Forsaking Homework and The Educational Experience

Hey Friends

            My lil sister recently shared with me something interesting she had read from the Golden notebook, an awesome book by last years Nobel prize winner Dorris Lessing. Lessing if I remember somewhere in the prologue, mentions how a lot of people who were english majors or students of literature end up abandoning their love of literature to go and do something else due to the fact that the current school system doesnt allow for  creativity.  Its seems, paraphrasing of course, that the need to base all opinion on documented criticisms and analysis  never allows the student to come up with new valid insight.

I whole heartedly agree and recently had the opportunity to to witness this first hand. My sister is taking a course on British Literature. The teacher has talked ad nauseum about Beowulf and the Canterbury tales but I feel not made the students any richer for it. Actually insight given by students are penalized mostly because:

1. Simply the professor has a PhD and the students dont. He cannot or will not accept any insight from a student
2. As was very captiously describe in Jose ortega’ y gasset essay/book in the 1930’s misison of the University, modern day academics were referred to by ortega as modern day barbarians in that they are hyperspecialists to the point that they only know and cant working in one small niche. Many a time  they are ingorant to everything outside of there small niche. Compare this to the intellectual lights of our history, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon,( i wonder if ther eis  significance in putting them in that order) Leonardo da Vinci.

For some reason I feel like with many of the great authors of british literature many teachers teach them like they are an island. Ironically like the british isle themselves, these writers are separated and isolated from the rest of the world ( which is of course for a long time was continental europe). Chaucer is one such person.

I was happy to tell my sister that the sufi attar the chemist ’s parliament of the birds was  actually was the source or an inspiration for Chaucer  as well as some of the works of Rumi which were well known during Chaucers day. I refered my sister to this section of The Sufis, written by Idries Shah, please bear with me lol

 

His [Rumi] work was well enough known within less than a hundred years of his death in 1273 for Chaucer to use references to it in some of his works, together “with material from the teachings of Rumi’s spiritual precursor, Attar the Chemist (1150-1229/30). From the numerous references to Arabian material which can be found in Chaucer, even a cursory examination shows a Sufi impact of the Rumi school of literature. Chaucer’s use of the phrase, “As lions may take warning when a pup is punished . . .” is merely a close adaptation of Udhrib el-kalba wa yatrf addaba el-fahdu (“Beat the dog and the lion will behave”), which is a secret phrase used by the Whirling Dervishes. Its interpretation depends on a play upon the words “dog” and “lion.” Although written as such, in speaking the password, homophones are used. Instead of saying dog (kalb), the Sufi says heart (qalb), and in place of lion (fahd), fahid (the neglectful). The phrase now becomes: “Beat the heart (Sufi exercises) and the neglectful (faculties) behave (correctly).”

 This is the slogan which introduces the “beating the heart” movements encouraged by the motions and concentrations of the Mevlevi—Whirling-Dervishes.

 The relationship between the Canterbury Tales as an allegory of inner development and the Parliament of the Birds of Attar is another interesting item. Professor Skeat reminds us that, like Attar, Chaucer has thirty participants in his pilgrimage. Thirty pilgrims seeking the mystical bird,  Simurgh makes sense in Persian, because si-murgh actually means “thirty birds.” In English, however, such a transposition is not possible. The number of pilgrims, made necessary in the Persian because of the requirements of rhyme, is preserved in Chaucer, deprived of double meaning. “The Pardoner’s Tale” occurs in Attar; the pear-tree story is found in Book IV of the Sufi work, the Mathnawi. of Rumi.

Armed with all this cool information, and some quotes by Jorge Luis Borges’ book: This craft of verse ( seven lectures he gave in Texas I forget for which university) where he gave a lot of valid insight into Beowulf, my sister went back to class only to get told that the the information she had was just merely conjecture, though she was willing to provide valid reference and has no place in the class.  The Professor even said that the travelers in Chaucer’s stories weren’t transformed by the  pilgrimage, which goes against my  understanding of a pilgrimage.

From my own experience, it seems really that nothing kills creativity more than school.   My sister now has a growing love for literature and spends most of her time reading books that inspire her, instead of doing her homework. As a student of literature , it kind of hurts to see but its make sense. Here is a cool quote by frank zappa:

Kid’s heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of
school they’re totally unprepared to do anything.  They can’t read, they
can’t write, they can’t think.  Talk about child abuse.  The U.S. school
system as a whole qualifies.

Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to
our mundane educational system.  Forget about the Senior
Prom and go to the library and *educate yourself* if you’ve
got any guts.

And my fav frank zappa quote of all time

If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education,
go to the library.

- Dave

A Beautiful Poem By Borges – dedicated to Shiro

Leave your comments tell me what youtthink or what comes to mind

Delia Elena San Marco

 By

Jorge Luis Borges

We said our good-bye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once.
From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved good-bye.

A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o’clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice?
Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead.
And now I search out that memory and gaze at it and think that it was false, that under the trivial farewell there lay an infinite separation.

Last night I did not go out after dinner. To try to understand these things, I reread the last lesson that Plato put in his teacher’s mouth. I read that the soul can flee when the flesh dies.
And now I am not sure whether the truth lies in the ominous later interpretation or in the innocent farewell.
Because if the soul doesn’t die, we are right to lay no stress on our good-byes.

