Comments on: Cheerful Renaissance Thought of the Day

By: Michelangelo

Michelangelo — Sat, 14 May 2011 19:05:35 +0000

I am Michelangelo, i am a painter, a sculptor and a poets laurete

By: Matt B.

Matt B. — Thu, 12 May 2011 20:03:57 +0000

“It’s no accident that the Italian word for ‘translate’ has the same root as the word for ‘betray’.”

“Translate” means “carry across”, as does “metaphor”. The “tray” in betray also means carry. We have a very spatially based language, and the fact is that a lot of words are about facing or going in a certain direction.

By: sievemaria

sievemaria — Wed, 11 May 2011 23:05:44 +0000

One thing for sure – Michelangelo was a lonely man . Always over-doing it, being mistreated by just about everyone, feeling sorry for him self and living to a ripe old age.

By: CoffeeCupContrails

CoffeeCupContrails — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:42:10 +0000

If you lived in a sewer with a rat and three confused turtles, fighting inter-dimensional brains, knowing you’d never score with that pretty journalist, you’d write poems too, my friend.

I did not know he could sculpt. That was news. He does make a good oven-baked pizza.

My respect for this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle grows by the day.

By: Eric Dennis

Eric Dennis — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:59:52 +0000

And for my next post: a Fourier transform of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

By: RayS

RayS — Wed, 11 May 2011 12:11:41 +0000

It’s no accident that the Italian word for ‘translate’ has the same root as the word for ‘betray’.
Poetry cannot really be translated properly – it can only be re-composed in the target language, which requires another poet.
Been reading H.R. Hays translation of Bertolt Brecht and even tho Hays is a poet himself, it helps a lot that the books is dual-language and I read German.

By: John R Ramsden

John R Ramsden — Wed, 11 May 2011 06:58:59 +0000

Sounds more like one of those Saxon riddles, as in http://www.abdn.ac.uk/english/beowulf/riddle.htm or http://www2.kenyon.edu/AngloSaxonRiddles/texts.htm “I’m this, I’m that etc, What am I?”

I’m guessing the answer here, if such is sought, is an ornately carved but dilapidated fountain head, with water issuing from an open mouth.

By: Peter Coles

Peter Coles — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:49:12 +0000

Listen to the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo set to music by Benjamin Britten. Magical.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 10 May 2011 20:03:19 +0000

Translation is the key — more art than science. The late translator is described as a preeminent Renaissance art historian. I don’t know if he wrote poetry himself.

I’ve always preferred translators who were also poets — Robert Bly comes to mind. In my opinion he wasn’t a “great” poet, but his translations of, for example, Pablo Neruda, were sublime.

It’s enlightening to lay translations side by side — one by an academic or language specialist, and the other by a poet. The later is almost always better.

In any event, I like this poem — quite a bit actually. Lines like “My pale blue eyes are powdered into grounds, / My teeth are like keys on an instrument, / So, when they move, my voice is still or sounds.” and “In wind when there’s no rain my clothes would scare / Crows from the seed, without another dart.” are really very nice.

But perhaps that says more about me than the poetry.

By: Carol

Carol — Tue, 10 May 2011 18:35:41 +0000

He needs a better translator. This sort of reminds me of the storied translation from the Russian, “his mother had sausagy arms”. It might be accurate, but it isn’t idiomatic or graceful.