Os Lusiadas

The other day I finished Duolingo's Portuguese "language tree" course.  I felt rather disappointed:  I was hoping it would go on longer.  So what do I do now?  (Duolingo doesn't have a higher-level course.) I found a blog where someone suggested Readlang and Memrise.  I got into Readlang, and read a Portuguese version of Aesop's "The Fox and the Grapes." The problem with that site is that it needs an App made for my Chrome browser, where my ebook Googleplay app hasn't been working. (Actually, it hasn't been working on my regular Firefox browser either.)

Out of curiosity I found Os Lusiadas on the Gutenberg website.  That's Portugal's national epic, written in the 16th century by the one-eyed poet Luis Vaz de Camoes. (There's a bust of him in the Portuguese neighborhood on College Street.) The language wasn't as tough as I feared, considering that this was the age of Shakespeare.  I've even started doing my own translation of it!

The Lusiades is written in iambic pentameter, with each stanza using an ABABABCC rhyming scheme.  I've managed to use a similar scheme, except that I also use ABBAABCC and BAABABCC and such.  Lucky for me the Romance languages tend to be more verbose than English, so you can often say the same thing in English with fewer syllables.  It's easier to pad out a line to fit the same length than to cut it down.

Here's my translation of the first stanzas:

1

I sing of arms, I sing of barons outstanding

Who from Lusitania's western shore

Set out on oceans never sailed before,

Yet beyond Taprobana sailing, landing, [Taprobana: ancient name for Sri Lanka]

Perils grave and many a war withstanding,

Beyond mankind's familar strength to endure,

Among those faraway lands to erect

The New Kingdom so sublime, and protect;

2

And also of the memories sacred, glorious,

Of those successive dauntless sovereigns spreading

The Faith, the Empire, in desperate war victorious,

Africa and Asia's vicious lands left bleeding;

And of those others with their work so valorous

Winning immortality, not conceding;

My song shall spread away through every part,

Should I be blessed now with the skill and art.

3

No longer do the wise Greek and the Trojan

Sail great voyages on the threatening seas;

No more do Alexander and great Trajan

Reap glory from their armies' victories;

I sing of Lusitania on the ocean

Whom even Neptune, even Mars obeys;

The song of the ancient Muse at last ceases

When a new, higher valor in my breast rises.

4

And you, my Tagides, you who created [Tagides:  classical nymph-muses]

In me a new and blazing inspiration,

Your joyful river of odes and declamation

Ever in my humble verse celebrated,

Give me now a high sound, sublimated,

A grandiloquent, flowing style of creation,

Because great Phoebus decrees that your waters [Phoebus:  classical sun god]

Shall be unmatched in Hippocrene's quarters. [Hippocrene:  spring on Mt. Helicon sacred to the Muses]

5

Give me a fury grand and sonorous,

No tones of rustic oats and rude fruit's seeds,

But a tuba singing and bellicose,

Sparking hearts with the sound of daring deeds;

Give me a song that's worthy of your valorous

People, that in honoring Mars succeeds;

Which spreads and sings all through the universe,

If words sublime enough can be fitted to verse.

Cold weather

"'I don't think Jerry steals horses,' Pa said.  But Laura thought he said it as if he hoped that saying it would make it so"--By the Shores of Silver Lake (sounds like some American liberals today!)

 

It's finally getting colder.  I brought out my warm autumn jacket and scarf on the weekend and my furry winter cap the other day.  Sunday it was warmer so I managed to get the last potatoes from the garden. (I got a few more beans, but they probably weren't good enough for eating.)

Friday night I saw The Birth of a Nation at the Carlton. (As I mentioned before, I tried to make it a History Book Club event, but nobody else was interested.) Frankly, it was pretty conventional:  William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner may be "appropriation," but it was far more original and imaginative.  At one point they even had the flashback montage cliche--of course, Cabaret had that too.

Today I've started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake (for the third time) History Book Club.  It's one of my favorite Little House books, and I've already read about half of it!  It's the one where they move to Dakota Territory where Pa has a clerking job in a railroad under construction, then spend a winter in isolation and get a homestead claim near a place where they're about to build a new town.  I recall that there's a Silver Lake near my hometown of Sackville, N.B. 

