Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Seen on Amazon

The Path to Rome for your Kindle! If I had a Kindle, I would buy this...






I'm really looking forward to reading this: "With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.... Exiles joins Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (called “an astonishingly deft and provocative novel” by The New York Times) as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can."

Thursday, April 17, 2008

A Latin Lawyer Poem

Exercise from Latin class today: translate Martial. Some of his stuff is not suitable for human consumption, but this one is just snarky:

It's not a case of poison, rape, or slaughter.
You're my lawyer - argue like you oughter.
I'm suing him for stealing my three goats.
A thing you have not proved by endless quotes
From Livy on the Mithridatic war,
And Marius and Cannae and still more,
And cries of "Madness! Punic perfidy!"
And flecks of spit that everyone can see -
Now try and get my three goats back to me.

Non de vi neque caede nec veneno,
sed lis est mihi de tribus capellis:
vicini queror has abesse furto.
hoc iudex sibi postulat probari:
tu Cannas Mithridaticumque bellum
et periuria Punici furoris
et Sullas Mariosque Muciosque
magna voce sonas manuque tota.
iam dic, Postume, de tribus capellis.

New Dappled Things

Ta da!

The poetry isn't as good this time. Paul Stilwell is the best in this issue. Two provocative essays: "When the Eagles Don't Fit in Capistrano" and "The New Jerusalem." I really want to read the rest of the second one.