The first thing to consider in this relation of events is that everybody likes Katrina.
Today her student’s husband’s chauffeur drove her north to the city of the moon (Chia is Chibcha for moon), deposited here there for an interview, waited, and drove her back. She had a good interview at the school and will go back for some more practical evaluation—we are not sure if they really like her, yet (remember, they do or will eventually, it is a rule) or if they are doing it out of consideration for her student whose children attend said school (and are probably the only ones chauffeured, not bussed).
Today another person called eager for classes for her and her daughter with Katrina, and was dismayed to find out that Katrina has class scheduled by the first student for herself and daughter at the time the second mother-daughter possibility wanted a class today. Katrina has been very successfully helping the first’s daughter with her homework, even the father is impressed. So we have a person much in demand, you see.
And here is the thing: if the opportunity to be bussed north to the city of the moon five days a week to teach young ladies in the arts of English writing, reading and spelling works out, there is going to be a certain limit that will apply. I might have to come out of my semi-retired state to teach the students of Katrina, which with the latest addition might number exactly 7 (One begins gradually here; I have 16 presently, but 11 of them are in one chunk). I will probably have to try my hand at more domestic things, from time to time.
It isn’t the extra work I mind (I welcome it—I like to teach, though I might be writing instead). I can handle the two young boys: we can study Tolkien and Lewis and what have you. It is the mother-daughter pairs, that worry me.
You know, if this works out, and Katrina is traveling to the city of the moon, then we might have an opening for some person who is a native English speaker to come and be employed for a few months. We have the spare room.
In Spanish there is no exact equivalent for the English word weather. My student this morning was trying to tell me it is because in Spanish speaking regions they don’t really have seasons. I am not inclined to believe him, though he’s far more traveled than I. But he might be onto something if you think about the origins of our language and the weather of the British Isles.
Anyway, we are having classic rainy season weather. Cool to chilly evenings and mornings, clear mornings warming to midday summer (ay, que rico) and then the torrents of the afternoon. It rains in alarming quantities for an hour or two and clears again, so it can cool off for the night. I met a guy from Seattle and he says it is like Seattle, only here you get more sun.
I’ve grown to like it. I like the rain of course, but the midday summer is nice too. I’m becoming like a Bogotano in that I feel the slight changes in temperature more, I notice the chilly mornings and evenings like they do, and I think part of all that makes me enjoy the warm, cheerful sun though it is tropical and forthright.
Now, perhaps, I am prepared for the more tropical lowlands where the heat is parked, the rain abrupt, and the great brown rivers flow by deep and sluggish. Christmas is coming, the season of unemployment. We might have to employ ourselves in some traveling.
I’ve got a science fiction story. It started with a quotation from Rodo. As it neared its end, it took on something of the poem from W. H. Auden below, especially the intriguing last stanza. I think I’ve construed the last stanza with the help of Gibbon. You have to think about it, but that’s the point.
The Fall of Rome
by W. H. Auden
(for Cyril Connolly)
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
* * *
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, Vol. 1, Chapter IX: State Of Germany Until The Barbarians, Part I: The State Of Germany Till The Invasion Of The Barbarians In The Time Of The Emperor Decius.
Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer, the feelings, or the expressions, of an orator born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2. The reindeer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia: but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Caesar the reindeer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Lawrence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.
It is difficult to ascertain, and easy to exaggerate, the influence of the climate of ancient Germany over the minds and bodies of the natives. Many writers have supposed, and most have allowed, though, as it should seem, without any adequate proof, that the rigorous cold of the North was favorable to long life and generative vigor, that the women were more fruitful, and the human species more prolific, than in warmer or more temperate climates. We may assert, with greater confidence, that the keen air of Germany formed the large and masculine limbs of the natives, who were, in general, of a more lofty stature than the people of the South, gave them a kind of strength better adapted to violent exertions than to patient labor, and inspired them with constitutional bravery, which is the result of nerves and spirits. The severity of a winter campaign, that chilled the courage of the Roman troops, was scarcely felt by these hardy children of the North, who, in their turn, were unable to resist the summer heats, and dissolved away in languor and sickness under the beams of an Italian sun.