At opera rehearsal tonight Beatrice came up with an exercise where we sang scales while extending our arms out and kicking our left and right legs in alternation!

On Duolingo I've been learning Portuguese business words ("loja" means shop), and just started learning political words.  Portuguese has a subjunctive mood in the future and pluperfect tenses, which I haven't seen in other languages.  I hope they'll soon be teaching nautical words, considering Portugal's illustrious seafaring history. 

 

I just learned on Youtube that the treaty of friendship between Portugal and England goes back to the 14th century!  Something else I've found on Youtube is a channel about dating different nationalities.  Seems that if you date a German girl she'll be brutally honest ("Don't you think it's time you got a haircut?") while a Mexican girl will expect you to walk with her on the outside of the sidewalk.  I don't know how true such generalizations are, but it's fun to watch.

I put a hold on a couple of books of Roald Dahl stories at the library, but the holds expired and I got fined two dollars.  They tried to phone me, but I hadn't updated my phone number! (I wish they'd email you too.)

Acting class

"You're about as fatale as an after-dinner mint!"--Cabaret

 

I'm now reading Bill Bryson's short biography Shakespeare:  The World as Stage (for the second time) for the History Discussion Group.  It's one in a series of Eminent Lives biographies, which could be convenient as background for future events in this Meetup.  Seems that in Elizabethan theatres it was customary to follow up a play by dancing a jig, even after tragedies!

 

Tuesday when I went to Alexiy's singing lesson the transit was against me!  First I just missed the St. Clair streetcar and had to wait twenty minutes for the next.  Then the Yonge subway line was moving slowly.  Then at Richmond Hill Centre I had to wait over fifteen minutes for the High Tech Drive bus.  When I finally got to Alexiy's house I was over forty minutes late, and got him to postpone our lesson till next week so he'd have enough time for a full one.   At least my York Region transit ticket was good for two hours, so I didn't have to buy a return ticket.

 

Half of Tuesday's opera rehearsal was an acting session, for which we divided into three groups.  Each group pretended to play a sport, and mine did baseball. (I was either shortstop or third base.) Then each group formed dioramas displaying given emotions.  We also did improvised dances, and did emotions with (non-verbal) sounds alone, then facial expressions alone, then body movements alone, then all three at once.  Those sessions are always fun.

It was really warm on Tuesday, then got cooler again the next day.  These temperature swings give me headaches!

 

Last night the Political Meetup met to watch the last U.S. Presidential debate on a Scallywag's screen.  I came just to hang with the others and didn't stay for the debate itself.  I was talking a lot to Carron, who resembles Cecilia Bartoli!

 

Tonight the History Discussion Group showed Bob Fosse's Cabaret. (I scheduled an event for next week where we'd go to the movies and see Birth of a Nation, but nobody was interested.) I'd seen it quite a few times, but it's always worth seeing again.  It's a terrific production, and the scene where the young Nazi sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is jaw-dropping!  I want to read Good-Bye to Berlin someday! (But the two flashback montages near the end are definitely a cliche.)

 

I brought in some more potatoes and all the carrots from the garden the other day.  There are still some spuds and one head of cauliflower left.

The other day I was learning scientific Portuguese on Duolingo.  But scientific words are particularly easy because they tend to come from Latin and Greek in both Portuguese and English!

A wedding

"Those people who were previously in the habit of complaining about the ever-increasing traffic problems, pedestrians who, at first sight, appeared not to know where they were going because the cars, stationary or moving, were constantly impeding their progress, drivers who having gone around the block countless times before finally finding a place to park their car, became pedestrians and started protesting for the same reasons, after having first voiced their own complaints, all of them must now be content, except for the obvious fact that, since there was no one left who dared to drive a vehicle, not even to get from A to B, the cars, trucks, motorbikes, even the bicycles, were scattered chaotically throughout the entire city, abandoned wherever fear had gained the upper hand over any sense of property, as evidenced by the grotesque sight of a tow-away vehicle with a car suspended from the front axle, probably the first man to turn blind had been the truck driver"--Jose Saramago, Blindness

 

I'm in a good mood just now.  I've been getting several things done the past few days. (I'm in a good mood whenever I have much to write about here.)

