2014-06-19

Epitaph

Hey, Denshi Jisho is testing out a new beta version.

[... T]he ultimate goal is to make something more than just a dictionary of words. Something akin to Google Now or Wolfram Alpha for the Japanese language. Just paste what you want to understand into Jisho, be it English, romaji, a single word or an entire paragraph of Japanese text, and it will search a myriad of data to help you understand the words, kanji and even grammar patterns.

Completely unrelated, here's something I quite liked from Hellen Waddell's introduction to her bilingual collection Mediaeval Latin Lyrics:

[... I]n anthologies omission is a worse thing than inclusion: and the omissions here may well seem unaccountable. There are five lyrics from Fortunatus, but not the two that are his immortality: Hrabanus Maurus is here, but not his pupil and far greater poet, the ill-starred Gottschalk: there is no trace of the glorious rhythms of O Roma nobilis orbis et domina, nor of Hildebert who has the antique gravity, nor of Gautier de Châtillon, and only a single lyric from the tiny but precious collection of the Arundel MS. I tried to translate them, and could not. To those born with this kind of restlessness, this curiosity to transmute the beauty of one language into another, although this baser alchemy is apt to turn the gold to copper and at worst to lead, a great phrase in the Latin, something familiar in the landscape, some touch of almost contemporary desire or pain, may waken the recreative trouble; yet a greater phrase, a cry still more poignant, may leave the mind the quieter for its passing. A man cannot say "I will translate", any more than he can say "I will compose poetry". In this minor art also, the wind blows where it lists.

In one thing the translator is happy: he walks with good companions. He is a kind of Old Mortality, his business, like Radulfus Glaber when they harboured him at St. Germain d'Auxerre, to go about with hammer and chisel, reviving the defaced inscriptions on the tombs of his brethren. Places where men have once been and now are not are older and more sacred, but at the same time friendlier, than virgin soil that has no history. And these poems, preserved by the piety of old monastic houses now themselves decayed, and printed in the last hundred years by scholars as patient as the men who first transcribed them, Thomas Wright and Edelstand du Méril and Ernest Dümmler, Ludwig Traube and Wilhelm Meyer and Paul von Winterfeld (to make mention only of the dead), are after all but epitaphs of their first makers: and like all mediaeval epitaphs, they cry out for that remembrance that is itself a prayer. There is no longer either tomb or inscription in what was once the Abbey of St. Martin at Tours; but in his Lament for the Cuckoo, his Winter and his Epitaph, still "lieth the Lord Abbot Alcuin of blessed memory, who died in peace on the nineteenth of May".

Here's Alcuin's Epitaph in the original text she provides and her translation:

Hie, rogo, pauxillum veniens subsiste, viator.
  et mea scrutare pectore dicta tuo,
ut tua deque meis agnoscas fata figuris:
  vertitur o species, ut mea, sicque tua.
quod nunc es fueram, famosus in orbe, viator
  et quod nunc ego sum, tuque futurus eris.
delicias mundi casso sectabar amore,
  nunc cinis et pulvis, vermibus atque cibus.
quapropter potius animam curare memento,
  quam carnem, quoniam haec manet, illa perit.
cur tibi rura paras? quam parvo cernis in antro
  me tenet hie requies: sic tua parva fiet.
cur Tyrio corpus inhias vestirier ostro
  quod mox esuriens pulvere vermis edet?
ut flores pereunt vento veniente minaci,
  sic tua namque, caro, gloria tota perit.
tu mihi redde vicem, lector, rogo, carminis huius
  et dic: "da veniam, Christe, tuo famulo."
obsecro, nulla manus violet pia iura sepulcri,
  personet angelica donec ab arce tuba:
"qui iaces in tumulo, terrae de pulvere surge,
  magnus adest iudex milibus innumeris."
Alchuine nomen erat sophiam mihi semper amanti,
  pro quo funde preces mente, legens titulum.

Hie requiescit beatae memoriae domnus Alchuinus abba, qui obiit in pace XIV. kal. Iunias. quando legeritis, o vos omnes, orate pro eo et dicite, "Requiem aeternam donet ei dominus." Amen.
Here halt, I pray you, make a little stay,
O wayfarer, to read what I have writ,
And know by my fate what thy fate shall be.
What thou art now, wayfarer, world-renowned,
I was: what I am now, so shall thou be.
The world's delight I followed with a heart
Unsatisfied: ashes am I, and dust.

Wherefore bethink thee rather of thy soul
Than of thy flesh; &emdash; this dieth, that abides.
Dost thou make wide thy fields? in this small house
Peace holds me now: no greater house for thee.
Wouldst have thy body clothed in royal red?
The worm is hungry for that body's meat.
Even as the flowers die in a cruel wind,
Even so, O flesh, shall perish all thy pride.

Now in thy turn, wayfarer, for this song
That I have made for thee, I pray you, say:
"Lord Christ, have mercy on Thy servant here,"
And may no hand disturb this sepulchre,
Until the trumpet rings from heaven's height,
"O thou that liest in the dust, arise,
The Judge of the unnumbered hosts is here!"

Alcuin was my name: learning I loved.
O thou that readest this, pray for my soul.

Here lieth the Lord Abbot Alcuin of blessed memory, who died in peace on the nineteenth of May. And when ye have read this, do ye all pray for him and say, "May the Lord give him eternal rest." Amen.

Popularity factor: 2

leoboiko:

Tad unrelated, but I'm reading Eagleton and:

> A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momen- tarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscuous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.


ヒューゴボス 偽物:

モダンなデザインで再提案するコレクションの主役は、モンクレールにとって最もトラディショナルなナイロンを使用したジャケット。

Aime la vérité, mais pardonne à l'erreur

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