Sedulia's Quotations

Arthur Waley translates from an unknown tongue

Mr Waley is unconquerable. I remember, for instance, the day when he was expected for the week-end at my brother Sacheverell's house in the country, and my sister-in-law and I, finding in the library a small and ancient book in an unknown tongue, placed it beside Mr Waley's bed in the hope that he would confess himself defeated. Next morning, Mr Waley looked a little pale; his manner was languid, but as he placed the book on the breakfast table he announced in a faint voice: 'Turkish. 18th century.' The pages were few; and after an interval of respect we enquired: 'What is it about?' Mr Waley, with sudden animation: 'The Cat and the Bat. The Cat sat on the Mat. The Cat ate the Rat.' 'Oh, it is a child's book.' 'One would imagine so. One would hope so!'

—Edith Sitwell (1187–1864), in Some English Eccentrics. Arthur Waley (1889–1966) was a famous translator from Japanese and Chinese.

 

 

 

Le Naour: the first "unknown soldier" at Verdun was African

The first "unknown" corpse exhumed at Verdun turned out to be Senegalese, so he was reburied and replaced by a white body.

—From a review by Neal Ascherson of Jean-Yves Le Naour's book The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War, translated by Penny Allen, Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 2006

Capus: Middle age is disappearing

In Paris, what used to be called middle age is disappearing. You stay young a long time, then go gaga.
–Alfred Capus

A Paris, ce qu'on appelait autrefois l'âge mur tend a disparaître. On reste très jeune très longtemps, puis on devient gâteux.

Martin Amis: a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander

It was...a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union.

–Martin Amis (1949-) in Koba the Dread, a political biography of Stalin

Make America Smart Again

Photo of pro-science protest, Flickr, Mobilus in Mobili

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-- when we're a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition.

–Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

Churchill on writing a book

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. 

       --Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Stephen Spender tells T.S. Eliot he wants to be a poet

In 1930 T.S. Eliot had decided to publish four of his [Stephen Spender's] poems in the Criterion, and furthermore invited him to lunch.

"At our first luncheon he [T.S. Eliot] asked me what I wanted to do. I said: 'Be a poet.' 'I can understand you wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by "being a poet,"' he objected."

  --Stephen Spender, quoted in essay "Stephen Spender: A Nice Bloody Fool," by Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) in posthumous anthology Arguably

The Irish peasant poet tells the scholar of Troy

[Between 1910 and 1930, the scholar Robin Flower went many times to the Blasket Islands off the southwest coast of Ireland in search of the Irish tradition. The islanders spoke only Irish, which Flower learned well. The Blaskets were abandoned for the mainland by the last islanders in 1953. Here, the island's poet Tomás Ó Crithin (1856-1937) is speaking in Irish of his youth while Flower takes down his words.]

"You would hear no word of English in Dingle that time, but Irish only spoken through all the streets and houses. The country was full to the lid of songs and stories, and you would not put a stir out of you from getting up in the morning to lying down at night but you would meet a poet, man or woman, making songs on all that would be happening. It is not now as it was then, but it is like a sea on ebb, and only pools here and there among the rocks. And it is a good thought of us to put down the songs and stories before they are lost from the world forever."

[Flower] At times I would stop him as an unfamiliar word or strange twist of phrase struck across my ear, and he would courteously explain it.... Thus on one occasion the phrase "the treacherous horse that brought destruction on Troy" came into a song.

"And what horse was that?" I said.

"It was the horse of wood," he answered, "that was made to be given to the King that was over Troy. They took it with them and brought it into the very middle of the city, and it was lovely to look upon. It was in that city Helen was, she that brought the world to death; every man that used to come with a host seeking her, there would go no man of them safe home without falling because of Helen before the city of Troy. It was said that the whole world would have fallen because of Helen that time if it had not been for the thought this man had, to give the horse of wood to the King. There was an opening in it unknown to all, two men in it, and it full of powder and shot. When the horse was in the midst of the city, and every one of them weary from looking at it, a night of the nights my pair opened the horse and out with them. They brought with them their share of powder and shot. They scattered it here and there through the city in the deep night; they set fire to it and left not a living soul in Troy that wasn't burnt that night."

   --Robin Flower (1881-1946) in The Western Island (1944)

Halldor Laxness: Danish scullions' view of the Icelanders, ca 1690

The scullions were Danish... and they smugly explained to Regvidsen time and time again that Iceland was not a country and Icelanders were not people. They insisted furthermore that the lice-infested pack of slaves that lived on that funnel of Hell scrabbled along only on whale oil, rotten shark meat, and alms from the king.

  --From Iceland's Bell, by Halldor Laxness (1902-1988), translated by Philip Roughton

Tina Fey on becoming a woman: dudes being nasty

When I was writing the movie Mean Girls-- which hopefully is playing on TBS right now!-- I went to a workshop taught by Rosalind Wiseman as part of my research. Rosalind wrote the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes that Mean Girls was based on, and she conducted a lot of self-esteem and bullying workshops with women and girls around the country. She did this particular exercise in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., with about two hundred grown women, asking them to write down the moment they first "knew they were a woman." Meaning, "When did you first feel like a grown woman and not a girl?" We wrote down our answers and shared them, first in pairs, then in larger groups. The group of women was racially and economically diverse, but the answers had a very similar theme. Almost everyone first realized they were becoming a grown woman when some dude did something nasty to them. "I was walking home from ballet and a guy in a car yelled, 'Lick me!'" "I was babysitting my younger cousins when a guy drove by and yelled, 'Nice ass'." There were pretty much zero examples like "I first knew I was a woman when my mother and father took me out to dinner to celebrate my success on the debate team." It was mostly men yelling shit from cars. Are they a patrol sent out to let girls know they've crossed into puberty?

   --Tina Fey in Bossypants (2011)