On Thursday I visited Dr. Hassan and in the evening went on Betty-Anne's art walk.  We were at the premiere of an exhibition of Joseph Connelly paintings of abstracts and flowers. (I liked the flowers painting with trees and clouds in the background.) We even got to talk to Connelly himself!

Friday I got a filling at the dentist.  I was scheduled for the afternoon, but there were a couple of morning cancellations and Dr. Hrabalova wanted to end early, so I agreed to do it in the morning.  The sooner started, the sooner finished!

Saturday afternoon I went to the Play Read-Through Meetup and we did Arthur Miller's great play The Crucible.  I had to leave early because of the next event, but I'm going to find the text in the library and read the last act I missed, along with some prologue stuff we had to skip over.

Then I went to John Snow's wedding at City Hall to his longtime companion Rene. (I've hardly ever been to straight weddings even!) I  gave them the coffee table book 100 Years of American Comics as a wedding present, as I happened to have two copies of it!  Mother once told me she didn't care for weddings.

 

Afterward we had dinner at the Hot House, where I ordered the salmon fillet.  I was sitting next to Gaby, whom I hadn't seen for months, and we got to talk a lot (by my standards anyway).  I might have ordered tiramisu for dessert, but I had a bit of a headache and wanted to finish up.

Someone else I hadn't seen for months was Bev, and last week I finally got around to emailing her.  I mentioned my next Reading Out Loud Meetup event, and she was interested enough to come! (She brought a Halloween lamp.)

That event was today, and titled "Skin Crawlers":  scary stories for Halloween.  Twelve people showed up, one of our best turnouts ever!  A lot of people said they enjoyed it.  I read the Scottish ballads "The Twa Corbies" and "The Cruel Sister," originally collected by Walter Scott, and C.S. Forester's "The Turn of the Tide." (The latter was from Murder, Short and Sweet, an anthology of murder stories that I found in the library.) I also gave Malcolm and Bev two more items to read:  Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter," from the same collection, and Robert Southey's poem "Bishop Hatto." Bev says she'll be coming again.

In addition, I finally finished the disaster issue of Lapham's Quarterly, where I read the Saramago quote.  And I finally passed Level 254 of Candy Crush Saga, which was a real bearcat! (My friend Blanche has been stuck there.)

In Duolingo today I was learning Portuguese medical words!

Free samples

Sunday night the Google Player problem righted itself.  It must have helped that I upgraded the Mac operating system to the new Sierra and moved to the Foxfire browser.  I got some worm in the Safari browser so that whenever I reopened the window it took me to some page I didn't want.

I've been reading that book about short-lived TV series.  After the first season in 1948, I went to the 1978 end and started working backward.  It only goes into detail about a minority of them, and not always the most interesting ones. (With ebooks you don't get the luxury of flipping through them to get an overview.)

One interesting thing about ebooks is that they'll give you the first six pages free as a sample.  Do you remember when I talked about those French comics featuring a little bear called Petzi who sailed over the world with his friends, which was based on a Danish comic about Rasmus Klump?  I've been looking at the start of some Rasmus Klump adventures in their original Danish, and using Google Translate on the captions.  The catch is that I don't know how to enter the "A" with a circle on top or the "O" with a slash.  I've also been looking at some French comics. (None of the Spanish Mortadelo y Filemon comics, alas.)

Tonight I went to the Political Discussion Meetup, which they've now moved to Scallywag's.  I mentioned that after the Clinton-Trump debate someone online asked "Who won the debate?" and I posted, "I won, because I didn't watch it"!  On Salon and The Huffington Post I've been writing, in effect, "Trump's going to lose anyway so go ahead and vote for Jill Stein!"

I've been having some more unusual dreams.  In one I was on a luxury ship with my father (we'd got booked at the last minute) and following him down a long escalator a short distance behind, but when I got to the bottom I'd lost him and couldn't figure out which of the two possible ways he'd gone.  In another we had a house in Amherst, N.S., near my hometown of Sackville, N.B.--we never had a house there--and I was in the basement and found a lot of interesting books there, including some Classics Illustrated comics.  And I was also dreaming about that cheesy scene at the start of Dirty Harry where Clint Eastwood challenges a punk to guess whether or not his Magnum is out of bullets...

