Miranda

Miranda Kerr
Romania

High dynamic range filtering lends an other-worldly quality to the fairytale-like buildings and grounds of a Romanian monastery.

Indonesia

Dominica
Indonesia

Benjamin Button

Big Ben

Prov. 1:10

"My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not." fili mi si te lactaverint peccatores ne adquiescas

Bintan, Indonesia - Sunrise

The sun slowly livens the Indonesian sky, casting it's pink glow across the waters toward the shore.

Chess: "T" "clock" "Big Ben" "insontem: Lat.: guiltless:innocent" :"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" "Milka"

Sun's Magnetic Field

I recently saw an IMAX film about the Sun. It stated that every 11 years the Sun's magnetic poles rotate and swap ends, which causes a solar flare. How do the magnetic poles rotate? Also, I know that the Earth's magnetic poles are slowly rotating and over thousands of years will be reversed - is this for the same reason the Sun's poles rotate?

Yes, both the Sun and the Earth reverse their magnetic fields. Both the Sun and the Earth are electromagnets, not permanent magnets (despite the Earth's core being made up of iron and nickel). So it is electric currents moving through the plasma of the Sun and the molten rock of the Earth's interior that generate the magnetic fields. These currents have instabilities that build up until the field reverses to relieve stress. With the Sun, it happens pretty regularly every 11 years.

The magnetic flip is the root cause of the 11-year cycle of solar flares, but it doesn't cause one particular flare. Solar flares are just more likely in the couple of years around the field flip (called solar maximum).

The White Rabbit is a fictional character in Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland. He appears at the very beginning of the book, in chapter one, wearing a waistcoat, and muttering "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Alice follows him down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. The Rabbit shows up again in the last two chapters, as a herald-like servant of the King and Queen of Hearts

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Chapter 1

Down the Rabbit-Hole

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, 'Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!' (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled 'ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

'Well!' thought Alice to herself, 'after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn't say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!' (Which was very likely true.)

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! 'I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud. 'I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think - ' (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) ' - yes, that's about the right distance - but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)

Presently she began again. 'I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think - ' (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) ' - but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke - fancy curtseying as you're falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) 'And what an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking! No, it'll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.'

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. 'Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the cat.) 'I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, 'Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?' when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, 'Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!' She was close behind it when she turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.

 
 

         
Black Sand Beach
Rocky boulders line the quiet shores of Lake Tahoe's Black Sand Beach.

Borges y el misterio de Swedenborg

Publicado por Patricia Damiano
Archivado en Borges Jorge Luis, Literatura, Swedenborg Emanuel




"Voltaire dijo que el hombre más extraordinario que registra la historia fue Carlos XII. Yo diría: quizá el hombre más extraordinario -si es que admitimos esos superlativos- fue el más misterioso de los súbditos de Carlos XII, Emanuel Swedenborg".


Éstas son las palabras inaugurales de Borges en la conferencia que pronunciara en la Universidad de Belgrano sobre el místico sueco. Por la misma época en que leía la versión escrita de esa conferencia, llegaba casualmente a mis manos una novela de Balzac, una novela mística, inspirada justamente en Swedenborg: Serafita. Algún tiempo después, volví a encontrar su nombre, en una vieja colección de ensayos de Paul Valery.

Habiendo agotado mis esfuerzos por hallar textos de Swedenborg en español, finalmente, y también de manera casual, di con una biografía suya en inglés en la librería Strand de New York. Después de leerla, volví a la Strand, buscando ahora libros escritos por Swedenborg. No hallé ninguno. Por suerte un librero me informó que existía una Fundación Cultural que llevaba su nombre. Y que esa Fundación se dedicaba casi exclusivamente a la publicación de sus obras.
Ahora podía elegir. Y obedeciendo a mi natural disposición, comencé a leer sus escritos teológicos y místicos. Quedé maravillado. Durante casi tres años, alternaba toda otra lectura, con su prosa sosegada, coloquial y minuciosa. Pude leer su Arcana Coelestia, donde expone lo que él llama el sentido interno o espiritual de los dos primeros Libros de la Biblia; su cosmogónica doctrina de las correspondencias; sus travesías por el mundo espiritual; y sus habituales diálogos con los espíritus, los demonios y los ángeles.
Y toda esta íntima aventura del espíritu, es protagonizada por un hombre que al llegar a los cincuenta años era considerado como uno de los científicos más eminentes de su tiempo. Desde entonces, desde que descubrí el fabuloso mundo de Swedenborg, me propuse acercarme a Borges, para agradecerle el hallazgo, y para conversar con él (para oírlo hablar a él) sobre el tema. Cuando llegamos a la casa de Borges -nos había citado a las cinco de la tarde- interrumpimos una suerte de ceremonia todavía habitual entre ciertas familias; la ceremonia del té. En mangas de camisa, una impecable camisa blanca; erguido, Borges no se inclinaba para aproximarse a la taza: la elevaba hacia él, por así decirlo, como si se tratara de algún instrumento ritual. Apenas notó nuestra presencia; sin apresurarse, volvió a dejarla sobre la mesa con el mismo ademán mesurado y casi solemne. Entonces se puso de pie; y ahora sí, inclinó levemente la cabeza dándonos la bienvenida.
Al mismo tiempo que nos hacía pasar a la sala con expresiones de auténtica y espontánea cortesía, volvió a tomar asiento luego de excusarse. En seguida, acompañado por la doméstica, salió de la sala. La desenvoltura, la natural simpatía, y la afabilidad de su trato, neutralizaron de entrada esa fastidiosa sensación opresiva de los prolegómenos. Cuando regresó, lucía un regio traje de color pardo claro, se había puesto una corbata de un tono algo más oscuro, y empuñaba su emblemático bastón. Ahora nos recibía como anfitrión, con todas las de la ley; había cambiado su atuendo para cumplir con otra ceremonia, la ceremonia de la hospitalidad.
Se sentó en el amplio sillón de la sala, enfrente al mío, e inmediatamente recordó el tema que habíamos hablado un año atrás en el salón de lectura de la New York Library. Era el mismo que evocaríamos ahora, aquí en Buenos Aires, en su departamento de la calle Maipú; un tema recóndito y fascinante: Emanuel Swedenborg. Y Borges no aguardó la primera pregunta, era evidente que se trataba de una de sus ocupaciones predilectas: El Misterio.

