2014年10月13日 星期一

Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.



No Fear Shakespeare: As You Like It: Act 1, Scene 2, Page 2

ORIGINAL TEXT

MODERN TEXT


25
ROSALIND
What shall be our sport, then?
ROSALIND
Well, then, what should we do for fun instead?

CELIA
Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.
CELIA
Let’s go find that hussy, Fortune, and and mock her till she starts distributing her gifts more equally.

ROSALIND
I would we could do so, for her benefits are mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.
ROSALIND
I wish we could do that, because Fortune gives all of her gifts to the wrong people, and she especially gets things wrong where women are concerned.

CELIA
'Tis true, for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest, and those that she makes honest she makes very ill- favoredly.
CELIA
It’s true: the women she makes beautiful she also makes slutty, and the women she makes pure and virginal she also makes ugly.


35
ROSALIND
Nay, now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s.
Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of
Nature.
ROSALIND
No, you’re getting Fortune and Nature mixed up: Nature determines how we’re made, and Fortune decides what happens to us.
Enter TOUCHSTONE
TOUCHSTONE enters.

CELIA
No? When Nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by Fortune fall into the fire? Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?
CELIA
Oh, really? Well, when Nature makes a person beautiful, can’t Fortune make her fall into a fire, thereby making her ugly after all? And even though Nature has given us the wit to have this argument, hasn’t Fortune sent this fool here to stop us?

ROSALIND
Indeed, there is Fortune too hard for Nature, when Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit.
ROSALIND
Yes, and now Fortune is playing a nasty trick on Nature: she’s breaking up a show of wit between two naturally witty women with the arrival of a natural fool.

CELIA
Peradventure this is not Fortune’s work neither, but Nature’s, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses, and hath sent this natural for our whetstone, for always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits. How now, wit, whither wander you?
CELIA
Well, maybe this is Nature’s work after all. Maybe Nature sensed that we’re not smart enough to be having this high-flown discussion about goddesses, so she sent us this fool to use as a mental 

WHETSTONE

A whetstone is used to sharpen knives.
whetstone
. After all, smart peoples' wits are always sharpened by the presence of a fool. What’s up, you wit? Where are you wandering off to?


"Nay, now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s.
Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature."
--Rosalind from "As You Like It" (1.2) 朱生豪譯:......命運管理著人生的賞罰,可是管不了天生的相貌。

2014年10月12日 星期日

all two-word phrases: Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy


The intertwining romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy is the backbone of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". Yet from their presence in British literature, it seems the protagonists have drifted apart over the years ‪#‎econarchive‬ (2013) http://econ.st/1nfPgfM

2014年10月8日 星期三

Virginia Woolf's The Waves


  1. The Waves / Virginia Woolf

    https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91w/
    Virginia Woolf. logo. This web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide. Last updated Tuesday, March 4, 2014 at 11:50. To the best of our knowledge, the text of ...


"Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" The waves broke on the shore.
On this day in 1931 Virginia Woolf's The Waves was first published. She was just forty-nine, and she would live and write for another decade, but this was the last of her major works. Many also say it is the best, and when Leonard Woolf put a memorial plaque in the garden of their home he chose from among its last lines: "Death is the enemy. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" The waves broke on the shore.

2014年10月3日 星期五

Helena from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1.1.226)


So I, admiring of his qualities.
Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."
--Helena from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1.1.226)

2014年10月2日 星期四

children’s poems/ nursery rhyme

What are your favourite children’s poems?

To mark National Poetry Day, share your nursery rhyme-free alternatives to the recent top 10 ranking of children’s poems

• The Owl and the Pussycat voted most popular childhood poem
Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. Joel Stewart
Can it really be true? The nation – AKA 2,000 people polled for Waitrose – has put Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Humpty Flipping Dumpty ahead of Jabberwocky in a vote for the UK’s favourite children’s poem. Seriously, world? Or more accurately: seriously, 2,000 people?
The top 10 is a bemusing mishmash of nursery rhymes and actual poems, thankfully topped by Edward Lear and his elegant fowl, and also featuring Wordsworth – because many a child, I’m sure, is a fan of I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
Perhaps I’m grumpy because, with a one-year-old, I am utterly nursery rhymed-out. We listen to them in the car to stop her crying, we read them endlessly at home, we debate their finer points with our three-year-old (“What is whipping them soundly?”). Lear and Carroll aside, when it comes to a ranking of “the top 10 poems from childhood”, surely we can do better than “up above the world so high/ Like a diamond in the sky”?
Where’s Macavity? (“He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.”). Where’s The Jumblies (“far and few, far and few”)? Where’sMatilda? (“For every time She shouted ‘Fire!’/ They only answered ‘Little Liar!’/ And therefore when her Aunt returned,/ Matilda, and the House, were burned.”)
Daddy Fell Into the Pond still makes me laugh. So does the Adventures of Isabel (“Isabel, Isabel, didn’t worry/ Isabel didn’t scream or scurry/ She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up/ Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up”). And the rhythms of The Highwayman (“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees” ) still echo in my head.
How about you? Perhaps we can come up with an alternative, nursery rhyme-free list. Or are you all, really truly, fans of Humpty Dumpty?