On Duolingo I've just been learning how to say "I've been doing" in Portuguese.  In that language you say it as "I've done" instead! (In French I think you say it as "I do"...)

The other day we ate scalloped potatoes, cauliflower and carrots out of our garden.

The world of Ebooks

The other night I weakened and bought an Ebook online.  I feel a certain loyalty to paper books, but there are some books you can only get in this format!  The book I bought was Short-Lived TV Series 1948-1979. (Why yes, I am interested in reading about shows like Cool Million and Anna and the King.) But when I tried to read it on the Safari browser, I got nothing but blank pages!  So I downloaded the Chrome browser and tried to read it on that.  But now I got a message that I couldn't open it and had to go into the browser's settings and specifically enable cookies on the website play.googleusercontent.com .  So I did exactly what I was supposed to, but I still had the same problem!  I had to phone brother Donald and ask him to come over once more and fix the problem.

Today I started digging up the russet potatoes in the garden.  The first row was a whole bowlful, including one big enough for baking.  I also brought in a really big head of cauliflower.  The carrots are looking good.

On Duolingo I've been learning the past tense and the imperative mood in Portuguese.  I've been doing about a dozen lessons a day. (There's a tongue-in-cheek clip on Youtube suggesting that Duolingo is a tool of the Devil, and Moira got a big laugh from it.)

My history discussion group met on Wednesday night and we discussed Ten Lost Years.  We got half a dozen people. (Our discussions tend to go off on tangents, but we have a good time.) I suggested some new year subjects to Jane, and she said that she's always skeptical about my ideas but gets won over when I explain them!  A few days ago I posted Cabaret, Anne of the Thousand Days and Tom Jones as movie events for the rest of the year, and I just posted the subjects for the first three months of 2017:  the 1950s, the United States and Ireland.  The background books will be John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Don't Know Much About History and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.  For movie events the same months, I'm thinking of Peyton Place, The Crucible (the version with Daniel Day-Lewis) and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.  I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of the game, but I do enjoy planning this stuff!

Now that I've finished Ten Lost Years and the Frost poems, I'm back to reading the Lapham's Quarterly about disasters.

Deadlines met

"My speech will be like the old woman's dance, short and sweet"--Young Mr. Lincoln

Well, I finished the Frost collection on Saturday night, though I skipped his two masque plays. (I finished Ten Lost Years yesterday, with three days to spare.) Yesterday afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed Frost, and we ended up reciting a lot of his poems, which was something new.  A newbie called Karen is really enthusiastic about the group.  Frost with his sensibility reminds me of my mother.

Last week I saw a documentary at the Bloor about the Barbican estate in London.  The Museum of London is located near there, but didn't get mentioned.  I was thinking that it's time for me to visit London, probably in May.

Friday the History Discussion Group screened John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, which I've seen quite a few times.  It's Henry Fonda's first great role!

Yesterday on Youtube there was a video about this puzzle they give to engineering applicants:  an alien arrives on earth, and each day the aliens on earth have a 1/4 chance that you'll die, a 1/4 chance that you won't die or reproduce, a 1/4 chance that you'll reproduce one alien, and a 1/4 chance that you'll reproduce two.  What are the odds that the aliens will die out on earth?  I guessed 40%, which wasn't so far off from the right answer, which is the square root of two minus one, or about 41.4%.

The puzzle intrigued me so much that I did some more figuring.  The chance that they'll die out in the first two days is 85/256, just under 1/3.  The chance that they won't increase is 112/256, or 43.75%.  The chance that they'll go from one to either two or three will be 76/256, or close to 30%, so the chance of a bigger increase will be the remainder, or something over 26%.  And the chance of dying out in three days is something under 37%.

In the long run, once the alien population gets critical mass the trend will become more predictable.  They'll increase about 50% every day, which virtually guarantees doubling after two days, tripling after three days and quintupling after four days.  I love numbers!