-"Yo escribí un prólogo a un libro sobre Swedenborg a instancias del Sr. Spiers, de la Fundación Swedenborg. Y tengo en proyecto (claro que a mi edad los proyectos son un tanto aleatorios) un libro sobre las tres salvaciones; la primera es la de Cristo, que es de carácter ético; la segunda es la de Swedenborg, que es ética e intelectual; y la tercera es la de Blake, discípulo rebelde de Swedenborg, que es ética, intelectual y estética, que se basa en las parábolas de Cristo, que él dice que son obras de arte".

-Usted ya me había comentado cuando lo vi en Nueva York que pensaba escribir un libro sobre Swedenborg...

-"Sí, pero ahora he pensado, que es mejor hacerlo de ese modo. Comenzando con Jesús, luego Swedenborg y luego Blake. Sería más fácil hacerlo así, ya que no se necesitarían tantos textos. Tengo la edición de Everyman's Library (cuatro volúmenes), un par de biografías, un libro por un especialista escrito en sueco y vertido al inglés ... ¿Usted quería hacerme una pregunta?"

-Si. En primer lugar, me gustaría saber de qué manera conoció usted a Swedenborg.

-"Lo conocí por Emerson. Porque Emerson tiene un libro: "Representative Men". Ese libro está escrito un poco a la manera de 'On Heroes Heroworship and the Heroic In History', de Carlyle, que fue de algún modo su maestro; entonces, él toma distintos tipos humanos. Recuerdo que son: Montaigne o el escéptico, Swedenborg o el místico, Shakespeare o el poeta, Napoleón o el hombre del mundo y Goethe o el escritor. Yo comencé leyendo ese libro. Ese libro lo leí en Ginebra en el año 14 ó 5; y luego, mi padre tenía un ejemplar de 'Heaven and HeIl', Caelo et Inferno'; él lo tenía en una edición de la Everyman's Library. Bien, yo leí ese libro y encargué a Inglaterra los otros tres publicados por la misma editorial. Publicaron cuatro libros de Swedenborg de acuerdo con la Sociedad Swedenborg de Londres. Y luego en francés conozco solamente una versión de Caelo et lnferno'. Swedenborg fue a Inglaterra porque quería conocer a Newton, y finalmente no pudo lograrlo, qué raro, eh? Yo he hablado mucho sobre Swedenborg con el pintor y místico argentino Xul Solar, yo era muy amigo de Xul, iba a casa de él en la calle Laprida 1214, y leíamos a Swedenborg, leíamos a Blake, leíamos a los poetas alemanes, leíamos al poeta inglés Swinburne y muchos otros textos".

-¿Qué impresión le dio la manera en que escribe Swedenborg?

-"Bueno. Generalmente, los místicos, tienden a escribir de un modo vago; él no. La obra de él es..., yo no diré prosaica, pero sí precisa. Es un poco..., como si él hubiera ido a la China, o hubiera ido a la India y describiera lo que ha visto."

-Como un científico...

-"Sí, claro. El llevó esa... casi aridez, esa sequedad, esa precisión, a sus descripciones. Generalmente cuando se habla de éxtasis, se usan metáforas del amor, o metáforas del vino, metáforas arrebatadas. Pero en el caso de él no. El no busca efectos patéticos. El describe lo que ha visto. En relación a esto recuerdo algo que me dijo Xul: 'Lo que se ve en el otro mundo depende un poco de uno'. Hay un poema muy lindo de Victor Hugo que expresa muy bien esta imagen: 'Ce que dit la Bouche d'ombre', "Lo que dice la Boca de sombra"; el mismo espectro que le dice a Nerón 'Soy Mesalina', le dice a Caín 'soy Abel'. Del mismo modo, las visiones de los místicos musulmanes, de los sufíes, no concuerdan con las de los cristianos. Quiere decir que hay como fuerzas o espíritus que cada uno ve de acuerdo con sus prejuicios o conocimientos. Posiblemente esos mismos ángeles, ese mismo Cristo, que él vio de ese modo, fue visto por místicos de otra tradición de otro modo."

