Just back from feeding the sheep -
Mr Tup on the 'Big Day'
and Mr Tup is looking in fine form. He is a bit grey for a Hebridean but apparently that is allowed when he is more than about 3 years old.
We have done the present thing and got a heap of culture to munch our way through – Sharon has 7hrs and 51 minutes of Jacques Brel footage on DVD thanks to the French version of Amazon (couldn’t find it in the UK). I have a new Ted Hughes CD with some of the short stories on it, plus a copy of Alasdair Reid’s Selected Poetry and Translations – where, again, the introduction by Douglas Dunn has proved fascinating in its consideration of translated poetry ‘… where poetic translation becomes interesting and aesthetically challenging; it becomes as creative as writing an original poem.’ Which is the upside, I suppose, of the queasy, ‘whose voice is this?’, feeling I always get when reading anything in translation, other than maybe physics. I find just the same questions even with poetry in English, if the work comes from before about 1900, give or take. How much am I spinning into Henryson and Dunbar when I ‘translate’ their poetry into the inside of my head. Everything hinges at least as much on a historical set of values, now maybe unrecoverable, as it does on the precise meaning of words over time.
Still, none of those problems are remotely as intractable as trying to understand what was in the heads of the people who screen 3 simultaneous ‘how to cook the greatest Christmas dinner’ programmes at the time when people are busy cooking Christmas dinner. Some things will always be a mystery.
David
