Stan Kelly-Bootle
wrote:
I’ve just checked by
kicking a nearby BRICK (but I’m mixing my philosophers!)
This was one of the highly annoying
Johnsonian gestures I had in mind: simultaneously right and wrong. Some minds
think alike.
Stan Kelly-Bootle also wrote:
Re-Anglo-Saxon: Charles
protests far too much and without due process, methinks, against the use of the
old term OLD ENGLISH to describe the vernacular Germanic language[s] prevalent
in Anglo-Saxon England between about 600 --1100 CE.
Quote: “my conclusion has been that
Anglo-Saxon is not "Old English", any more than Latin is "Old Italian", or "Old
Spanish", or "Old Portuguese", or "Old Roumanian". The use of "Old English" by
modern lexicographers is tantamount to the anticipated collective decision of
future lexicographers, five hundred years hence, to describe the language of
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans as "Old American".”
See here: http://www.cichw.net/SSAS.htm
Stan Kelly-Bootle also
wrote:
Charles: worth knowing
the history/controversy/texts of the Q1, Q2 and Folio variants before making
firm interpretations.
Many thanks for your solicitous
advice. I was aware of the variant you quote. Nothing I say is firm, but always
prefaced by imho, implying a present, most probably temporary opinion, and
subject to amiable correction and improvement. All experience is an arch
wherethrough gleams the untravelled world. (A poem, imho). As a chess-player, I
was impressed by Einstein’s remark on the mental flexibility of chess-players.
The only exception is the chess-player who rarely if ever loses, becomes
undefeated champion, and who then tends to go mad and think himself God. That’s
my defence, anyway.
Carolyn wrote, re
Fitzgerald’s Khayyam:
Isn't this one instance
in which "profanation of the dead" might not apply? Or does it? The Fitzgerald
is certainly a metamorphosis of some sort. I am rather fond of it and
though it's hard to imagine, I wonder if I should prefer the original?
At an early stage in my aimless,
wondering life I taught EFL for a few months at the National University of Iran,
1962-64. An Iranian (Jewish-Iranian) student once told me that Fitzgerald’s poem
(it’s a poem, imho) was “better” than Khayyam’s quatrains. In fact, Fitzgerald
made something else of his material. I wouldn’t call it profanation in his case,
but I would in most of Pound’s cases.
A.Bouazza
wrote:
The discussion of
Hamlet by Stephen Dedalus where he "proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost
is Hamlet's grandfather" is of course in ULYSSES, the famous library scene
Chapter 9.
Of course! Many thanks. It can also
be shown, by comparing folk-lores, that William Tell was Hamlet’s father,
although I can’t remember exactly how this conclusion is reached. It is
something to do with Horwendil, who was an archer and a dab hand at
apple-shooting, and how he then metamorphoses into Hamlet pere. Anyway, it seems
Updike had a handle on this theory, or something akin to it. See
here:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/u/updike-gertrude.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
and/or here:
http://www.ealdriht.org/earendel.html
I have just been told, off-list, that one of my recent (too-frequent, and I really must soon desist) posts "sounded rather snobby about American lit." I hope someone in agreement with this charge will dilate on it, so that I may mount whatever defence I can to whatever specific sins I am perceived to have committed. And to the combat, Loo or Whist, lead on. Not poetry, imho.
Charles