-Usted decía hace un momento que Swedenborg viajó a Londres para conocer a Newton y que le parecía raro que no hubiera logrado hacerlo. Sin embargo en esa misma ciudad, tuvo lugar su encuentro con Cristo.

-"Sí. Sé que el primer encuentro con Cristo fue en Londres, y los otros también. El estuvo además en Alemania, Holanda, los Países Bajos, pero finalmente se estableció en Londres. Tal vez el hecho de que fijara su residencia en Londres está relacionado con esa experiencia. A partir de ese momento su vida cambió totalmente. Abandonó el estudio de la ciencia; por ejemplo: la anatomía, la astronomía, las matemáticas, y se dedicó a registrar minuciosamente ese mundo espiritual. El diálogo con los ángeles empezó a ser un hecho cotidiano para él".

-En el prólogo al libro de Synnestvedt sobre Swedenborg, usted afirma que hay algo incómodo en su obra; que usted piensa que él es un pensador por derecho propio, y que tal vez trató de enmarcar, o acomodar su pensamiento al texto de la Biblia.

-"Yo no sé si en el caso de él, pienso que es así en el caso de la cábala. En el caso de él creo que no. Además, el padre de él era obispo, obispo evangélico, luterano. El tiene que haberse criado en un ambiente muy piadoso. Yo no creo que eso le haya costado ningún esfuerzo a él. Digo, que él pensaba naturalmente en el espíritu de la Biblia. Bueno..., mi abuela, sabía de memoria la Biblia, en su familia eran metodistas. Usted hacía una cita bíblica, y ella decía, 'sí', por ejemplo: 'Libro de los Reyes, capítulo tal, versículo tal: y seguía adelante, o 'Libro de Job, capítulo tal versículo tal...' Me parece que no es tan raro eso. En Alemania hay una expresión que traducida, sería: firme en la Biblia", son las personas que saben la Biblia de memoria."

-Una pregunta en relación al tema, pero vinculada más directamente con usted. ¿Alguna vez desde su infancia hasta hoy, usted percibió, sintió o intuyó la presencia del mundo angélico o trascendente?

-"No sé si llamarlo angélico o trascendente. Pero sé que... bueno... Yo dos veces en mi vida he sentido el hecho de vivir fuera del tiempo. Eso me ha ocurrido.., una vez fue en Palermo, y otra vez fue en uno de los puentes detrás de la estación de Constitución. Y esas dos veces, me habían sucedido cosas, bueno, que me habían conmocionado durante el día. No sé... Una mujer me había dejado... Y de golpe estaba pensando en eso, y de pronto me vi así, en tercera persona, y sentí: 'qué puede importarme lo que le pasa a Borges, si yo soy Otra cosa; lo que me ha pasado es meramente circunstancial.' Ahora, yo no sé cuánto 'tiempo' duró ese estado; pero yo me sentí, no sé si feliz, pero como... bueno, como sereno, como arrebatado así de todo. Y he tratado de decirlo, una vez en un poema y otra vez en prosa, pero no sé si he logrado comunicar esa sensación. Cuando estuve en Japón tuve ocasión de conversar con un monje budista, y él me dijo que había alcanzado el nirvana. Yo le dije "¿Y aseguro que usted no podrá contármelo?".

-'No'- respondió, claro; porque cada palabra presupone una experiencia compartida, por ejemplo; si usted está en Estados Unidos, y habla con alguien y le dice 'tal cosa tenía gusto a mate', el interlocutor no tiene porqué entenderlo si no conoce el gusto del mate... Entonces, el monje, me dijo que su experiencia del nirvana era incomunicable; que él podía hablar sobre el nirvana con otro monje que también lo había alcanzado. Que él no sabia cuánto tiempo había durado, pero que después todo era distinto para él. Le pregunté -'Distinto ¿en qué sentido?, ¿usted siente todo igual que antes?'-'Sí'- me contestó, 'entiendo perfectamente lo que usted quiere saber'. 'Yo siento soledad, siento ansiedad, siento alegría, siento dolores físicos, siento placeres físicos siento los sabores de las cosas; pero todo eso de un modo distinto después de alcanzar el nirvana'.

-¿Y de ese modo es mejor?' -'Si'- me dijo, -pero yo no lo puedo explicar'. Y me di cuenta que tenía razón, que era algo inexpresable. Esto fue en Nara. En un monasterio budista..." Un famoso irlandés -que imaginó con riguroso fervor la tercera forma de salvación postulada por Borges, la salvación por la belleza-, en otra conferencia, esta vez en la Universita Popolare Triestina, exaltó, al igual que Borges, la filiación espiritual del iracundo poeta inglés William Blake con el visionario sueco. Dice James Joyce: "...Swedenborg, que frecuentó todos los mundos invisibles durante largos años, ve en la imagen del hombre el mismísimo cielo, y a Miguel, Rafael, y Gabriel, que según él, no son tres ángeles, sino tres coros angélicos. La eternidad, que al discípulo amado y a San Agustín se les apareció bajo la forma de ciudad celestial, y al Alighieri como rosa celestial, revestía para el místico sueco las formas de hombre celestial, con todos sus miembros animados por un fluido de vida angélica que sale y vuelve a entrar, en sístole y diástole de amor y sabiduría. A partir de esta visión desarrolló el inmenso sistema de lo que él denominaba correspondencias, y que domina su obra maestra Arcana Coelestia, nuevo evangelio que, según él, anuncia la aparición del Hijo del Hombre en los cielos, prevista por San Mateo". (*)



(*) Fuente: Entrevista realizada por Christian Wildner con Jorge Luis Borges en prólogo a la traducción por él mismo realizada de Emanuel Swedenborg, El Cielo y sus Maravillas y el Infierno, Buenos Aires, Editorial Kier, 1991.



