Sedulia's Quotations

Peter France: The translator is a raider, bringing home booty

...Peter France... spoke of how a translation can become a source of insight, but also pointed out that translation from a minority into a majority language can be seen as a political act: one of aggression, of colonisation, in which 'the translator is a raider, bringing home booty which is then made available like tea or sugar to consumers in the dominant cultures'.

--From the Introduction to An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic verse, ed. Ronald Black (pub. 1999), p. lxv

Illustration from The Book of Discoverers and Explorers (pub. 1900), by Edward R. Shaw

Rose Kennedy goes to Paris

The Kennedy family in the 1930s 

Joe [Kennedy Sr.] worked long hours and was often away all night. Rose never asked where he had been, any more than her mother had asked Honey Fitz. But at some point in 1920 she moved back to her parents' house for several weeks. After attending a religious retreat, she returned to Beals Street determined to fulfil her wifely and maternal duties. In 1921, they found a bigger house in the same neighborhood with a private bedroom for Rose. Soon they began taking separate vacations. Years later, when their granddaughter Caroline asked how they handled their differences, Rose explained: 'I would just say "Yes, dear," and then I'd go to Paris.'

  --Jackson Lears in a review in the London Review of Books, 7 November 2013

Thomas Carlyle calls the French excitable

The French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the perilous evil, which belongs to that. Rebellion, explosion, of unknown extent is to be calculated on.

  --Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in The French Revolution: A History (1837), ch. 1.2.VIII

Jerome K Jerome on the difference between German and British children (1900)

In the German parks there are special seats labelled, 'Only for grown-ups' ('Nur für Erwachsene'), and the German small boy, anxious to sit down and reading that notice, passes by, and hunts for a seat on which children are permitted to rest; and there he seats himself, careful not to touch the woodwork with his muddy boots. Imagine a seat in Regent's or Saint James's Park labelled 'Only for grown-ups'! Every child for five miles round would be trying to get on that seat, and hauling other children off who were on. As for any 'grown-up', he would never be able to get within half a mile of that seat for the crowd. The German small boy, who has accidentally sat down on such without noticing, rises with a start when his error is pointed out to him, and goes away with downcast head, blushing to the roots of his hair with shame and regret.

  --Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) in Three Men on the Bummel (published 1900)

Su Shi hopes his son is stupid

Families, when a child is born, want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence
having wrecked my whole life,
only hope the baby will prove
ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
by becoming a cabinet minister.

   --Chinese poet 蘇軾 Su Shi (1037-1101), also known as Su Dongpo, on the birth of his son. Translation by Arthur Waley (1889-1966).

人皆生子望聰明
我被聰明誤一 生
但原吾兒魯且愚
無災無難到公卿。

Sooner or later...

With thanks to the American Library in Paris's Facebook page.

Jules Renard on literary criticism

Analyze a book! What would you say about a guest who, after eating a ripe peach, took the morsels out of his mouth to look at them?

       --French writer Jules Renard (1864-1910) in his diary, 15 March 1892

Analyser un livre! Que dirait-on d'un convive qui, mangeant une pêche mûre, en retirerait les morceaux de sa bouche pour voir?

Mary Lou Jepsen on hormone levels of a young man: I was angry all the time

I was angry all the time. I thought about sex all the time. I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world. It gave me a new appreciation for men.

  --Engineer Mary Lou Jepsen, in 2013, in a TED talk. She had had a brain operation and needed hormone therapy, and was experimenting with hormone levels "typical of a man in his early 20s."

Garry Wills: the South avenges itself

American politics is the South's revenge for the Civil War.

  --Garry Wills, in 1975, quoted by Sam Tanenhaus in "Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people", in the New Republic, February 2013.

The illustration is from "The Cavalry Fight at Brandy Station" [Virginia] in Three Years in the Federal Cavalry (1870), by Willard Glazier.

Bill Gates has fun

I love playing tennis. I am an avid bridge player (a card game if you have not heard of it - it was more popular in the past!). I like to tour interesting things with my kids like power plants, garbage dumps, the Large Hadron Collider, Antarctica, missile Silos (Arizona)....

  --Bill Gates on Reddit, answering questions today. Someone asked him what he does for fun.