Bread of the world in mercy broken,
wine of the soul in mercy shed,
by whom the words of life were spoken,
and in whose death our sins are dead:
Look on the heart by sorrow broken,
look on the tears by sinners shed;
and be thy feast to us the token
that by thy grace our souls are fed.
Can sign up for and go to free concerts:
Estimad@ Joel Zartman.
Usted quedó inscrit@ con su acompañante Katrina Zartman CC E######, al concierto ORATORIO EL MESIAS DE HANDEL
Le recordamos que el lugar donde se llevará a cabo el evento será en el Auditorio Mario Laserna. Calle 19A No 1 – 96 Este.
Le agradecemos llegar con 1 hora de anticipación el lunes 23 de noviembre de 2009, POR FAVOR NO IMPRIMA ESTA INVITACIÓN YA QUE NO ES NECESARIA PARA EL INGRESO.
Because you get in by showing your Cedula.
In Bogota this morning, on a narrow, one way street downtown a taxi stopped to let a person out. The impatient traffic piled on behind and plied the horn. The driver counted his money and while putting the whole wad back into his shirt pocket, rolled his head and looked into the rear view mirror. On his features was a surly look, a truculent. He put his car in gear and then accelerated deliberately lethargically away.
In Bogota this morning a librarian of long tenure took an English test. The test was to spring her from elementary level English. With eight other students she listened to the listening part five or six times. Unlike them, she took four hours to think about the whole test: they just took two. “Ay teecher,” she said, and shook her head.
In Bogota this afternoon at an awkward, crowded crosswalk a shouting whistling waiter bore across the street a tray with lunch: styrofoam containers stacked on each other and covering the tray. “I’ll burn you! Watch out!” he said, and all but “I’m really clumsy! Beware of retards bearing soup!” The crowds parted before him grudgingly or not at all—as if they were cars and he an ambulance with sirens, lights and all.
In Bogota today the city shuffled about its business starting early, around five or so and swelling to fill the consecutive buses running back and forth and up and down. All of it a collection of individual instances: real, pathetic, interesting, banal. Things you would never know if I hadn’t told you. I read Borges on the way to work: Labyrinthine Borges, with his mad imagination of endless, pedantic details, his deft, incisive, thorough erudition. In his mind was a great deal of the tangled patterns of our human life.
on reading a gleeful article in Slate
Grant me, O Lord . . . for nothing earthly, temporal or mortal to long nor to wait.
—Lancelot Andrewes
I listened to Arvo Part
and thought of grass:
wet grass, long, lank and lying
by some way of childhood
with mingled shards of glass
reflecting the serene sky.
I listened to Palestrina
and I heard the sound
of medieval serenity:
the transcendental mass
rising from throbbing throats
already turned to dust.
A symbol arises in the world
like the chaff that the wind
whistles away. The turbulence
of frantic, empty decay
surrounds me in the sound
of a world that has no heart,
No core, no will, no love
to hear the attunement
of Christian ideals
rising in cathedral spaces,
blowing over fields of memory
after the rain has passed.
* * *
Civilization is a symbol
passing to leave monuments,
broken statues, graves
overgrown, and dust behind.
When our failing civilization
is passed and barbarity
has spent itself again
some wise men will study
what is left of it.
And upon these ideals,
that core of silence,
find a measure of repose.
* * *
At the heart of Western Civilization is a long, quiet serenity. Listen to Palestrina, Mozart, Brahms and Arvo Part. The Christian ideal is to seek no home in this world, and in seeking without, Western Civilization has found something settled and eternal at which it gestures within the stream of time. It can be seen by means of that most temporal of arts: music. Music touches on eternity because it must surrender itself to its medium, it must yield itself to time; and only through time is time conquered.
