire of Flannery O'Connor

For the past week, over at Scot McKnight's blog, a small discussion has been going on in several threads (“On Reading Fiction 1,” “On Reading Fiction 2,” etc., through “On Reading Fiction 5”) using Flannery O'Connor's short story, “Revelation,” as a jumping-off point. I have joined in, and here are some more of my comments. (If it is confusing to read just my comments, go over there to read the entire conversation.)

#1: [name], what will be left when the wood, hay, stubble, and “all the rest” (to use your words) have been burned away will be the gold, the silver, and the precious stones. And just as it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, it will also surely be a fearful thing to be saved, yet so as by fire.

I know this doesn’t sound at all postmodern, but it’s what “the Scripture saith.”

[name], I didn’t read O’Connor in the 60’s, I read her in the 70’s, but it was pretty shocking stuff even then. Reading Wise Blood prompted no less a personage than Evelyn Waugh to say of it, “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” In “Revelation,” what don’t you find shocking about, “Mrs. Turpin knew just exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage”? What don’t you find shocking about, “You could never say anything intelligent to a nigger. You could talk at them but not with them”? Read all of her stories; eventually you will be shocked.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If reading Flannery O’Connor doesn’t shock you, you aren’t paying close enough attention.

#3: [name], I can’t wait for you to read “The Lame Shall Enter First”! And are you saying you haven’t read “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”? Tsk, Tsk (jk)!!! Flannery’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, has a very high “shock quotient,” in my opinion. Try all of her work, a little at a time. Eventually, mark my words, you’ll be shocked. (I must have a very low shock threshold: I was shocked from the get-go, after reading “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in 1975.) It’s also very instructive to read Mystery and Manners, her non-fiction volume, to find where she’s coming from.

Flannery O’Connor said, “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it most certainly is Christ-haunted.” Then there’s William Faulkner’s famous statement, “The past is never dead; in many places it’s not even past.” I don’t think the times are all that different, in the South or anywhere else. The landscape may have changed, but people’s hearts haven’t.

#4: [name], I have never thought about “the level of thoughtfulness and complexity within Mrs. Turpin” before or that O’Connor uses it to “jab at” the reader’s assurance of superiority to Mrs. Turpin.

Flannery was definitely attempting to wake up readers of her fiction from their complacent sleep, to get a specific message across through her characters. Even the trees and the sun are characters in her stories in the sense that Flannery used them to shock the reader into looking at things another way.

I think perhaps you are also right in thinking that we readers are being “tweaked” and challenged about our assumptions that transformations are total, all-at-once experiences. Given that Flannery O’Connor was a devout Roman Catholic and not a Four Spiritual Laws evangelical, that is certainly a very real possibility. I generally read “out of” her work, though, and not “into” it.

I never tire of uncovering layers and layers of meaning and motive in the works of Flannery O’Connor.
[End of comments]

But assuming that even readers of my blog will eventually grow weary of my fascination with all things Flannery O'Connor, this ends my series of posts about her.

Count your blessings, name them one by one

In this country we have the rule of law and our government is of, by, and for the people. Our Constitution sets up three branches of government, the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. Each branch is independent of the others and acts as a check and balance on the others. In such fashion we have existed as a nation now for well over two hundred years.

So here are three questions every citizen should know the answers to. First, who is the current President (executive branch)? Okay, that's an easy one, and don't say Millard Fillmore. Second, what three people represent you in the U.S. Senate and in the U.S. House of Representatives (legislative branch)? Third, what are the names of the current nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court (judicial branch)? No fair looking their names up. Here is a picture of them to help you along.



For the record, the two senators from Georgia are Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isaacson, and the congressman representing Georgia's Sixth Congressional District is Tom Price. But I can name only seven of the nine justices, and I can match only four of the names with their faces.

I hope you do better on the test than I did. Just be glad I didn't ask you to name the members of the President's cabinet. (Let's see, there's Condoleezza Rice who is the Secretary of State, and....)