To say goodbye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

One day we will pick up this uncertain conversation again, Delia—on the bank of what river?—and we will ask ourselves whether we were once, in a city that vanished into the plains, Borges and Delia.

A Note about the translations

Hello Everyone,

                    I just wanted to talk to you about the translations I’ve done or am doing or will usually due on this blog. Basically I feel in terms of translations there are two approaches, on is that of the grammarian and that of the poet. One focuses on the denotation, translating word for word relying on the words themselves to convey all levels of subtle nuance. The other way is to focus on the connotation and translate or create the same feeling as a poet would, or from the point of view of a poet.

This is very similar to what Robert Graves has done in his central book, well central for me The White Goddess. Here is an excerpt from WIKIpedia, the source of all things true

Graves described The White Goddess as “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth.”[.........]… Relying on arguments from etymology and the use of forensic techniques to uncover what he calls ‘iconotropic’ redaction of original myths, Graves argues not only for the worship of a single goddess under many names, but also that the names of the Ogham letters in the alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Ireland and Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king (see “Celtic Astrology“); and, further, that these letter names concealed lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess. In response to critics, Graves has accused literary scholars of being psychologically incapable of interpreting myth ^[1] or too concerned with maintaining their perquisites to go against the majority view.

Graves admitted he was not a medieval historian, but a poet, and thus based his work on the premise that the

language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry…

For me I feel that a lot of Robert Grave works reached the pinnacle of thought through Joseph Campbell. Take a look if you are interest and the books Occidental Mythology and Creative Mythology.

The translation I have done or usually will do unless someone asks me to specifically are denotation based. I am just translating directly with little care at the moment for the poetic spirit, I am usually at work on a break when I blog. I have spent years studying the poetic voices and means of expressions especially through the vehicle of the French language. I’m everywhere!!! The poetry of the Lamartine, de Musset, de Vigny, Valery, Rilke (he had great french poems) Baudelaire Mallarme Verlaine Rimbaud, Desnos, Victor Hugo, who isnt gripped by that poem Demain Des L’aube and the prose of, François Villon the hidden mystic, St Exupery, Raymond Queneau the French comedian (who doesn’t Like Zazie and the Exercises of Style) have a unique place in my heart and my mind.

What my approach to translating? Read the work, get a feel for it  and then abandon everything I thought I knew about it and just go only by my ‘hearts’ perception of it.

Here is something from Wikipedia on translation:

Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if translation were an exact science — as if consistent, one-to-one correlations existed between the words and phrases of different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may assume that all that is needed to translate a text is to “encode” and “decode” equivalents between the two languages, using a translation dictionary as the “codebook.”^[4]

On the contrary, such a fixed relationship would only exist were a new language synthesized and simultaneously matched to a pre-existing language’s scopes of meaning, etymologies, and lexical ecological niches. ^[5] If the new language were subsequently to take on a life apart from such cryptographic use, each word would spontaneously begin to assume new shades of meaning and cast off previous associations, thereby vitiating any such artificial synchronization. Henceforth translation would require the disciplines described in this article.

Another common misconception is that anyone who can speak a second language will make a good translator. In the translation community, it is generally accepted that the best translations are produced by persons who are translating into their own native languages,^[6] as it is rare for someone who has learned a second language to have total fluency in that language. A good translator understands the source language well, has specific experience in the subject matter of the text, and is a good writer in the target language. Moreover, he is not only bilingual but bicultural.

The best of translation comes from Jorge Luis Borges, masterful is the only word to describe it. If you have this book or want to get it take a look at the chapter: World Music and Translation. Man its awesome.

-Dave to be continued

Food For Thought – Tues. August 26, 2008 Jorge Luis Borges

 

Hello VEryone

                   Here is a great story/poem./mental child of Jorge Luis Borges…… read this and tell me if at any point you have discerned Yourself and you, and I of course will do the same Also maybe it will be cool if we cna take it a step further and see which one of you, which one of me is writing enjoy this food for thought

-Dave

Borges and I

The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen.

I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause, perhaps

mechanically nowadays, to gaze at an entrance archway and its

metal gate; I hear about Borges via the mail, and read his name

on a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I

enjoy hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography,

etymology, the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose: the

other shares my preferences but in a vain way that transforms

them to an actor’s props. It would be an exaggeration to say that

our relationship is hostile; I live, I keep on living, so that

Borges can weave his literature, and that literature justifies me.

It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages are valid, but

those pages can’t save me, perhaps because good writing

belongs to no one, not even the other, but only to language and

tradition. For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively, and

only some aspect of me can survive in the other. Little by little,

I will yield all to him, even though his perverse habit of

falsifying and exaggerating is clear to me. Spinoza understood

that all things want to go on being themselves; the stone

eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger. I am forced to

survive as Borges, not myself (if I am a self), yet I recognise

myself less in his books than in many others, less too than in

the studious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free

myself from him, and passed from suburban mythologies to

games of time and infinity, but now those are Borges’ games

and I will have to think of something new. Thus my life is a

flight and I will lose all and all will belong to oblivion, or to

that other.

I do not know which of us is writing this page.