Tuesday 28 January 2014
'Shakespeare made little changes'
You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letters. It doesn't matter what it's about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap's corpse has sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, 'Full fathom five thy father lies', you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way - e.g. 'your father's corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level' - and you're just a coastguard with some bad news.- Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence
[with thanks to Sam Leigh, for the splendid - signed! - gift]
Monday 27 January 2014
On Robinson Crusoe
Instead of shrieking or writing poetry, becoming a wild hunter or a religious hermit, he calmly sets about building a home and making pottery and laying out a farm.- Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library
Surrealest interview
INTERVIEWER: Clarice Lispector, where does this name, 'Lispector,' come from?
CLARICE LISPECTOR: I don't know. I asked ... It's a Latin name, right?
Perfectly bad militar-ism
Baudelaire, in Mon cœur mis à nu, warned us that journalists with a fondness for military metaphors were proving their un-warlike nature.- Clive James, in The Monthly
Wednesday 22 January 2014
Etymological smack-down!
On the naming of Batticaloa:
That said:
It has much rice, principally in a district that lies on the side of the island that faces the east, called Calou, that is "kingdom," by reason of which rice, which they call bate, the kingdom is called Batecalou, which they interpret as the "kingdom of rice" [4].- Joao De Barros, The history of Ceylon: From the earliest times to 1600 AD
That said:
[4] This is one of the most amusing of Barros's etymological atrocities. Of course, Sinh. bat is boiled rice; and neither in Sinh. nor in Tam. is there a word like calou meaning "kingdom."- Donald Ferguson, Barros's translator and editor
Friday 17 January 2014
Errata - or; How it is Done
Page 1. Line 16. after Parts, strike out the comma...- Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island of Ceylon, in the East-Indies: Together With an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and divers other Englishmen now living there, and of the Author's Miraculous Escape
[Note to editors: This page of minor corrections is at the front of the first edition.]
Thursday 16 January 2014
lingua Dilliwalaha*
In a place - and a world - where a person's intellectual power is judged so much on the basis of their facility with the English language, I have chosen to make all characters in this book speak the same, standard, English so that their widely differing relationships to this language do not themselves become the issue.- Rana Dasgupta, Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-first Century Delhi (forthcoming)
--
* full adjectival credit to Rob Stroud
Wednesday 15 January 2014
Tuesday 14 January 2014
Why there is no contemporary war poetry - nailed!
Poetry at its best says something about the human condition, often in relation to death, and the poets of WWI were serious writers operating at the very limit of human experience, sending back first-hand literary reports. It's difficult to imagine an equivalent situation ever occurring again, at least in the West. Most of the poets I know would think twice before setting a mouse-trap, let alone enlisting for active service,* and I don't have the subscription figures in front of me but I'd guess that readership of Poetry Review amongst Her Majesty's Armed Forces is pretty low.- Simon Armitage, The Not Dead (introduction)
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* As if to prove this point, Armitage refers (in 'Warriors') to 'the bun-line' - which has never been a military term, whatever any number of military personnel may try to tell you. (He/it/they mean 'bund-line', from an Indo-European word meaning earthworks, or dyke.)
Also, extraordinarily (in 'Albion'), 'sleighing [sic] the dragon'...
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