Cortesía de Helen Redvelvet
source :http://bibliotecaignoria.blogspot.com/

Applecart

 
Prov.7:2
"Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye."

 

 

 

Face

chess: applecart 

 

  “What a drag it is to be criminally handsome” (S.J. Perelman) “Hawaii” abacus abaca(Musa textilis) “Armando Manzanero” “Manzanillo” “Camomille” dragon : Arthur Rackham cover design for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination

“Por la noche, su tiniebla, y su astronomía” Joseph Heller & Thalia’s ping pong : [(Ni Moisés, ni las Musas) “Catch 22”]

“In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and though bits of the Psalms have inevitably been embedded in poems, new translations have become the province of theologians and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time.” Praise Yah Eliot Weinberger The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. - Review - Prov.7

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel. By Robert Alter. Norton, 410 pp., $30.00.

ROBERT ALTER'S contribution to current scripture studies has been immense and defining. Alter, who is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, possesses a rare combination of interpretive gifts. He has both a sensitive ability to work with Hebrew and an artistic sensibility that allows him to grasp the aesthetic workings of a text without excessive or premature theological judgment. Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) have had a vital influence on the methods and perspectives of the "literary study" of the Bible--an approach that has opened ways of reading and interpreting scripture unavailable to the dominant methods of historical criticism.

Alter's translation of Samuel 1 and 2 in The David Story allows him to return to and use the insights and suggestions of The Art of Biblical Narrative. In his extended introduction, he invites a fresh consideration of the way we may hear and receive this text and gives something of a charter for a literary approach to it. While the writer may have been doing history, it is "an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with his historical figures and events in his historical plays." The author's attention to detail and dialogue cannot be reportage; it is inescapably construction. "The author approaches the David story as an imaginative writer, giving play to that dialectical fullness of conception that leads the greatest writers (Shakespeare, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, to name a few apposite instances) to transcend the limitations of their own ideological points of departure," Alter states. Prov.7

His point is exceedingly important and cunningly stated. To transcend one's "own ideological points of departure" means, in a theological context, to be carried artistically beyond one's own take on the ethical and the theological--a transcendence authorized by the text but much resisted by the church. The outcome of applying such an emancipated imagination to Samuel, Alter says, is "a will and testament worthy of a Mafia chief," "the wisdom of a Tallyrand," "the first full-length portrait of a Machiavellian prince in Western literature." Prov.7

Alter's artistic sense requires and permits him to reject two staples of conventional criticism: the Deuteronomic hypothesis that has never been easy to sustain in regard to Samuel and that constricts the power of the narrative; and the breaking of a unified and coherent narrative into sources, a long-established method of historical criticism. Alter wants the fullness of narrative to have its own say.

As one would expect, Alter's translation is imaginative and sensitive to nuance. But though subtle and suggestive, it is not a wholesale departure from traditional renderings. He has a generous appreciation for the King James Version:

   What is clearer to me now is that the precedent of the King James Version

   has played a decisive and constructive role in directing readers of English

   to a rather literal experience of the Bible, and that this precedent can be

   ignored only at considerable cost, as nearly all the English versions of

   the Bible done in recent decades show. The men responsible for the 1611

   version authorized by King James, following the great model of William

   Tyndale a century earlier, produced an English Bible that often, though by

   no means invariably, evinced a striking fidelity to many of the literary

   articulations of the Hebrew text. This success of course reflected their

   remarkable sense of English style (nothing traduces the power of the

   original more egregiously than the nonstyle cultivated by the sundry modern

   versions), but it was also a consequence of their literalism. The

   literalism was dictated by their firm conviction as Christians that every

   word of the biblical text was literally inspired by God. That belief led

   them to replicate significant verbal repetition in the original, avoiding

   elegant synonymity, and to reproduce in English many of the telling word

   choices of the biblical writers.

Alters commentary on Samuel consists of isolated notes on specific matters. This section of the book offered less than I had expected. Alter's literary sensibilities produce shrewd notes; one can learn a great deal from them. But the format does not permit him to say as much as he could or as we might hope he would concerning the text's literary patterns and movements.

That Alter, so able and versatile, would invest himself in the demanding, meticulous work of translation suggests that attentiveness to nuance and detail is well worth the effort. Clinical pastoral education and its dread "verbatims" has taught many of us that how something is said matters enormously. It has taught us the difficult skill and freedom of attending to nuance. Ironically, many of us who have learned to listen well nevertheless run roughshod over the biblical text, unwilling to let its nuance subvert either social ideology or passion for certitude.