I was listening again to Spiegel Im Spiegel and Fur Alina. The former leaves me always with a sense of forlorn, wet grass and fresh wind: something mingled of loss and hope. I suppose it was a burst of light in 1978. I also think of the mirrors reflecting each other in the interior of an elegant café from the early part of the 20th Century—something melancholy in it, something of the true triumph of those who go in the house of mourning and yet have wisdom which is eternal and must prevail. In the midst of the disintegration of our spent civilization, it seems to me the music of Part offers a core of serenity in the circumstances. Not one that ignores them, but one that has learned the exact measure of indifference such things deserve.
I want to write like Borges. That guy knew what he was doing. I have to study him.
Today I worked on some poetry. I think I’m getting better, so I’m pleased.
Today I went to the bank and stood in a long line to pay the rent. The lady behind me complained about it a lot. It took the person getting ready to open another service desk in the bank some 20 minutes. Said person got the lady behind me, but I didn’t stay to listen to the harangue.
Today I went downtown early. It was grim down there, threatening rain, dark and I was affected. I think it was the American in the bus who insisted on standing: he stood out. Suddenly it seemed to me that if I were to write my own Divine Comedy, I’d not have to exercise a lot of imagination. The American seemed like some kind of warden of the damned.
Today I went to the Colombo-Americano an hour before I had to be at school to teach. I read some Donne and some commentary. I picked up The Way of All Flesh and read an introduction that made me want to read the novel. Was glum because I still can’t afford to join the library.
Today I finished that cretin Chretien’s unfinished work. Why did he have the effrontery to die before finishing the work? I don’t believe the suggested endings—none of them.
Today I went to school to teach and they want me to get a background check at DAS. I need a background check to enter GSK (Glaxo Smith Kline). I’m supposed to teach some really important person there, the manager for AIDS research in Colombia or something. Told the coordinator maybe he could get someone else. This coordinator is the guy who scheduled me to be two different places on Monday and ended up with me putting into his hands an extremely irate very important person from GSK. He was telling me today how he’d screwed up with Siemens so that security was not letting our teachers in. I don’t think he’ll be with the company long. I whined about them making me run around with the background check and not paying me for the lost time. Wanted to tell him I was from a developed country, not used to it; didn’t. He offered me a large, round chocolate something or other and I thanked him grimly.
Today I taught class. Have a student who should be two levels down . . . how to get rid of him? Learned a lot about how they print money and mint coins here in Colombia from said student.
Today I had the best hamburger I think Katrina has ever made. It was just what I needed. She’s making friends of extremely devout Catholics who are trying to help her get a job in an extremely Catholic school and to get her to meet their extremely Catholic priest. Today she skipped prayer meeting and instead made said hamburger and worked on her resume. Do Catholics have better food than protestants? Maybe it is the fact that it had mayonnaise and she knows that stuff will kill me. I think my wife has joined a secret Catholic order or something—she knows I’m a protestant.
Today I prepared a lesson over the intractable verbs of reporting. I know of no interesting way to deliver the explanations. The class it tomorrow at 7. Thanks to my brilliant coordinator, my schedule with the night class when the student is docile was changed. Said student loves mornings, having tried it. Now he wants morning classes all the time. This comes perfectly timed for me to miss a more lucrative 8 hour a week class at said time, since said student only takes 4 hours. Said brilliant coordinator is not for a moment suggesting any of this is his fault. Warned me about the opportunity I might miss if I don’t send said student back to his original, said time.
Bleh
November’s days are thirty:
November’s earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest things on ground are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or separately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best woods
Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.
But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth is silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud. in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly,
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky;
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.
—Edward Thomas
I am of the Germanic persuasion: the less human contact the better. I am not warm, I’m not gregarious, and I do not like to touch other human beings, or that they touch me.
But here it is all otherwise, and there’s the crowded busses.
They usually stand waiting to enter the bus right in-front of the doors unless unreasonably constrained by the Mayor’s employees to make a line off to the side. They often let people off the bus very grudgingly, and I have actually stood aside to let people on before getting off. This is partly due to the drivers who are impatient, who cause door mechanism to hiss at the passengers and the warning to sound to rush them on. But it is part of Bogota: they stand right in front of the elevator doors and stare at you as if to say, What, you’re getting out?
