Corrigendum and Addendum

Image from theguardian.com in an article about the Chinese translation of “Don Quijote.”

Referencing https://ethicaldative.com/2021/06/20/the-quixote-funny-and-sad, in translating Martín de Riquer’s phrase “… Una diatriba para acabar con algo que hace mucho que se acabó…” I left out “hace mucho.” I should have written: “… A diatribe devoted to ending something which ended long ago…”

If Riquer had written hacía mucho, the translation would change to: “… A diatribe devoted to ending something which “had ended long ago…”

The pluperfect highlights a key point: Don Quijote is an anachronism in his own time. Everything about the crackpot knight on his shambling nag (rocín) is perceived by those he encounters as archaic. He exudes a whiff of olden times which are remote from their contemporary, 17th-century lives.

Cervantes legitimized writing that was meant to entertain, rather than instruct and edify. His beef with the stories that drove Alonso Quijano off the rails was that they were wretchedly told. He blew them out of the water with a new way of telling well nigh invented by him on the fly.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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The Quixote: Funny and Sad

Image from theguardian.com in an article about the Chinese translation of “Don Quijote.”

Lo extraordinario del “Quijote” es que es una parodia que interesa al que desconoce lo parodiado, un libro con una circunstancia muy concreta que llega a los más alejados en el tiempo y el espacio, una diatriba para acabar con algo que hace mucho que se acabó, y que cada día nos abre mayores perspectivas y posibilidades de reflexión y de auténtico regocijo, pues el que no se da cuenta que el “Quijote” es un libro divertido lo ha entendido tan poco como el que no ha reparado en su tristeza.

(Martín de Riquer, “Miguel de Cervantes, Obras Completas, I, Don Quijote de la Mancha, seguido del Quijote de Avellaneda, Edición, introducción y notas de Martín de Riquer, Editorial Planeta, Barcelona, 1962)

The extraordinary thing about the “Quixote” is that it’s a parody of interest even to the person who is unfamiliar with what’s parodied, a book with a very concrete circumstance which yet reaches those most removed in time and space, a diatribe devoted to ending something which is ended, and which each day opens up to us greater perspectives and possibilities for reflection and genuine pleasure, for (indeed) the person who doesn’t realize that the “Quixote” is an entertaining book has grasped it as poorly as the person who hasn’t noticed its sadness. (My translation)

[Alba, I misspoke when I told you this would give you a glimpse of Cervantes’s 17th-century Spanish. That quotation is for another day. This is 20th-century scholar Martín de Riquer reflecting on the work in the introduction to his edition. Jaime]

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Robert Hollander: Scholar-Translator

Robert Hollander with his wife, Jean Hollander, in his Princeton University office in 2001. On the desk is their translation of “Inferno,” the first volume of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” In the foreground is a bust of the writer to whom Professor Hollander devoted much of his life. Credit… Laura Pedrick.

Robert Hollander, Princeton Dante scholar and translator, died in April, 2021. The translation of “The Divine Comedy” which he produced in close collaboration with wife Jean Hollander (d. 2019), herself a poet, is said to be among the “smoothest” and most accessible of the English versions.

Jean Hollander provided the spark for the translation project in 1997. Peering over her husband’s shoulder as he studied a 1939 translation of “The Divine Comedy,” she pronounced the text to be “awful.” Challenged by Mr. Hollander to do better, she returned two days later with a “free-verse rendering of the text in current English idiom.” “That’s not bad,” he said.

Their role-based collaboration is evoked in a tableau of tropical bliss:

On trips to the beach during a family vacation on the Caribbean island of Tortola, Professor Hollander would don his clip-on sunglasses, Ms. Hollander would put on a sun hat and bring a picnic — and then the two would spend all afternoon debating cantos. They adjudicated microscopically fine distinctions, like whether sinners were hurled “down” or “below.”

(Alex Traub, “Robert Hollander, Who Led Readers Into ‘The Inferno,’ Dies at 87,” NYTimes, 6-8-21)

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Travesía (13)

Whitman 1819 – 1892 [Image from www.allenginsberg.org]
Fulton Ferry Boat (Brooklyn, New York), July 1890 via The Library of Congress, Washington DC. [Image from www.allenginsberg.org]

Versión castellana del poema “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) de Walt Whitman
English text at http://www.poetryfoundation.org
Spanish Interpretation by JMN

[Translator’s note: This is the 9th and last part of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I will put it up in 4 sections.]

(9) Section 1 of 4
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
¡Prosigue tu flujo, río! ¡Fluye con la pleamar, y bájate con la bajamar!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
¡Seguid vuestro jugueteo, oleaje crestado de borde festoneado!
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!
¡Nubarrones vistosos del ocaso! ¡Empapad con vuestro esplendor a mí, o a los hombres y mujeres que me sucedan por generaciones!
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!
¡Atravesad de orilla a orilla, muchedumbres incontables de pasajeros!
Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
¡Levantaos, altos mástiles de Mannahatta! ¡Levantaos, bellas colinas de Brooklyn!
Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
¡Late, cerebro perplejo y curioso! ¡Arroja preguntas y respuestas!
Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!
¡Suspéndete aquí y por todas partes, eterno flotador de solución!
Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!
¡Contemplad, ojos afectuosos y anhelantes, en el domicilio o la calle o la asamblea pública!

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Nazi disléxico

Es que hay que ir al colegio, hasta para ser un nazi asqueroso.