Alter's book is important because it shows a keen listener in the act of listening. It demonstrates how one who already knows a great deal about the text is again surprised and led elsewhere by its detail. Alter invites his readers to listen with him, to hear more and other than already has been heard. Listening is a countercultural activity, an activity that leads to freedom, as Alter demonstrates.

Reviewed by Walter Brueggemann, McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.3

Prov.7

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter

Out of the mouths of babes; apple of the eye; fire and brimstone; out of joint; sleep the sleep of death; sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; whiter than snow; oh that I had wings like a dove for then would I fly away; the meek shall inherit the earth; tender mercies; clean hands and a pure heart; I have been young and now am old; my cup runneth over; many a time; clean gone; the days of old; I am a worm and no man; his heart’s desire; the heavens declare the glory of god; go down to the sea in ships; at their wits’ end; the valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . .

The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred years, it has been transformed from the translation of a holy book into a holy book itself. Poets, however, know from experience that there are no definitive texts, and over the centuries an assembly of angels has been singing the Psalms in its own way: Wyatt, Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Campion, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan, Smart, Clare, Hopkins and Kipling among them. Some were setting lyrics to new tunes; some were performing metrical exercises with familiar material; some were expressing private prayer; some were simply writing a poem. St Augustine said that all things written in the Psalms are mirrors of ourselves and it was inevitable that, when English poets were still largely Christian believers, they would look into the mirror of this foundational anthology of poetry, as Chinese poets looked into the Confucian Book of Songs.

In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and though bits of the Psalms have inevitably been embedded in poems, new translations have become the province of theologians and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time.

New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is somehow closer to the original, writing in the language as it is now spoken) or they are a springboard for trying something new in the translation-language, inspired by certain facets of the original (such as Pound’s Chinese or Anglo-Saxon versions, Paul Blackburn’s Provençal, Louis Zukofsky’s Latin). Alter, whose concern is Biblical Hebrew and not contemporary poetry, is in the former camp. As he explains in the introduction, his project is to strip away the Christian interpretations implicit in the King James and later versions and restore the context of the archaic Judaism of the half-millennium (roughly 1000-500 BCE) in which the Psalms were written. His poetics is an attempt to reproduce the compression and concreteness of the Hebrew, ‘emulating its rhythms’ and ‘making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry’. As for mistakes, it is surprising that the King James apparently has so few. Alter corrects very little, sometimes unconvincingly, though he is more specific on flora and fauna.

His de-Christianisation is largely in the avoidance of frequent King James terms such as ‘salvation’, ‘soul’, ‘mercy’, ‘sin’ and its sister, ‘iniquity’. He translates the KJ line ‘my soul thirsteth for thee’ (63) as ‘My throat thirsts for You,’ explaining in the introduction that although the Hebrew word nefesh ‘means “life breath” and, by extension, “life” or “essential being” . . . by metonymy, it is also a term for the throat (the passage through which the breath travels)’ – a translation, in other words, more literal than the original. Elsewhere, ‘my soul’ becomes ‘my being’, or sometimes merely ‘I’. For ‘sin’ he prefers ‘offence’; for ‘mercy’, ‘kindness’. For ‘iniquity’ he often chooses ‘mischief’, which, in American English, is more likely to be associated with frat-boy pranks on Halloween than treachery in the desert. Thus the KJ ‘they cast iniquity upon me’ (55) becomes ‘they bring mischief down upon me’ and the KJ ‘Iniquities prevail against me’ (65) becomes ‘My deeds of mischief are too much for me.’ The strangest choice of all is the replacement of the often reiterated ‘salvation’ and its cognates with ‘rescue’ (the noun), in ways that seem to have no connection with English as it is spoken: ‘rescue is the Lord’s’ (3) or ‘the cup of rescue I lift’ (116) or the KJ ‘A horse is a vain thing for safety’ (33), which becomes the incomprehensible ‘The horse is a lie for rescue.’

The parallelism that is the organising principle of the psalmodic line (and of much archaic poetry) has been plain in English since the translations of Miles Coverdale in 1535. Coverdale marked the division into hemistiches (or what Alter, following Benjamin Hrushovski, calls ‘versets’) with a colon, a practice followed, inconsistently, by the King James. Bishop Robert Lowth explained it in detail in 1753 in Oxford, and inspired Christopher Smart, who attended the lectures, to use the form for his Jubilate Agno. Alter emphasises this by splitting each line into two, with the second one indented, giving the poem a more ‘modern’ look, but it is hard to see why this is ‘more palpable’ than previous versions. Open any page of the KJ version and the parallelism is quite clear: ‘Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together’ (98) – a line I picked at random – seems little different from

Let the rivers clap hands,
let the mountains together sing gladly

– though Alter is, characteristically, slightly more awkward.

To illustrate how he has rendered the condensed language of the original, Alter, in the introduction, takes an unfortunate example, the famous line from Psalm 23: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ He explains that the Hebrew has eight words and 11 syllables, but the King James translation ‘weighs in’ at 17 words and 20 syllables. Alter has brought this down to 13 words and 14 syllables, an admirable diet, but there are few who wouldn’t prefer the chubbier version to this:

Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
I fear no harm.

