Last week I posted about my introduction to Baudelaire and shared a few excerpts from Twenty Prose Poems. I’ve been reading Les fleur du mal; my edition 1963 edition was translated in the ’30s by George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay with an introduction written by the latter.

After praising the translation in which she played a part, Millay, a poet herself, explains in detail various poetic forms. In particular the differences between traditional French poetry, which tends to be written in alexandrines, and English poetry, which uses a variety of forms (iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter, etc.) and notes the challenges she faced in translating poetry from French into English.

She also makes the following comment:

It is impossible to make a good translation of a poet of whom one disapproves. To excuse him or to condemn him is, for the translator, equally impertinent and equally fatal. Them poem is the thing. Is it interesting? – is it beautiful? – is it sublime? Then it was written by nobody. It exists by itself. The reader of poetry who has never had the brain-dizzying experience of being seduced into stupefied, into incredulous, into dismayed, into amused, into delighted, into wild unqualified enthusiasm for a poem written by his bitterest personal enemy, or by the person whom he has for years considered to be the Most Sickening Poet on the Face of the Earth, has never known one of the few authentic paradisiacal vertigoes of life.

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I’ve only recently started reading Baudelaire; I finished Twenty Prose Poems yesterday. Despite taking French from kindergarten through to OAC, it’s hardly surprising that the few trips I’ve taken to Quebec to exercise the tongue have not been sufficient to maintain bilingualism: I found the French quite challenging.

It’s strange, after so many years absent from the language, to see how easy it was to pick up again in some respects, but also quite different and difficult. I’m no longer sure if this is due to the differences between québécois and Parisian French, or because they were written before Canada was even a country and the language is antiquated, or, far more likely, c’est parce que mon français est terrible.

Fortunately, the City Lights edition I have was translated into English by Michael Hamburger, and, after struggling through the French, immediately following I was better able to appreciate the grace of Hamburger’s translation, and better understand the text.

Multitude, solitude: terms that, to the active and fruitful poet, are synonymous and interchangeable. A Man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a busy crowd.

from “Crowds” (“Les foules“)

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I heard Jordan Peterson speak at the Royal Ontario Museum a few months ago; he was awkward, but very knowledgeable. I can’t recall the topic, but when it was mentioned he wrote a book on the psychology of myths in religion, I took note. That book was Maps of Meaning, which I’ve recently begun reading. It’s fascinating, and deeply insightful: expect further commentary.

In the preface Peterson outlines his background. He was raised Christian, attended church, and left while young (“twelve or so”) due to a minister’s inability to reconcile modern truths with archaic beliefs. (“Religion was for the ignorant, weak and superstitious. I stopped attending church and joined the modern world.”) Typical story.

As a young adult he joined a socialist party, convinced “[e]conomic injustice was the root of all evil”. Secular dreams replaced religious, political utopia exchanged for spiritual paradise. Familiar territory.

He left the town he grew up in, attended an out of town college, and got involved with university politics, retaining his left wing stance. He writes:

“The board was composed of politically and ideological conservative people: lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. They were all well (or at least practically) educated, pragmatic, confident, outspoken; they had all accomplished something worthwhile and difficult. I could not help but admire them even though I did not share their political stance. I found the fact of my admiration unsettling.”

In contrast, the socialist leaders he wanted to look up to did not inspire respect. He found them to be ineffective complainers. He explains that “[t]hey had no career, frequently, and no family, no completed education – nothing but ideology. They were peevish, irritable, and little, in every sense of the word.”) He found he did not admire those who believed Continue reading »

Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, first published in 1986, was written to counter arguments made in favour of creationism by the eighteenth century theology William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1902.

Paley is perhaps best remembered today for his watchmaker analogy, intended as an argument in favour of the existence of an intelligent designer, or god. This was first seriously challenged by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (the consequence of, or process by which “favourable” traits become prevalent and “unfavourable” traits become rarer), made well known in his Origin of the Species first published in 1859. Dawkins further decimates Paley’s theory, arguing instead for a “blind” watchmaker, as highly complex systems can be produced by a series of small, cumulative – yet naturally selected – steps, rather than relying on a supernatural designer.

If you walk up and down a pebbly beach, you will notice that the pebbles are not arranged at random. The smaller pebbles typically tend to be found in segregated zones running along the length of the beach, the larger ones in different zones or stripes. The pebbles have been sorted, arranged, selected. A tribe living near the shore might wonder at this evidence of sorting or arrangement in the world, and might develop a myth to account for it, perhaps attributing it to a Great Spirit in the sky with a tidy mind and a sense of order. We might give a superior smile at such a superstitious notion, and explain that the arranging was really done by the blind forces of physics, in this case the action of the waves. The waves have no purposes and no intentions, no tidy mind, no mind at all. They just energetically throw pebbles around, and big pebbles and small pebbles respond differently to this treatment so they end up at different levels of the beach. A small amount of order has come out of disorder, and no mind planned it.

Dawkins explains that, of course Continue reading »

We all know women have made great strides toward gender equality in the past hundred years, yet it seems men have barely inched along.

Men continue to be abused in pop culture, and indeed, the male image may be subject to further degradation and oppression now than at any point in the last hundred years. How does this affect men’s psyches and general self-perception? Continue reading »