Coucoumellisms

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th’upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert th’Eternal Providence, And justifie the ways of God to men. -- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book One Lines 17-26 -- An exercise in analytical close reading of the text: And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer:  “And” implies something or someone else. Milton has already mentioned the Shepherd and the Heav’nly Muse. Now he comes to a third entity. “Chiefly” signifies that this particular entity is the most important. “Thou” with a capital T implies a number of things: 1. That the speaker is speaking directly to someone, 2. That the person is someone to whom great respect is owed, but paradoxically 3. Beca...

  Thanks to Martin Luther and his 95 theses, Christians were freed (among other things) from the troublesome necessity of doing good works (or paying for indulgences) to gain salvation. By Shakespeare’s time, many texts no longer have Christianity as a central theme; instead, Christianity is moved to the back burner in secular texts and rarely mentioned. In older medieval texts, even epic Pagan stories of kings and thanes like Beowulf have Christian themes running through them and allusions to a Christian God. In Twelfth Night, upon a gentleman’s arrival at the gate, Sir Toby declares, “Let him be the devil an he will, I care not. Give me faith, say I . ” (Shakespeare 1.5.125-126) In other words, leave him alone; release him of any expectations. Leave him free to be what he wants. What manner of person he is, what station in life he has, his rank or class do not matter; they are of little consequence. He could be the devil, Satan himself if he wanted to be, and it would not matter...

 Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman is a controversial figure in American Poetry, considered by some to be “America’s Poet” and by others a self-centred windbag. Contrary to poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman does not look for meta-narratives to find meaning in the world. Instead, he finds meaning in what is in front of him. All the mundane things we see and do give just as much meaning to life as the mystical epiphanies we experience. The physical is just as important as the spiritual. Walt Whitman challenges the polarization of both Gnostic religious ideas in a society still influenced by puritanism and the idea of democracy as uniformity of thought and expression within the context of a young republic.  Whitman was born towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, only 36 years after the end of the American Revolution. At 13, he learned to set type in a printer’s officer. At 16, he was spending summers along the coast of...

(From an essay I wrote for a translation class - posting it here for anyone who might be interested in knowing more about the challenges that translators face. I really enjoy translation myself - it's like a challenging word-game.)           A number of challenges face translators such as false friends, structural differences, missing terms, ambiguity, words that have several meanings and so on. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for French-to-English translators are Gallicisms. The Oxford Canadian Dictionary defines “Gallicism” as “A French word or usage, esp. one used in another language.” English-speaking people living in Quebec and surrounded by French often end up using Gallicisms. To run down to the “dep” instead of the corner store is one example. Another example is the use of French structure in an English phrase, or to literally translate a French expression instead of using the English expression already in use. “You’re in the moon” is one instan...