Over the last century, there have been many translation strategies for giving a sense of the denseness of classical languages such as Chinese or Sanskrit: layout on the page, enjambment, the dropping of articles when possible, a reliance on Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate words. Alter tends to use the possessive. The opening line of Psalm 19 in the King James, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ becomes ‘The heavens tell God’s glory’; if nothing else, cutting three syllables. Its concluding lines, which are repeated thrice daily by observant Jews, ‘Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer’ are turned into lines that would have the prayerful stumbling:

Let my mouth’s utterances be pleasing
and my heart’s stirring before You,
LORD, my rock and redeemer.

Considering that the Psalms are meant to be spoken or sung, many of Alter’s lines are difficult to say: ‘Your throne stands firm from of old,/from forever You are’ (93) is one for elocution class, and the KJ ‘Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord’ (70) has been turned into a stammer: ‘God, to save me,/Lord, to my help, hasten!’

Translation comes from somewhere, the language and literature of the original, but it also goes somewhere, into the language and literature of the translation language. Too often the experts in one know very little about the other. The cliché that only poets can translate poetry is half true. More exactly, only poetry-readers can translate poetry: those familiar with the contemporary poetry of the translation language, the context in which the translation will be read. On the evidence here, Alter seems to know very little about the last hundred years of English-language poetry.

He is partial to Victorian language, perhaps in the belief that it is more ‘poetic’. The result is that, at times, he sounds more dated than the King James. He’s in ‘death’s vale’ where the KJ was in ‘the valley of death’. His Lord is ‘my crag and my bastion’ (18) where the KJ’s is ‘my rock, and my fortress’. He has a ‘people aborning’ (22) where the KJ has a ‘people that shall be born’, and a ‘sojourner’ (94) for the KJ’s ‘stranger’. The KJ’s ‘I have considered the days of old’ (77) is now ‘I ponder the days of yore.’ And the famous line ‘I have been young and now am old’ (37) has been turned into A.E. Housman: ‘A lad I was, and now I am old.’

Worse, like many writing poems for the first time, he is in love with inverted syntax: the trees ‘fresh and full of sap they are’ (92); ‘they fix to the string their arrow’ (11); ‘His handiwork sky declares’ (19, better known as ‘the firmament sheweth his handywork’); ‘orphans they murder’ (94). Sometimes he merely inverts the King James phrases. ‘For I am poor and needy’ (86) becomes ‘for lowly and needy am I’; ‘The sea is his, and he made it’ (95) turns into ‘His is the sea and He made it’; or similarly, ‘Thy way is in the sea’ (77) is now ‘In the sea was Your way.’ There are inversions on nearly every page and after a while, wonder, one does, if it’s not the swamp of Yoda the Jedi Master we’re in. That sinking feeling hits bottom as early as Psalm 23:

The LORD is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
In grass meadows He makes me lie down

(And, almost needless to say, for ‘He restoreth my soul,’ Alter has ‘My life He brings back.’) The incessant inversion, combined with the predilection for possessives, leads to many examples of the kind where la plume de ma tante would become ‘My aunt’s is the pen.’ The first line of Psalm 24 is straightforward in the King James: ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.’ Alter’s line needs to be diagrammed: ‘The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness.’

He seems to have no ear for American English, from the alpha (2: ‘Why are the nations aroused,/and the peoples murmur vain things?’) to the omega (150: ‘Let all that has breath praise Yah’ – a construct rather like ‘All who is going should get on the bus’). He is oblivious to American slang, not realising that Psalm 66 (KJ: ‘Make a joyful noise unto God . . . Say unto God, how terrible art thou in thy works!’) in his version (‘Shout out to God . . . Say to God, ‘‘How awesome Your deeds”’) sounds like a Christian rock band warming up the crowd. He sometimes slips out of register: ‘The wicked man borrows and will not pay,/but the just gives free of charge’ (37). And he apparently can’t hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush.

Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto me’) into: ‘At the mere ear’s report they obeyed me,/aliens cringed before me.’ There are many other lines that would cause the meek to tremble, though perhaps not aliens to cringe. Among them: ‘With their dewlaps they speak haughty words’ (17); ‘All day long I go about gloomy’ (38); ‘Like sheep to Sheol they head’ (49, KJ: ‘Like sheep they are laid in the grave’); ‘All the wrongdoers bandy boasts’ (94); ‘For all gods of the peoples are ungods’ (96); ‘I hate committing transgressions’ (101); ‘I resemble the wilderness jackdaw’ (102); ‘for we are sorely sated with scorn’ (123); and, perhaps the worst of all, the anatomically perplexing ‘The wicked backslide from the very womb’ (58). But fortunately, as Edward Dahlberg once remarked, ‘there are many psalms that even the droning of a priest cannot kill.’