This used to make me angry. I would push through them, sometimes roughly. It was really stupid of them to stand there and I’d stare at them and they’d look down. It is a problem that they do this, but it isn’t something a foreigner is going to change. Once I almost knocked a guy over and he stared at me in outrage. They’re outraged because they don’t think ahead about what is going to happen when the doors open and people come out. When it happens everybody readjusts, but the more shameless push through greedy for a seat or a good place. Or they are waiting for another bus like this guy was, and will stand as close to the door as they possibly can. I used to think it was outrageous they should expect people exiting to wriggle through the waiting mass.
Latin American’s aren’t the only one’s with uncomfortably close notions of personal space, but there is no doubt that Colombian’s have a more limited sense of personal space than I do. I’m fastidious and I hate being constantly unnecessarily touched, but to them it is nothing. The quality of life being what it is in Bogota, one is touched rather often, and especially on the crowded bus. I do everything I can to avoid human contact but a Latin American cannot be bothered: it doesn’t mean that much to them.
I deal with it by wondering what their consciousness of the world is, by attempting to perceive how exactly it is they don’t notice the lack of space, the brush on the sleeve, the touching of a backpack. One becomes more detached and then it is easier to ignore. And I deal with it by moving the way they do through crowded spaces.
It requires a more passive approach. Moving through a stagnant crowd means signaling your intentions and then waiting, like a quietist. You start moving toward the door and stop when your way is blocked. What happens is that they shift aside and you move, as it were, through a living organism. If you are slow and gentle you become part of a great, collective movement all directed at permitting you to get through. You pass with a new sense of human contact: the contact changes quality. It is perhaps like being born.
At least that is what I like to think when I get out of the crowded bus with the help of all the others I had to pass and rub against. I like to think that I am born again a Colombian. It is something alien to my way of proceeding, but now I like it because it requires its understanding, its mental mode of operation. And I think with this I’m closer to the consciousness they have of contact and personal space: there is some withinness to being among strangers they always perceive.
Curious, if it turns out to be true. They are very welcoming of strangers here, that is certain.
Terry Teachout with a list of his top 25 and blurbs with the why.
The saints of God! their conflict past,
And life’s long battle won at last,
No more they need the shield or sword,
They cast them down before their Lord:
O happy saints! forever blest,
At Jesus’ feet how safe your rest!
The saints of God! their wand’rings done,
No more their weary course they run,
No more they faint, no more they fall,
No foes oppress, no fears appall:
O happy saints! forever blest,
In that dear home how sweet your rest!
The saints of God! life’s voyage o’er,
Safe landed on that blissful shore,
No stormy tempests now they dread,
No roaring billows lift their head:
O happy saints! forever blest,
In that calm haven of your rest!
The saints of God their vigil keep,
While yet their mortal bodies sleep,
Till from the dust they too shall rise
And soar triumphant to the skies:
O happy saints! rejoice and sing:
He quickly comes, your Lord and King!
O God of saints! to Thee we cry;
O Savior! plead for us on high;
O Holy Ghost! our Guide and Friend,
Grant us Thy grace till life shall end;
That with all the saints our rest may be
In that bright paradise with Thee!
—William MacLagan
My moleskine notebook is coming to an end. Moleskine has no presence in this country other than to make an anniversary notebook for the cultural center downtown. So I have the option to renew my notebooking in a notebook with a red cover. I don’t mind the red cover and I like the colombianess of having one with the stamp of the Center for Economic Culture. But it is ruled, not full of squares. It is expensivish too: 30,000 COPs.
While looking in what is one of the biggest book stores I’ve seen here (the Center of Economic Culture which is part of the great Central Bank complex which nowadays pays the bill for my students) I noticed a nice little paperback anthology of T.S. Eliot: Spanish and English on facing pages.
