Sedulia's Quotations

Patrick Hackett: Awake, I am here in France.

Awake, I am here in France.
When I sleep I'm in the Ireland of Conn.
Who would choose to watch and wake?
I am watchful-- to suckle sleep.

        --Pádraigín Haicéad/ Patrick Hackett (ca 1600-1654), tr. Thomas Kinsella, with Seán Ó Tuama, from An Duanáire: Poems of the Dispossessed. Haicéad was a priest who like many educated Irish Catholics spent much time on the Continent.

Isan bhFrainc im dhúscadh dhamh
in Éirinn Chuinn im chodladh;
beag ar ngrádh uaidh don fhaire--
do thál suiain ar síorfhaire.

Owen Roe O'Sullivan: Even the Sassenachs might die

The world laid low, and the wind blew-- like a dust--
Alexander, Caesar, and all their followers.
Tara is grass; and look how it stands with Troy.
And even the English-- maybe they might die.

        --Owen Roe O'Sullivan/ Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748-1784). tr. Thomas Kinsella, with Seán Ó Tuama, from An Duanáire: Poems of the Dispossessed.

From Sedulia: Owen Roe lived at the worst time in history for an Irish poet, when the Penal Laws were killing the ancient way of life and when Catholics had no legal way to make a professional living. He was a brilliant, red-haired, hard-living brawler, called "Owen of the Sweet Mouth" (Eoghan an Bhéil Bhinn) and in Munster I have myself still met Irish speakers who passed down the folk memory of his great charm.

Do threascair an saol is shéid an ghaoth mar smál
Alastrann, Caesar, 's an méid sin a bhí 'na bpáirt;
tá an Teamhair 'na féar, is féach an Traoi mar tá,
is na Sasanaigh féin do b'fhéidir go bhfaighidís bás!

Tolkien casts the devil out of a tape recorder

[Tolkien before Lord of the Rings was published; his friend George Sayer comes to visit.]

He had now nothing to look forward to except a life of broken health, making do on an inadequate pension. He was so miserable and so little interested in anything except his own troubles that we were seriously worried. What could we do to alleviate his depression?....Then I had an idea. I would take the risk of introducing him to a new machine that I had in the house....It was a large black box, a Ferrograph, an early-model tape recorder. To confront him with it was a risk because he had made it clear that he disliked all machinery. He might curse it and curse me with it, but there was a chance that he would be interested in recording on it, in hearing his own voice.

He was certainly interested. First he recorded the Lord's Prayer in Gothic to cast out the devil that was sure to be in it since it was a machine. This was not just whimsy. All of life for him was part of a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil, God and the devil. I played it back to him. He was surprised and very pleased. He sounded much better than he expected...The more he recorded, the more his confidence grew....I suggested he should read one or two or the best prose passages from The Lord of the Rings... He listened carefully and, I thought, nervously, to the play-back. "You know," he said, "they are all wrong. The publishers are wrong, and I am wrong to have lost faith in my own work. I am sure this is good, really good."

    --J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), described in "Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien" by his friend George Sayer. From Tolkien: A Celebration (1999), ed. by Joseph Pearce.

William Blake: Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

--William Blake (1757-1827) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Verdun: The first unknown soldier 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 bookThe Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War, Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 2006

Edward Gibbon: The Romans now preferred bread to liberty

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

From The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 29 (1776-88), by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

F.E. Smith in contempt of court

Judge: "Are you trying to show contempt for this court, Mr Smith?"   

F. E. Smith  : "No, My Lord. I am attempting to conceal it."

Egil the Viking curses the king

When they got to Herle, Egil and his men wasted no time but ran fully armed up to the farmstead. When Thorir and his household saw this, everyone of them who could shift for themselves, men and women alike, ran for their lives from the farm. Egil and his men looted everything they could get their hands on, then went back to their ship, and they didn't have long to wait before a good wind began to blow from the mainland. They prepared to sail, but when they were ready to set out Egil went ashore onto the island, picked up a branch of hazel and went to a certain cliff that faced the mainland. Then he took a horse head, set it up on a pole and spoke these formal words: "Here I set up a pole of insult against King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild" --then, turning the horse head toward the mainland-- "and I direct this insult against the guardian spirits of this land, so that every one of them shall go astray, neither to figure nor find their dwelling places until they have driven King Eirik and Queen Gunnhild from this country."

Next he jammed the pole into a cleft in the rock and left it standing there with the horse head facing the mainland, and cut runes on the pole declaiming the words of his formal speech. After that he went aboard, and they hoisted sail and made for the open sea.

        --From ch. 57,  Egil's Saga, written ca 1230 by Snorri Sturluson (1158-1241) of Iceland about Egil Skallagrimsson (910-990), translated  by Hermann Pálsson (1921-2002) and Paul Edwards

Lisa Kudrow: Sex, ultimately making another human being

We treat sex so casually and use it for everything but what it is-- which is ultimately making another human being with thoughts and feelings and rights who will grow up to be an adult.

        --Lisa Kudrow (1963-) who played Phoebe on the television show "Friends," in an interview in the Guardian, 7 April 2006

Karen Swenson: What woman has a country?

What woman has a country? Always she's
the alien in a male nation, papers
disheveled, visa date blurred,  her strategies
for sanctuary require that she barter
self for place within the borders or else, misfit,
illegal, grow lean upon her loneliness,
a susurrus of shadow at the limits.
Where has she journeyed from, she dispossessed
of all hands hold, companioned only by
the fair wind of memory? --in desert quiet
a windmill's piston creaks to prophecy
the small cry of water in the dust, or the duet
of a raven echoing its martinal [or matinal?]
voice and shadow on river, on canyon wall.

        --Karen Swenson

My mother liked this poem and sent it to me.