As one reads along, the suspicion grows that perhaps this book is not about the poetry at all, but about the commentary. Usually half, and sometimes more, of every page is taken up by Alter’s notes. Certainly there are many editions where the notes are more interesting than the texts, but the commentary here divides between lexical minutiae, of interest largely to Hebraicists (though this is a heavily promoted mass-market book) and a running exegesis for freshmen, in a relentless reiteration of the obvious. The line ‘My being like thirsty land to You’ (143) is glossed: ‘Rain in this climate and therefore in this body of literature is characteristically thought of as a desperately needed blessing. Hence God’s responsive presence is metaphorically represented as the rain that the parched land awaits to quicken it with growth’ – though one presumes that, by page 493, the reader has already figured out that these people are living in the desert. ‘Sing to the Lord a new song’ (149) needs this explanation: ‘The idea of a “new song” is highlighted in several psalms. In a sense, this is a kind of self-advertisement of the psalmist, as if to say “here is a fresh and vibrant psalm that you have never heard before.”’

It is remarkable that, in some two thousand of such notes, most of them longer than these, very little outside of Alter’s own interpretations is ever mentioned. He takes issue with some of the King James readings and very occasionally disputes some (usually unnamed) biblical scholars, but not once does he cite any of the translations from the history of English poetry, the uses to which individual psalms have been put, the detailed Christian exegeses of everyone from St Augustine to John Donne (and only very rarely the Jewish exegeses of Rashi and Avraham ibn Ezra), or even – except where there are specific references – other passages in the Bible. (This is contrary to Jewish tradition, which tends to pile up citations and defer to the long tradition of transmitted wisdom.) There is one far-fetched mention of Mallarmé, explaining why, in Psalm 65, Alter translates a certain word as ‘silence’. And he defends his transformation of the well-known line ‘sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb’ (19) into ‘and sweeter than honey,/quintessence of bees’ – despite his own injunction against multisyllabic Latinate words and the inappropriate alchemical term – by modestly noting: ‘The English equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.’ (The Hebrew had merely put together two words that both mean ‘honey’.)

St Hilary said that the Book of Psalms is a heap of keys that can open every door in a great city, but that it is hard to find which key opens which lock. For translation, the opposite has been true: many poets have discovered many different keys to unlock certain doors.

For emotional power, Thomas Wyatt, circa 1536:
From depth of sin, and from a deep despair,
From depth of death, from depth of heart’s sorrow,
From this deep cave, of darkness deep repair,
Thee have I called, O Lord, to be my borrow.
Thou in my voice, O Lord, perceive and hear
My heart, my hope, my plaint, my overthrow,
My will to rise, and let by grant appear
That to my voice thine ears do well intend.

(130)

For concision and straightforward speech, Arthur Golding – whose translation of Ovid was loved by Pound and plagiarised by Shakespeare – in 1571:

My heart is boiling of a good word.
The work that I indite shall be of the King.
My tongue is the pen of a swift writer.

(45)

(Alter: ‘My heart is astir with a goodly word./ I speak what I’ve made to the king./My tongue is the pen of a rapid scribe.’)

The lute music of Philip Sidney in the 1580s:

How long (O Lord) shall I forgotten be?
What? ever?
How long wilt Thou Thy hidden face from me
Dissever?

(13)

And Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, ten years later, bringing in the whole orchestra:

Lord, crack their teeth! Lord, crush these lions’ jaws!
So let them sink as water in the sand.
When deadly bow their aiming fury draws,
Shiver the shaft ere past the shooter’s hand.

(58)

Thomas Campion in 1612, similarly alliterative, but restoring the psalm to the clarity of a single human voice singing:

Aloft the trees that spring up there
Our silent Harps we pensive hung:
Said they that captiv’d us, Let’s hear
Some song which you in Sion sung.

(137)

(Alter: ‘On the poplars there/we hung up our lyres./For there our captors had asked of us/words of song,/and our plunderers – rejoicing:/“Sing us from Zion’s songs.”’)

Milton, in 1653, the master of syntactical inversion:

Rise Lord, save me my God, for thou
Hast smote ere now
On the cheek-bone all my foes,
Of men abhorred
Hast broke the teeth. This help was from the Lord;

Thy blessing on thy people flows.

(3)

The sheer goofiness of Richard Crashaw in 1648, translating ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ as:

Happy me! O happy sheep!
Whom my God vouchsafes to keep;

(23)

(And later, ‘He leadeth me beside the still waters’ becomes, in part: ‘At my feet the blubb’ring Mountain/Weeping melts into a fountain.’)

Isaac Watts in 1719, making an entirely new song out of ‘O sing unto the Lord a new song’:

Joy to the world – the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King:
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing.

(98)

Christopher Smart in 1765, turning a single line (KJ: ‘He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes’) into one of his typically bright and idiosyncratic stanzas:

His snow upon the ground he teems,
Like bleaching wool besides the streams,
To warm the tender blade;
Like ashes from the furnace cast,
His frost comes with the northern blast
To pinch and to pervade.

(147)

Thomas Merton, who as a Trappist monk recited them every day, wrote that ‘the Psalms teach us the way back to Paradise.’ Indeed, ‘they are themselves a Paradise.’