So I resolved my dilemma. Got the Eliot, and have temporarily (perhaps permanently, we’ll see) decided the next notebook is going to be a 300 COP one with a picture of Machu Pichu on it. It has squares rather than lines, even if it does have margins.
Vamos pues, tu y yo,
Cuando la tarde contra el cielo se tiende
Como un anestesiado sobre una mesa.
Lo que pudo haber sido y fue
Dan a sólo un fin, que es siempre presente.
Here is a clever article by a linguist. It is about language death and considers whether it is good or not.
I’m all for it.
Calvinism is a complex system, but if it does not come with verities so clear and fundamental they can be uttered without reservations or caveats, then it is hard to say it has been clearly grasped. Considering some of the Calvinists I’ve met (I’m a Calvinist myself), I wonder if their desire for something deeper and richer has not led them into regions they are not prepared to handle as well as those regions deserve—and require. Scripture, when it addresses something, doesn’t say everything on that subject there is to say. Theology does because it is the nature of theology to do so, to be comprehensive. It seems there is some difficulty in determining what minimum can be said in preaching. Preaching is difficult because it aims at exposition and also aims to be doctrinal: it can result in a tangle.
One of the things this sense of confusion produces is the need felt always to say everything there is to say about everything: it is tedious to do so, cumbrous, and leads to endless discussions. I wonder sometimes if some don’t have the notion of the forlorn country singer whose refrain was “Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” They don’t often have the confidence to speak with boldness and clarity, and I doubt whether people can be effectively instructed by that sort of approach. You can’t move beyond the basics unless you can be clear and confident of them.
In this respect, the need here appears to me great. Compared with the USA the level of learning and order in the churches is low. The level of learning is low because even though they have a great deal of right information, it exists without a great deal of clarity. You have the sense they have spider webs of doctrine in their heads, confusions and tangles of right beliefs badly ordered. It is hard to operate without clarity. It is hard to understand the parts without an idea of the whole.
The solution is hinted at when we understand that doctrines have various levels of importance: this suggests that theology has an organized system. It has an organic system which is coherent, and it coheres by arranging doctrines according to a particular way. Knowing this helps us to select what is more important in what we are saying; knowing, for example, that at the heart of Christian theology is the gospel helps us to begin understanding the relationship of one doctrine to another. We realize that the most important relationship of any doctrine is its relationship to the gospel. Doctrines are interdependent, which is one of the reasons that theology tries to say everything, but their interdependence is not the most important thing about them: they are important because they are true, and they are interdependent because some truths are more necessary for some thing than others.
To select what is more important to what we are saying, or to stick to what is important in what Scripture is saying while bringing it home to hearers—taking into consideration their circumstances—requires that we move beyond the basics: that we assume them. But what if we can’t assume them?
The basics are things that can stand alone because their relationship to the whole is so obvious, and I sometimes wonder if Calvinists believe in basics. It may be we are confused about the whole, the form of theology. But I think the trouble is not that we don’t believe there are basics, but that we don’t understand how it works because we view doctrine as mere information. Without quality, without an affective weight to that information, it is hard to distinguish the importance between doctrines. Here they are very fond of the translated works of A.W. Pink. He has a book on the attributes of God I’ve tried to read. I don’t get very far because I’ve read A.W. Tozer on the attributes of God and the difference is clear. They fear A.W. Tozer because of his notions of free will in one chapter, but that, it seems to me, can be easily countered: the argument is bad. They fear Tozer because he has unreliable information and turn to Pink, but Pink is only information without any of the affective qualities that Tozer draws on so well. Tozer appeals to the imagination and causes you to admire, to desire, to long for, to feel the awe and reverence due the being he describes. His very title is much less factual and much more accurate: not The Attributes of God but The Knowledge of the Holy. More poetic, and with a sense of the form of theology, pointing clearly to end for which it exists.
