2. By James K Baxter, a New Zealand poet. This is evidently the NZ equivalent of Li Bai's Saying Farewell to Meng Haoran:
High Country Weather'That poem I learned in school' changes by generations. The Canuck equivalent in my generation was probably High Flight, or possibly In Flanders Fields (the only rondeau I know of that doesn't feel contrived.) I wonder what it is now?
Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.
Upon the upland road,
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger
As for Li Bai, the perennial discussion:
Translating Li Bai's Yellow Crane Tower
Several translations of Li Bai's Yellow Crane Tower
3. Spot the Saint. Oh happy memories of Iconography 100, forty years and more ago.
In other matters, I'm now safely enrolled in Intermediate French at Central Tech, Wednesday evenings starting in January. Then got a catalogue from the uni's Continuing Ed dep't to check out the horrendously expensive online course in Theory of Translation, prerequisite to the Translating Japanese courses. Which I must take, naturally. But... but... they also have a course in Dutch, for half the Translation one! Oh how I would like to learn Dutch! I don't intend to work more than I have to next year, maybe 90 minutes a day, surely I could manage three courses?? This ignores the tendency of work to have crises, requiring all hands to the pump, and I can already see the next one shaping up. (Middle-aged staff have middle-aged bodies, and worse, aged-aged parents. Recipe for disaster.) Also perennial low-grade depression, now endemic to winter as well as summer, is sure to pull the I don' wanna trick on me, especially for an evening course. But, but... I would so like to learn Dutch.