Curiously, many of Alter’s goals were achieved in the 1960s in the Jerusalem Bible, an English translation by an anonymous committee (though the translation of Jonah has been attributed to Tolkien), directed by Alexander Jones, of a decades-long French project by the (Catholic) School of Biblical Studies in Jerusalem. It is without literary pretension and its literal, plain-spoken minimalism takes one far from the courtly elegance of the King James and into the world of the desert tribes. Its narratives, at times, seem as straightforward and unadorned as Icelandic sagas, those other great tales of vengeful shepherds. And its deadpan translation of the interminable, detailed rules and prohibitions underscores how selective the so-called fundamentalists of our age are: ‘When two men are fighting together, if the wife of one intervenes to protect her husband from the other’s blows by putting out her hand and seizing the other by the private parts, you shall cut her hand off and show no pity’ (Deuteronomy 25.11-12). Moreover, it manages, in the Bible’s deepest strata, to summon up the archaic world where Yahweh was not the only God, but the chief among many gods – Canaanite and other eclipsing figures – simply by naming him. (Alter refuses to do this, in deference to the Orthodox Jewish taboo against saying the name, and resorts to the standard ‘Lord’ in small capital letters.) Here are a few lines from Psalm 29, in the Jerusalem Bible translation:

The voice of Yahweh over the waters!
Yahweh over the multitudinous waters!

The voice of Yahweh in power!
The voice of Yahweh in splendour!

The voice of Yahweh shatters the cedars,
Yahweh shatters the cedars of Lebanon,
making Lebanon leap like a calf,
Sirion like a young wild bull.

The voice of Yahweh sharpens lightning shafts!

The anonymous Jerusalem Bible translators, who make no claim for poetry, have inadvertently written a Beat poem – by Allen Ginsberg or Anne Waldman or Michael McClure – a reminder that the Psalms have set the tone and standard for what an oracular and ecstatic poem should sound like: in English, from the King James to Whitman to Ginsberg; and in the rest of the world from Whitman to Neruda and Senghor, among so many others. Where the usual ‘Lord’ carries millennia of evolving interpretations, and an inherent benevolence, calling Yahweh by his name – as we would a Greek or Hittite or Hindu god – confers a mythological otherness: an unsophisticated warrior god of the neolithic Hebrews, far from the deity now invoked in suburban synagogues.

We tend to remember the songs of praise and thanksgiving, but most of the psalms are preoccupied with vengeance. The psalmist is surrounded by enemies who slander him, bring lawsuits against him, cheat him in the marketplace, and he calls on Yahweh to destroy them. Or the Hebrews are surrounded by hostile tribes and they call on Yahweh to destroy them. Everyone knows Psalm 137, the beautiful song of exile (‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’), but few remember how it ends, here in Alter’s translation:

Daughter of Babylon the despoiler,
happy who pays you back in kind,
for what you did to us.
Happy who seizes and smashes
your infants against the rock.

Alter comments that the psalm ‘ends with this bloodcurdling curse pronounced on their captors, who, fortunately, do not understand the Hebrew in which it is pronounced’. A cheerful thought, but language is more than the meaning of words and somehow one suspects that if this curse was indeed once spoken aloud, the Babylonians, knowing nothing of the original, would still have been able to translate it.

Eccles.10:1 “Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.”

from blog : Cosmic Variance


Science & democracy

Take that, quarks!

Physicists usually get the props/scorn for crazy names, but astro-ph today reminded me that astronomers can frequently pull out names that shame even the kookiest bits of physics nomenclature.

So today I present to you “Gomez’s Hamburger”.

Gomez’s Hamburger is (as you may have guessed), not actually a gigantic threat to vegetarianism across the Galaxy, but instead is a “protoplanetary disk” seen edge-on. Stars usually form in molecular clouds from dense cores of gas and dust. Some of the higher angular momentum gas and dust, however, winds up not on the star itself, but in a rotating disk around the star. Some fraction of the material in the disk eventually winds up building a planetary system.
The picture at left shows some of the these disks seen in silhouette against the glow of the Orion nebula. Gomez’s Hamburger is what you get when one of these disks is seen perfectly edge-on. The dust in the disk blocks the light from the newly formed star in its center, making the burger, while light reflected from the upper layers of the disk is less shielded, and manifests as the bun.

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January 28th, 2009 Tags: gomez's hamburger
by Julianne in Science | 7 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

1. squawky Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

   Oooo. many thanks for the images today - I have to write a lecture on the formation of the solar system, and Gomez’s Hamburger is… well… a very nice example to show. And a laugh, too.

   To be honest, I much prefer the name Gomez’s Hamburger to some of names we’ve applied to rocks on Mars (Scooby Doo, for example). Much more descriptive!

2. greg Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

   Until I see a cat photoshopped into that and a suitable lolcat statement appended, I will not be happy

3. ts Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

   Doesn’t seem to come with fries though. What a bummer.

4. Eugene Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

   My favourite astro-name is still “Carinae’s Defiant Finger” :

5. Jason Heldenbrand Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:13 pm

   “Ding fries are done.”

6. ts Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

   > My favourite astro-name is still “Carinae’s Defiant Finger”

   I always thought if that defiant middle finger was the first object that the ancient astronomers ever saw in the sky, the relationship between humans and religions would have taken an entirely different course.

7. Bryan Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 2:57 pm

   If physicist nomenclature is kooky, just imagine what the philosophers are coming up with. Philosophy of Mind seems to have the edge on everyone else: Zombies, Swampmen, and Brains in Vats are all clear winners. But even philosophers of science have a few gems, including supertasks, the hole argument, and the Growing Block.