It is part of the dilemma of these Calvinists I speak of that to say a work appeals to the imagination and is more poetic gives one’s argument no traction with them. Insensible to these things, they minimize matters of the realm of desire and imagination. But this is the realm of quality: what gives weight and ballast the basics require—and deserve. There can be no proper arrangement based on quantity, on the inadequate notion of objectivity (which means quantifiable, in a reduced system that has dismissed the opposite: subjectivity; and I think it is the result of using inadequate terms). The solution is to put the ballast of imagination into the hull of the basic facts so that the mast may rise tall above, the rigging be properly be arranged, and the sails can fill with wind. A sailing vessel has very many ropes, elaborations and complications, but there is an order and arrangement to them that keeps them from making a spider web—at least to those initiated in the mysteries of sailing: who know the system and can assume the basics.
I think the solution is to teach believers the affective weight of basic doctrines, so that on these can be built strong, compelling arguments of advanced doctrine and theology.
Christopher Hitchens reflects a little on his debates with the religious. He has his poor moments. His problem, to compare with the article below on Rand, is the same as hers: reason is not enough, and he doesn’t appear to have something to love.
Asterix & Obelix are not quite Tintin, but I enjoyed them too when I was young.
The life and views of Ayn Rand. Somehow, the statement that she had a glare that would wilt a cactus explains a lot, to me, about the novel I attempted and never finished.
Hirsch & Education, an overview of his life and works so far.
Part of the weekend’s excesses included the purchase of some literature. I found a volume of Borges (Ficciones) for only 12,000 COPs rather than the usual 44,000, and along with that the Chrétien de Troyes Tale of the Grail (might have something about Perceval in the English title). So I was reading in the bit about the besieged damsel and came upon two expressions which I had been looking for but had never formerly encountered (It is a great joy to read; the translator found something awfully congenial in the original; very lively).
“Los cocineros no están ociosos, y los pinches encienden el fuego en las cocinas para cocer los alimentos.”
That word “pinches” means exactly what the context so explicitly indicates: cook’s helpers. They use the word in Mexico as a vulgarity, pinche this, and pinche that, as we might use a curse: damn. Mexican use has nothing to do with what the dictionary says, and so, after all these years, I was pleased to see it actually existed as a legitimate, though perhaps obsolete (?) word.
The cooks were not slothful because God had sent a boat laden with supplies to the castle at exactly the right moment (Deus ex machina, if you ask me; but I forgive Chrétien because I really wanted them to be delivered from the dastardly depredations of Clamadeau). And here is how the translation puts the comment on that event:
“Y le plugo a Dios que arribase entero y salvo ante el castillo.”
That verb “plugo” also occurs in the form “plugir.” Today instead of “plugo” we’d say “placio” or “plagió” all of which are 3rd person singular preterite indicatives. The archaic, or perhaps only rare, form used occurs very conspicuously in one of my favorite Spanish hymns, a work in a minor key and with a Jewish flavor to it (there are a number of them). I love the ending because that form of the 3rd singular seems to me so audacious: nothing comes after it, it is all conspicuous despite being such an odd word.
Nunca, Dios mío, cesará mi labio,
De bendecirte, de cantar tu gloria,
Porque conservo de tu amor inmenso,
grata memoria.
Cuando perdido en mundanal sendero,
No me cercaba sino niebla oscura,
Tú me miraste, y alumbróme un rayo,
de tu luz pura.
Cuando inclinaba mi abatida frente,
Del mal obrar el oneroso yugo,
Dulce reposo y eficaz alivio,
darme Te plugo.
It is a good, solemn hymn, and simple; and it doesn’t hurt that it has lines in which statements about “el oneroso yugo” (the onerous yoke) are used lyrically.
There is a verb form that came up in my translation on the same page: “tan caro como oséis” the wealthy and starving denizens of the castle say to the merchants on the ship: as expensive as you dare. New on me.
Spanish is not my mother-tongue, and every time I go back it seems I have to relearn it. I have so many anglicisms this time around it almost makes me despair, besides residual Mexicanisms. I think part of my problem may be that I’ve never studied the rules of Spanish grammar. Part of the problem is that Spanish is very hidebound, most conservative, not lending itself to adaptation but rather adapting the words it assimilates. In that respect, English is a bit more free and flexible.
