The Tailor Of Gloucester is an English children’s story by Beatrix Potter, of “Peter Rabbit” fame. She wrote and published it in 1901.
It tells the tale of a poor tailor who has to make a coat and waistcoat for the Mayor of Gloucester’s Christmas Day wedding. He works late into the evening cutting and preparing the fabric. He lays everything out so that he can start sewing it the next morning.
One of the pleasures of fatherhood was being able to re-read some of the books I had enjoyed as a child. Another was to discover a whole new generation of delightful children’s books.
One such book, or set of books that I came across when my daughter was about five years old was the “Flat Stanley” series written by Jeff Brown.
The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is a modern American bestseller. It has sold over 1.2 million copies in the USA alone and has been translated into 24 languages according to Wikipedia – yes, the book even has its own Wikipedia page. But how many of those 48 [Read more…]
I recently finished reading David Boyd’s lively translation of The Factory by Oyamada Hiroko, a contemporary Japanese writer of somewhat dystopian novellas who, incidentally, lives barely a stone’s throw from me somewhere in the western suburbs of Hiroshima. One of my English language students told her classmates and me about [Read more…]
Earlier this year I was listening to the Audible version of Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature and was intrigued by his discussion of Flannery O’Connor. It occurs in the last chapter of the book where things take a deeply serious turn and Greene urges us to “Meditate on [Read more…]
Continuing to look at Statius’ description of human generation in the 25th Canto of Purgatory, it is interesting to note that A. S. Kline translates “anima” as “spirit” rather than “soul.” Either word can be defended as a translation choice. What is being described by Stazio is the “ensoulment” of [Read more…]
Yesterday I looked at how Clive James translated Statius’ account of “perfect blood” in Purgatory 25. Today I will look at a few more lines of the passage, concluding with line 66, perché da lui non vide organo assunto. Dante, Purgatorio 25, 66. Yesterday we left off in the middle [Read more…]
In yesterday’s blog post I wrote about Clive James translation of Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 25, lines 37-66. I contended that if you knew nothing about Galen’s medical theories then much of Clive James’ translation of Statius’ account of human generation would be incomprehensible. In contrast, A. S. Kline’s prose translation [Read more…]
On Wednesday evening I was reading Clive James’ translation of the 25th Canto of Dante’s Purgatory with my private student Dr. M and was struck by the curious convolutions of the passage on the generation of the human soul. To put it in its context, Virgil is leading Dante through [Read more…]
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