Lost In Translation

When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, I was startled by a serious gap in my children's education, and so, in a feeble effort to correct this deficiency, I purchased a copy of the "I Ching" (translated by James Legge). In his preface I came across a section that illuminated the whole Asian to Western Language translation problem:

"When I made my first translation of it in 1854, I endeavored to be as concise in my English as the original Chinese was. Much of what I wrote was made up, in consequence, of so many English words, with little or no mark of syntactical connexion. I followed in this the example of P. Regis and his coadjutors (Introduction, page 9) in their Latin version. But their version is all but unintelligible, and mine was not less so. How to surmount this difficulty occurred to me after I had found the clue to the interpretation;- in a fact which I had unconsciously acted on in all my translations of the other classics, namely, that the written characters of the Chinese are not representations of words, but symbols of ideas, and that the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks. It is vain therefore for a translator to attempt a literal version. When the symbolic characters have brought his mind en rapport with that of this author, he is free to render the ideas in his own or any other speech in the best manner that he can attain to."

Last night my wife and I watched "The History Boys", or at least the first 95% of it. Something in this movie prompted me to realize that a large part of poetry is the sound it makes. Not everyone is enraptured by the same kind of music, and for some spoken poetry is very pleasant, perhaps even enthralling. My father liked poetry. It does not do much for me. I might enjoy it, but not enough to make note of it.

I do not listen to music much anymore. I really liked rock and roll when I was growing up, but I have heard all the songs so many times, I do not want to here any of them again. Hearing one once in a while is okay, but I pretty much go without music now. The classics do nothing for me, nor does hardly anything modern. I last thing I heard that I really enjoyed was the soundtrack to "Kill Bill".

And speaking of Uma Thurman (star of Kill Bill), she has followed Clive Owen into the "made for advertising" movie business with a film for Pirelli.