The Old Philosopher

The Old Philosopher

Sixty-seven years now I've banged my hard-thinking brains

  'round the world. So, still a kid in the pink?

Meh, maybe. In truth there were those first twenty-five years

  when I did not even bother to think.

 

-Reese Warner (after Xenophanes)

 

This poem of mine came out at the webzine The Asses of Parnassus recently. It's an adaptation (not really a translation) of a short poem by the philosopher Xenophanes, who was born in Asia Minor (the west coast of Turkey) and died in Syracuse. His years are approximately 570 - 478 B.C. The poem was preserved as evidence that Xenophanes lived to be at least 92 years old.

 

The Greek original:

ἤδη δ᾽ἐπτα τ´ἔασι και ἐξήκοντ᾽ενιαυτοί
  βληστρίζοντες ἐμὴν φροντίδ᾽άν Ὲλλάδα γῆν
έκ γενετῆς δὲ τότ᾽ἦσαν έείκοσι πέντε τε πρὸς τοῖς
  εἴπερ ἐγω περὶ τῶνδε οἶδα λέγειν έτυμως.

The fun word in this is blastrizontes (the word that begins with a B at the beginning of the second line). It's an unusual word and  means something like to toss and turn, and is usually used of someone suffering from a fever. I didn't exactly preserve that metaphor.

 

The poem shows up in Diogenes Laertius' brief biography of Xenophanes in The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Here's Pamela Mensch's more literal translation:

 

Seven and sixty years have by now been

  Buffeting my thought up and down the land of Greece;

And since my birth there have been twenty-five more,

  If I may speak truly about these matters.

 

-Xenophanes (tr. Pamela Mensch)

 

Not much is actually known about his philosophy.

"When Empedocles said to him that the wise man remained undiscovered, he replied, 'As one might expect, since it takes one to find one.'"

I don't know that Gumby is actually an eminent philosopher, but still he managed to photobomb my picture.

The old philosopher shown above is from Raphael's 'School of Athens' in the Vatican, reproduced on the cover of my copy of Diogenes Laertius. He's usually identified with Carneades, and not Xenophanes

Hengist and Horsa

Hengist and Horsa

Hengist was coarser than Horsa

And Horsa was awfully coarse.

Horsa drank whiskey,

Told tales that were risqué,

But Hengist was in a divorce.

 

Horsa grew coarser and coarser,

But Hengist was coarse all his life.

That reprobate Horsa

Drank tea from a saucer,

But Hengist ate peas with his knife.

 

-Desmond Carter

 

 

Search the Internet for Hengist and Horsa and you end up with some informative article about the possibly mythical German brothers who led an army of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to invade England in the 5th Century AD. They did what they could to bring us English. Geoffrey of Monmouth writes:

"About this time there landed in certain parts of Kent three vessels of the type we call longships. They were full of armed warriors and there were two brothers named Hengist and Horsa in command of them."

The brothers show up in Bede as well. 

But did I care about that? I did not! I was looking for Desmond Carter's inspired bit of nonsense about the brothers, and it was harder to find on the Internet than it should have been. Carter was a British lyricist who worked with composers such as George Gershwin and Ivor Novello. He also wrote the English lyrics to Gloomy Sunday, covered by Billie Holiday and Paul Robeson.

 

And why did this occur to me? Well, the Other Reader and I were out for lunch, and I ordered the fish and chips, with peas, which are in season for us, and there I was pushing peas on to my fork with my knife--not, quite!, eating peas with my knife--and while I couldn't remember the rest of the poem, I did manage, "But Hengist ate peas with his knife..."

 

Wanderer's Nightsong (#poem)

 

Wanderer's Night-song

O'er all the hilltops

Is quiet now,

In all the tree-tops

Hearest thou

Hardly a breath;

The birds are asleep in the trees:

Wait, soon like these,

Thou too shall rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

 

I just finished A. N. Wilson's recent biography of Goethe (pretty good!) and came across this poem. Goethe wrote the poem on the wall of a gamekeeper's hut in the mountains of Thuringia, Germany in 1776. He mentioned it in a letter, and friends copied it out and later published it without his approval. He never thought to include it in one of his own books, but now it's sometimes considered the most perfect lyric in German and was set to music by Schubert.

 

Six months before his death with his health failing, Goethe insisted he could still climb the mountain to where the hut was, and did, and read the poem he'd written there fifty years before.

 

Another version, by John Whaley, an English translator who died in 2005:

 

Over all of the hills

Peace comes anew,

The woodland stills

All through;

The birds make no sound on the bough,

Wait a while,

Soon now,

Peace comes to you.

 

-Goethe (tr. John Whaley)

 

And warum nicht? The German:

 

Wandrers Nachtlied

 

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur! Balde

Ruhest du auch.

 

-Goethe