Translation of the farewell poem recovered from the murderer of Theo van Gogh.

The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting [...]

Reading (and trying to sing) bits of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues over lunch, I came across the following in the 118th chorus:

Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)’s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men:

This morning in one of Barcelona’s beach-side districts, Barceloneta, l’Agrupació Coral Humorística “El Rossinyol”, founded 1925, was singing the following ditty, accompanied by a band that in Holland would be referred to as a boerenkapel:

Sa-le_el sol por la ma-ña-na,
por la ma-ña-na sa-le_el sol.
Los bor-rachos por la tar-de,
y por la no-che_el ros-sin-yol!
I don’t know who sang [...]

Waszynski’s extraordinary 1937 Dibuk still drifts into the occasional dream. Der Volf was written by another Polish Jewish artist, H Leivick at around the same time as the play on which Waszynski’s film was based. Both introduce the supernatural in order to help us understand why it is wrong to do wrong, but where Der [...]

With that grace alate/
which thy stool embalms/Shelter neath thy cloak/our humble homes and farms.

John at Barcablog claims to have a cunning plan. I do not, but here is a punning clan:

No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been [...]

I have been up the coast a couple of times this week (off again tomorrow) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many spring flowers. Their profusion is partly a consequence of heavy rainfall, and partly of the fires last summer that burnt away heavy shrubbery and young pine woods, clearing the ground. However, [...]

The kinky Murcian waiters clique is anxious to watch rude muscles bulge and divine blood flow in Mel’s Pash and will not be making an appearance today, which means that we need not fear interruption as, for a change, we get random with some really boring stuff.

This stuff should be subsidised, not banned, although I can’t work out whether the machines used to produce it are translators or generators. Here’s something I received this morning (URL omitted):
Our soft pensil makes sound.
Our noisy round eraser is thinking and our children beautiful spoon arrives.
A golden glasses smells at the place that any round-shaped [...]

Re the Dirty Kuffar video: although the transliteration changes, radical Islam has been predicting imminent victory over us for quite a long time:
And Halid returned to the west of Azahfi, and said to them:
- Know that these kafres are disheartened.
(Anonymous, Libro de las batallas (1600))
But we aren’t, are we, because we just like getting naked! [...]

Like a tree quick, rooted in the wind…

It may seem childish, but it did please me to discover that Doris Moreno Martínez was supervised for her thesis on the Inquisition in C16th Catalunya by one Ricardo García Cárcel. Having survived his encarcelación in these parts, Abenatar Melo escaped to Amsterdam where he wrote a verse version (1626) of the Psalms of David, [...]

Through the serpent have come all evils in the world.

Once upon a time Pere Quart (Joan Oliver to his friends) composed some often wickedly funny verses that were published with drawings by Xavier Nogués under the title Bestiari in Barcelona in 1937. His treatise on the camel and the dromedary is reminiscient of one by Ogden Nash that I blogged into melodious Catalan a couple of months back and I prefer his zebra:

The joy of the poor is brief,
My friends, how soon it’s past!
Just when everything’s going so well,
The donkey breathes its last.

These two energetic logos are on one of my favourite day-off wanders: from the Plaça d’Espanya through the old backstreets of working class Sants up to Collblanc, then a slalom down through the drab poverty of l’Hospitalet, finishing up with wander down the ceramic-ridden old road back to the Plaça d’Espanya.
The first logo adorns [...]

Some of the recent obituaries of super-poet Willem Wilmink (1936-2003) managed to avoid mentioning his writings in Twents, despite the fact that this part of his work - he also translated, wrote and rewrote extensively in Dutch - enjoyed a large following in Twente.
Let’s start by locating the two languages. Linguists classify Dutch and Twents [...]