Nazi disléxico

When graffiti misfires. A droll catch by Javier.

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Deluged So Few nor Dampened So Many

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/06/14/news-of-the-incident-got-around-in-gob-circles/)

Rigging walloped the Wisp isthmus with a vengeance. Rigs to melt permafrost for pus collection. Rigs to truck scoop to reservoirs. Rigs to tanker and pipe it to spillways and railheads. Rigs to salvage grounded and derailed carriers.

Plants burgeoned like twinkling fairy cities in the night. Plants to introduce gain of function additives. Plants to process pus derivatives into plastics and personal lubricant and coffee whitener.

Support and service jobs broke out like plethoras. Jobs to do and undo, start and stop, perforate and plug, buy and sell, furnish and dispose, advise and teach, protect and serve, adjudicate and snuff. Odd jobs, hand jobs, put-up jobs. Jobs to stencil “Danger” whereall it needed to go.

Everywhere you looked there were pieces of work; both hard and soft labor found at the drop of a hat in the teeming, melt-field pus camps; temp gigs and side hustles and life hacks galore in the honkytonks and greasy spoons that bloomed like venus flytraps along the shorelines of runoff lagoons.

Just how and whether Todd’s ancestor Astrid issued from this rowdy mileu remains to be seen. What’s important to remember here is that there are more plausibilities than the deniable kind, no matter how lustily Texas governors assert the contrary. Let’s put a pin in it there.

(c) 2021 JMN — All rights reserved

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News of the Incident Got Around in GOB Circles

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/06/13/smegma-boom-of-the-2020s-in-the-wisp-isthmus/)

Scientists converged on Exit 186 to examine the fluid that had preserved Fred’s effaced face. It turned out to be a highly extrapolated sublimate of West Texas light sweet crude. A massive tectonic blister of the stuff extended from the Wisp isthmus all the way down to the Mar-a-Lago Trench.

The indigenous word for the fluid was ñiññ, meaning “earth pus.” In Wisp folk medicine it was reputed to be a balm for anal afflatus.

The Department of Wasteland Security reclassified the Wisp protectorate as a national park. This opened it up to intensive melting for earth pus extraction. Exxon-Roxxoff stranded expectant tankers in the Wisp shoals and started a ruptured pipeline to spill product on serial compass points radiating southward.

A device pioneered in labs of the desert converted to CO2 the waste oxygen spewed by earth pus combustion. This removed the last impediment to ruthless monetizing of the miracle goo. It was Katy bar the door — a Klondike level of churn paired with a Niagara of trickle. Not since OPEC times has such untaxed wealth deluged so few nor dampened so many.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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Crear con arcilla – Las Creaciones Artísticas

Partiendo de un dibujo sobre un plano de arcilla, se pueden crear formas plásticas: con el bajo y el altorrelieve las figuras emergen, se separan del…

Crear con arcilla – Las Creaciones Artísticas

Alba, me encanta el objeto y la descripción del proceso.

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Smegma Boom of the 2020s in the Wisp Isthmus

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/06/12/your-kingdom-has-dang-near-come/)

Astrid was the fatherless child of a tool-pusher named Kirk Frick. Her core story is that she franchised her way out of puberty to merge with a founding partner of Huff Pugh Fuchs. We’ll develop Astrid Frick Fuchs when we need her, but let’s do a little foregrounding first.

It was the fraught decade of the aughts. Trophy hunting was pitiful. All the wild game was virtually shot up. Sportsmen had to plink at domesticated prey to kill anything at all. In this bleak scenario a lucky GOB named Fred bagged a quasi-extinct tundra coney. As he emptied his clip skyward in celebratory gunfire, Fred inadvertently shot off his face.

A search party found Fred facedown in a puddle of smegma-like fluid. The icky ooze had exerted startling antisepsis on his effaced face. The mess of bone and tissue was still pink and vibrant.

They were fixing to trundle the cadaver back to town when a fella named Wayne noticed their dualie was sitting on empty. Fred was rapidly putrefying now on the Dodge’s tailgate. The party discussed thumbing a ride on the interstate. “Let’s try some of this stuff first,” Wayne said.

They scooped fluid into empty hooch cartons and dumped it into the dualie’s tank. It not only got them home, it tripled the truck’s rated MPG and improved its performance. News of the incident got around in good-old-boy circles.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved.

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Your Kingdom Has Dang Near Come

(Continued from https://ethicaldative.com/2021/06/11/lets-imagine-you-successful/)

You believe the nuttiness sickening the land could be flared off by a good fracking. For a guy who will sue the “bejeepers” out of someone if provoked, you’re oddly comfortable with the word “butthole.”

You lead from closed-door meetings. “Absolutely not” is how you say “no.”

Did we mention you’re a man in this figment? There, we’ve said it. Step into the light. A woman risks being collaborative, unassuming, flexible, subtle, kind, empathic, modest, and strong. We can’t work with that.

You’re a stinker, Todd, but you’re not complicated. Mile wide, inch deep. Your life is a business plan. Here we float the standard disclaimer: If someone out there resembles you it’s not Nick’s fault. Give a nod of assent, that’ll do.

Now that we have a contract, let’s try to make you interesting. You descend from Astrid Frick Fuchs, a doyenne of the rentier class spawned by the smegma boom of the 2020s in the Wisp isthmus.

(c) 2021 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved

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