From: marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski)
Subject: MICHAEL KANDEL! / Marek (Re: request, Stansilaw Lem poem ..for fun)
Keywords: acknowledge the translator who did all the work!
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 01:38:38 GMT

In article <1992Nov17.230639.492@wam.umd.edu> sheilah@wam.umd.edu (Danny-Boy) writes:
>
>
>
>skipp ahead to **** for Stansilaw Lem poem
                         ^Stanislaw

Indeed, it is a very funny poem, and it reads very well in its native
Polish.  However, what you posted is the English translation of it
which is a work of art in and of itself as are all the other poems of
Lem from the _Cyberiad_ that the translator somehow manages to render 
in English, consistently funnily and with great skill, often 
departing from the original masterfully, for no other way could lead
to a translation that would convery the poetic quality of the Polish texts.

Translating is hard.  Translating poetry is very hard.  Trnaslating
poetry chockful of mathematics must be outrageously hard.  Let's say who
did all tht work, not just say that here's a Lem poem:  Michael Kandel,
who nota bene, went to school in a Majorly English way :), getting
his BA, MA and PhD in English, all from Indiana University.  He is now
a senior editor at Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich in NYC.  I think his
Lem translations in toto are wonderful, and I recommend every one,
with the _Cyberiad_ as my all-time fave.  In fact, Kandel's outrageous
invention, "Princess Ineffabelle" is my adopted IRCNAME...  :)

Oops, forgot the requested outline.  Then again, in Polish texts, the list
of contents traditionally comes at the ned of the book.  Here goes:

I.    Sharp scolding of the practice of not acknowledging translators.

II.   Introduction and kudos to Michael Kandel, a good doobie of an EM.

III.  Plug for HBJ products by the world's best and most well-read SF writer.
      (Marek starts another holy war...)

				-- Marek

P.s.  There are typos in the poem, Sheila.  Ought to fix them.

>
>I am mostly posting to very requery that if anyone feels
>they have anything interesting to say, when creating flames
>to put a warning on it, something like, sure this is a flame,
>but I am not merely insulting people, I am defending the honor of all
>that is True and Beautiful and besides, I have something interesting to
>say. Maybe even you want to put, "MY GOD! I AM. things of utter truth and
>interest" in the keywords, or summary line. Plus, if you
>want to be helpful, give an outline at the beginning, something like,
>
>   I. insults. whereupon I lay heavy crustacians at my enemy's back 
>      back porch, hoping that one squeezes his cat's tail and makes it
>      yowl beyond belief.
>
>  II. interesting observations on criticism and intepretation. Watch as I
>      interpret a poem with bare toes. (toenails clipped)
>
> III. insults. but witty, tidbits relevant to grand unified theory, so 
>      sheila will be particulary interested in this.
>
>  IV. btw, I just thought I would through in a nice discussion of 
>      things we have to assume before we exist.
>
>I don't know. things like this.
>
>****
>This poem is about Love and tensor algebra
>
>	Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
>	Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
>	Their indices bedecked from one to n,
>	Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
>
>	Come, every frustam longs to be a cone,
>	and every vector dreams of matrices.
>	Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
>	It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
>
>	In Rienmann, Hilbert or in Banach space
>	Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
>	Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
>	We shall encounter, counting, face to face         * how lovely!
>
>	I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
>	Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
>	And so we two shall all love's lemma's prove,
>	And in our bound partition never part.
>
>	For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
>	Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
>	Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers
>	Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
>
>	Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
>	Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
>	A root or two, a torus and a node:
>	The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
>
>	Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
>	The product of our scalars is defined!
>	Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
>	Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
>
>	I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
>	I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
>	Bernoulli would have been content to die
>	Had he but known such a^2 cos (2phi) !	
>-- 
>I am always wrong. Don't believe me ever.
>stark raving sane  sheilah@wam.umd.edu


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