washington crossing the delaware

okay friends, family, and strangers. please prepare to be blown away: complete with wide eyes, gaping mouths, a little drool and a strange sense of squirmy giggling behind covered lips. this is the poem i promised you a couple weeks ago. the one from the class reading.

a sonnet (1936), by david shulman, based on a famous painting:

Washington Crossing the Delaware

A hard, howling, tossing water scene:
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When general's star action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands - sailor crew went going,
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens - Winter again grows cold;
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with's hands in;
He's astern - so, go alight, crew, and win!

okay now. so this is a reading on the "untranslatable" (oh it's for the translation unit of my applied linguistics course). the author of this reading is a pretty funny guy, and he is giving examples of (mostly) poems which at first seem like they are certainly untranslatable, but he perseveres and often shows that there is, infact, a way; employing a splash of genius and a truckload of creativity.

Reading this vivid poem, could anyone fail to feel the raw whipping of the winds, the violence of the waves, the threat of the oncoming Brits, the bravery of our valiant Johnnys..
Well, yes - it's a little odd, I admit. Some of the lines, like the one about the redcoats, are a bit hard to parse. And does "anger" really rhyme with "danger"? Here and there, the poem seems somewhat forced. Still such defects mught be excused when one considers that David Shulman, its author, was working under duress when he penned it sometime in 1936. Like a poor soul penned in jail, Shulman was deprived of certain luxuries. Indeed, paying a kind of complementary lipo-service to Varaldo in his Latin incarnation, Shulman deprived himself of "u", though he allowed himself all other vowels (accually, not "y" either). Well is that all there is to it?
As a matter of fact, no. In vain will one seek any of the letters, "b", "f", "j", "k", "m", "p", "q", "v", "x", "y", and "z". Now we're starting to talk contraints! Indeed what letters do appear in this poem? The answer - and I hope this knocks your socks off - is: exactly the letters in the poem's title, and no others. This is quite a lipogram, after all.
And yet, there is more. Notice that on every line there is a "w". Or rather, two of them. But why? Because there are two "w"'s in the poem's title! ... and so on down the line. In a word, in this fully metric and rhyming sonnet, every single line is a perfect anagram of the title, and still the whole thing basically makes sense. ... If you're looking for tangledness of medium with mesage, this is about as extreme an example as I think you're likely to find. It is a wonderful, inimitable word-carving inextricably ,married to the English language.

so i guess it goes without saying that that is an example of an untranslatable piece of text. haah so now that i have bored you to tears...

fourteen again

i just recieved - in the mail - nine, (count'm, NINE!!!) dvd's worth of wallflower vids spanning more than ten years. oh online wallflowers community, how much fun i've had all these years. all nine dvd's are a compilation of all the music video's, interview clips, commercials, and recorded shows that we have stashed on various unmarked vhs' for the last ten years.... and they are ALL put together now...

onward, brothers

everyday-life is running full ahead at a fantastic speed; when i get home i feel like i just was swooshed around by a dancing partner and wide-eyed catching my breath. somewhat tiring, strangly invigourating, mostly hilarious - and certainly lots of fun.
have some freaking cool stuff i read in my required papers for a class the other day, i thought it was awesome! was laughing out loud in the library. i want to share it with you guys right now, but perhaps tommorrow will be more forgiving in the time aspect.

children, rinse your reeds.

my throat hurts when i swallow. it feels kind of like i have a cut on the left side of my esophagus. (unfortunatly, this does not stop me from eating). i'm not sick, so my only explaination for this is that i picked up some nasty bacteria from my yucky-tasting-never-been-washed-sax reed. this is my only explaination.

in other less gross and infinatly more exciting news, i've been reading two REALLY COOL AND EXCITING articles. i am pretty convinced if it wasnt for God, i would not be reading these REALLY COOL AND EXCITING things right now. anyway they are papers about the history and state of the dong orthography. the dong are a minority group of China which we got the privledge to live with for a short time last summer. orthography is a word lillian taught me to pronounce two weeks ago. it is basically language written down using symbols. the curious way by which i have these papers in my greasy little hands is this: joshua-elijah - whom nearly always has the dong people on his mind, tongue and heart - met a man (in the happening place of saskatchewan) whose daughter and son in law are language M's in china. pretty cool, eh? after excitedly conversing through email (with the abundant use of exclaimation marks), they passed his email on to another couple who work mainly with the dong people, and thier language. hmm. yep, and they sent us those aforementioned papers on the development of that orthography. there's some more sock burning cool stuff about that, but in all honestly i'm wary of this ultra public internet-ness, so in the spirit of not wanting to get anybody in trouble, ask me about it and i'll be more than excited to share with you!