jadesfire

Before moving on to more serious things, seen on Broad Street today:

The definition of 'cheeky': calling out to people on an open-top tour bus and inviting them on your walking tour of the city.

Getting back to poetry month:

One of my favourite plays is The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard. I was lucky enough to see the original production at the National Theatre, and while I was a little young to enjoy it properly, it still caught my imagination, and when I've read the play since, I've been able to 're-watch' it in my head. There are many wonderful lines, although the best are usually lifted from Housman's own writings.

When it comes to Roman poets, I prefer Catullus and Ovid to Horace in general, but this is one that has stayed with me. Housman's translation went unpublished until after his death, and when he was teaching, he would take all the other poems apart, but he would just read this one in Latin and move on. It seems to have touched him deeply, and in the play he says "There's no one like Horace for telling you you're a long time dead."

I'm still looking for that in Horace, if I'm honest, but I can see what he means about this poem.

( Diffugere Nives. )

Poetry isn't something I generally connect to, but just as last year was my experiment in 'trying to understand vids', I thought I'd use this poetry month to try out some poetry. I went through a phase of memorising it, although the only things I can remember now are the couplets of "If" in a more or less random order, "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day", a couple of Yeats poems and this one:

( She walks in beauty... )

And while we're on the subject, I can't recommend the Mark Steel lecture on Byron highly enough. He has a few series on 'People with a Passion' and is a joy to listen to.

Oh, and not directly on that subject, but related to the idea of 'People with a Passion', if you can access the BBC iPlayer, try the latest Horizon programme. (

apiphile, you'll like this - it's an hour of Marcus du Sautoy getting enthusiastic about maths and at one point they scan his brain :D) I swear, I fangirl that man to an embarrassing degree. Since the programme features Alan Davies getting maths lessons, you can also watch it and see where I went to school! We even had the same maths teacher *g*

I have a whole load more links I wanted to share with you, but for now, I'll settle for Diablo III - Archivist. There's more like this under my 'LJ' tag at my delicious account if anyone wants to get a head start on my next linkspam.

And if anyone spots my life while they're out and about, please send it back, along with the sleep that I seem to be missing at the moment. Ta muchly :)

Below the cut is a vivid demonstration of why I should never, ever get bored.

A week ago,

bironic wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at Rodney, based on this poem by Wallace Stevens. For some reason, I decided it would be really great to translate them into Latin. No, even I haven't worked out why yet, but I'm quite pleased with the results.

I chose to translate them into Classical Latin, even though 'Ancient' in Stargate uses the various forms of Latin freely and interchangeably. Think of this as an early dialect.

Huge thanks to

sepia_words, who untangled my grammar and made my adjectives agree with my nouns. There is a story to accompany these poems, here

( Tresdecim Modi ut Rodneius Videre Posset )

Current Mood: exhausted

Following

pwcorgigirl's brilliant look at homophones at The Clinic (here), I was inspired to seek out the following poem, heard a long time ago but never forgotten.

( Best read aloud... )

Housman and Horace

Sand and me have handled the most bizarre briefs

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Rodney (Latin remix)

Homophones et al.

Profile

Links

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags