Talk:Nostradamus/Archive 6

message: Hi,
I would appreciate some help to translate in English the below extract of Nostradamus:
Comment ilz signifioient l'homme qui auroit vescu son juste eage. 
L'homme qu'auroit acomply son droit eage
Et qu'a vescu jusques au terme parfaict
Signifier nous voulant ce passaige,
Une corneille font metre en vif pourtraict
Car elle vit cent ans de bien long traict,
Cessi vray estre ilz feurent consentens,
L'egiptien an estoit de par tel trait
Qu'il contenoit par lors quatre cens ans.
Much appreciated!
Cheers,
Pete
:Ah well! Alas, that's not one of those from the Orus Apollo manuscript that I translated in my Unknown Nostradamus. But given that it will give people here some idea of what is involved in the book, let's have a go, bearing in mind that, to be a proper, representative translation, it needs to scan and be in rhyming verse (!) – which necessarily involves a certain amount of adjustment and/or padding, especially given Nostradamus's typically vague syntax (likewise governed by the need to scan and rhyme):
::How they signified a man who has lived to a ripe old age
:::The man who a full, ripe old age shall know
:::And reach thereby his full and proper term;
:::That passing wishing fully to affirm
:::They put a living portrait of a crow,
:::For it doth live a span of five score years.
:::They were agreed that this indeed was true,
:::Th' Egyptian year being so made, it appears,
:::That it of years four hundred did accrue.
« Th’Egyptian year = four hundred » (One year = 400) ?
Very strange…
There must be a mistake in your translation !!!
:Bear in mind, though, that this extract from Nostradamus's translation of the Latin version of a Greek book on Egyptian hieroglyphs (a) is ill-informed, and (b) is poetry, not a piece of legal prose! --PL 09:32, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: And all this years and years before the Rosetta Stone was found.  ;P  •Jim62sch• 09:39, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Absolutely. The actual meanings of the hieroglyphs weren't known at the time. Champollion wouldn't come along until another two-and-a-half centuries at least – and Nostradamus didn't predict him, either! ;) --PL 10:19, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  translation needed 

message: Shouldn't this article be protected, since it's on the main page? --M1ss1ontomars2k4 (T | C | @) 00:25, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's why it should NOT be protected, except to clean up after vandal bot attacks. Having articled linked from the Main Page editable is advertisement for the Wiki concept "...the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" as the Main Page states. Kusma (討論) 00:38, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alert, perhaps! 

message: I knew it would become a featured article soon. General Eisenhower • (at war or at peace) 00:40, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Awesome 

message: Somewhere on the internet I saw a translated quatrain disected and noted about talking about a possible WWIII.  It had pretty considerable detail.  Something about Russia invading Eastern Europe and getting as far West as Italy and a major battle in Genoa.  Other than that, I don't remember much.  If anyone knows what I'm talking about, please verify what I am saying.Cameron Nedland 01:14, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nostradamus says absolutely nothing about all this. You're merely talking about the popular falsifiers. --PL 08:08, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Uh...sorry?Cameron Nedland 19:14, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Please see the new 'Alternative views' section of the article. --PL 09:31, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  WWIII 

message: "Yet, to date, no one is known to have succeeded in using any specific quatrain to predict any event whatsoever in advance"
I find that a little hard to believe. While I hardly ever believe in prophecies/soothsayers I was impressed at childhood by Nostradamus and his "sucesses" in predicting based on the past events. For whatever it was worth there was a quartrain predicting a nuclear attack on New York and when my brother chose to go to N. America I wanted him to go anywhere but New York, just to be on the safer side. He then finally moved to Toronto exactly a month prior to the 9/11 attack. Every time I think about that it makes me wonder and marvel at his writings (probably even mistranslations that led to me avoiding NY) that saved a life. 
The translation was done by Erica Cheetam and in it says New York attacks specifically with the illustration on the cover page depicting attacks on the WTC among other things. I'm sure many who have done research on Nostradamus' work must be able to cull this piece of information and atleast prove that his prediction (with un/intentional interpretation by the modern day author) could have been partially right in this case. Anyone? --Idleguy 09:13, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The 'prediction' was not Nostradamus's, but Erika Cheetham's (as subsequently taken up in Orson Welles's famous film/video)! Nostradamus never mentioned either nuclear attacks or New York City. Nor is the latter at Nostradamus's stated latitude of 45 degrees, as Erika suggested. Nor, indeed, was there a nuclear attack anyway. Please see 'Nostradamus in popular culture' on this. Reviews of Cheetham and other authors can be found on my User Page. --PL 09:24, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK. It seems you've done extensive work on Nostradamus, and I can understand that it was more like a loose prediction that was translated by Erika to make it sound New York city (those twin brothers analogy etc. seemed convincing.) But it seems by some sheer luck or coincidence she seems to have got it somewhere near the bull's eye on this one. It wasn't a nuke but it was pretty devastating. And from personal experience I must add I am not sorry to have heeded the "prediction" or whatever it was. --Idleguy 12:27, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

text: Indeed. Point taken! ;) --PL 15:13, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: To say the least.  In any case, Cheetham (pronounced Cheat'em) is a charlatan.  Si tu peux trouver un quatrain spécifique dans le français original qui mentionne les armes nucléaires, comme New York de nom, le partager svp avec nous. Merci. •Jim62sch• 15:15, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There is nothing mentioned in the quatrains specifically about New York or nukes. I haven't come across anyone who predicts in simple terms, instead they try to confuse others and have an "out" as Randy says. In the end my take on this is that the mistranslation and misinterpretation (intentional or otherwise by cheetam) may have resulted in a semi-spectacular prediction. That's all. Translation courtesy of Babel fish :D --Idleguy 15:16, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Cripes, Jim62sch, if that's an example of your French, then you shouldn't be claiming expertise in interpreting 16th century texts.--Chris 17:20, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't claim that I did...I asked others if they had that expertise, as they seemed to be implying that they did, (although I do know enough about Middle French to be able to work most of it out, in part by relying on Latin).  As for the French in the above, I read it better than I speak it as I have very little chance to converse in it (besides, I was rushing, which is always a bad thing). •Jim62sch• 10:14, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You claim native-like ability on your user page; maybe you should scale that back to fr-3.--Chris 16:28, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

text: For writing, you are probably correct.  Odd how easy reading French is for me, but how difficult it is for me to write it as well as I'd like.  Of course, were I to be able to practice, it'd get better quickly.  •Jim62sch• 11:27, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Maybe Cheetham used Bablefish to make her prediction, a task even more impossible than using it to translate the Divine Comedy.  •Jim62sch• 16:09, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Just an interesting note that questions the validity of a sentence 

message: 1. For para 2:
Since the publication of his book entitled Les Propheties, which has rarely been out of print since his death and has always been hugely popular across the world, Nostradamus has attracted an almost cult following. His many enthusiasts, to say nothing of the popular press, credit him with predicting numerous major world events. In contrast, most of the academic sources listed below maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus' quatrains are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless as evidence of any genuine predictive power. Moreover, none of the sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever succeeded in interpreting any of Nostradamus' quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear identification of any event in advance.
2. For last section under 'Works':
Since his death only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over 200 editions of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2000 commentaries. Their popularity seems to be partly due to the fact that their vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote them selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim them as "hits" (see Nostradamus in popular culture."
Can we agree on these? I so, I will incorporate them into the article. --PL 09:09, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed text substitutions

message: What is the current-day value of N's estate of 3444 crowns? Someone edited the earlier estimate of $300K (US) to $1 million (US). Given the vagaries of price comparisons, should we even include a direct equivalent? 
"Crown" may refer to an écu couronné comprising 60 sols, like the Louis XIII écu. If that's so, and the estimate here of 1 sol:$50 is valid, then the estate was worth slightly over 10 million dollars. Not bad for a best-selling author, but not a figure I would trust. Does anyone have a better-documented estimate?--Chris 19:37, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The conversion rate that I have assumed in my books on the subject is 3 pounds to the crown, and roughly 20 modern pounds to the contemporary pound. Consequently my estimate of his worth at death is some $300,000, minus some debts. --PL 09:19, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Still, an estate of $US300,000 in those days would place you much higher in society than the same amount today. I wonder how that could be expressed in this article.--Chris 13:40, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Well, actually no. What his estate was worth to him then was worth exactly what its converted value is to us now (assuming that I have the coversion rates right). That's what 'conversion' means! I suspect that he kept his wealth secret, though. His place in society was almost entirely a function of his relationship with the Queen and the various Bishops, Archbishops and other nobility with whom he associated and for whom he worked. --PL 15:58, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Value of Nostradamus' estate 

message: Are the two examples (the Jewish homeland and the Civil war) now cited in the opening section supposedly predictions made in advance by interpreting Nostradamus' quatrains, or merely predictions from completely different sources. I have briefly checked the links but can find no mention of N. If they are not predictions based on the writing of N then surely they have no place here.Davkal 20:55, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmm! Haven't seen those! --PL 09:21, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: new opening section

message: PL, your proposal to blanket-revert over 100 recent edits by dozens of editors, the vast majority well-meaning contributions, is not acceptable and is disrespectful of these other Wikipedians. If you do this again, it will have to go to mediation.
There is no reason why we cannot work together on this article. As I've argued before (and I think my view represents the consensus of commentators), this generally good article is marred by a florid and opinionated style that is far from the NPOV ideal. (This is not to say that such a style doesn't have its place - where would we be without Thomas Carlyle?) As such, the article required, and still requires to some  degree, a fairly extensive but superficial stylistic edit. This is apart from some minor problems with sourcing and organization of the sort that are found in many good articles. 
I would be happy to work with you, Jim62sch, Deglr6328, and other contributors to further improve this article. To help cool things down, I won't object if you want to roll back to Kinneyboy90's edit of 08:47, 1 June 2006 - that's the one immediately preceding your first blanket revert. Let's try to work consensually from this point onwards, recognizing, of course, that neither you nor anyone will necessarily approve each and every edit.--Chris 13:17, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm off camping for a couple of days. I hope you guys all play nice over the weekend, and that nobody goes crazy on the reverts. I hope to do more work with all of you next week.--Chris 16:15, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, since you insist, I have edited the existing article rather than reverting it. As expected, there was a lot to do! In the process I have incorporated the most recent changes suggested above and added the two major bibliographies to the Source List. Hopefully there is now a sounder basis for well-meaning tweaking and copy-editing! --PL 17:02, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please refrain from blanket reverts of recent changes 

message: Views differing considerably from the foregoing are to be found both in printed literature and on the internet. At one end of the spectrum, there are extreme academic views such as those of Jacques Halbronn [see his contributions to the Benazra and CURA sites listed under 'External links'], suggesting at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus' Propheties are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to grind. Although Halbronn possibly knows more about the texts and associated archives than almost anybody else alive (he helped dig out and research many of them), most other specialists in the field reject this view.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are a large number of fairly recent popular books (backed up by literally thousands of private websites) suggesting not only that the Propheties are genuine, but that Nostradamus was a true prophet. Unfortunately, thanks to the vagaries of interpretation, no two of them agree on exactly what he predicted, whether for our past or for our future [Lemesurier, P: The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997]. There is a general consensus, however, that he predicted the French Revolution, Napoleon, Hitler, both World Wars, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also a general consensus that he predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of the various books' publication, from the Apollo moon landings, through the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and the Challenger disaster, to the events of 9/11: this 'movable feast' aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre [Lemesurier, Peter, The Unknown Nostradamus, 2003].
Possibly the first of these books to become truly popular in English was Henry C Roberts' The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus of 1947, reprinted at least seven times during the next 40 years, which contained both transcriptions and translations, with brief commentaries. This was followed in 1961 by Edgar Leoni's remarkably dispassionate Nostradamus and His Prophecies, which is universally regarded even today as by far the best and most comprehensive treatment and analysis of Nostradamus in English prior to 1990. After that came Erika Cheetham's well-known The Prophecies of Nostradamus, incorporating a reprint of the posthumous 1568 edition, which was reprinted, revised and republished several times from 1973 onwards, latterly as The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus. This went on to serve as the basis for Orson Welles' celebrated film/video The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Apart from a two-part translation of Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus: historien et prophète of 1980, the series could be said to have culminated in John Hogue's well-known books on the seer from about 1994 onwards, including Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1999) and, latterly, Nostradamus: A Life and Myth (2003).
With the exception of Roberts, these books (and their many popular imitators) were almost unanimous not merely about Nostradamus' powers of prophecy, but also about various aspects of his biography. He had been a descendant of the Israelite tribe of Issachar; he had been educated by his grandfathers, who had both been physicians to the court of Good King René of Provence; he had attended Montpellier University in 1552 to gain his first degree: after returning there in 1529 he had successfully taken his medical doctorate; he had gone on to lecture in the Medical Faculty there until his views became too unpopular; he had travelled to the north-east of France, where he had composed prophecies at the abbey of Orval; in the course of his travels he had performed a variety of prodigies, including identifying a future Pope; he had successfully cured the Plague at Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere; he had engaged in 'scrying' using either a magic mirror or a bowl of water; he had been joined by his secretary Chavigny at Easter 1554; having published the first installment of his Propheties, he had been summoned by Queen Catherine de Médicis to Paris in 1555 to discuss with her his prophecy at quatrain I.35 that her husband King Henri II would be killed in a duel; he had examined the royal children at Blois; he had been buried standing up; and he had been found, when dug up at the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date of his disinterment.
From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in, especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus' private correspondence  [Dupèbe, Jean, Nostradamus: Lettres inédites, 1983] and, during succeeding years, of the original editions of 1555 and 1557 by Chomarat and Benazra, together with the discovery of much original archival material [Leroy, Dr Edgar, Nostradamus, ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre, 1972] [Brind'Amour, Pierre, Nostradamus astrophile, 1993] revealed that much that was claimed about Nostradamus simply didn't fit the documented facts. The academics [Leroy, Dr Edgar, Nostradamus, ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre, 1972] [Brind'Amour, Pierre, Nostradamus astrophile, 1993] [Randi, James, The Mask of Nostradamus, 1993] [Lemesurier, Peter, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997] pointed out that not one of the claims just listed was backed up by any known contemporary documentary evidence. Most of them had evidently been based on unsourced rumours retailed as 'fact' by much later commentators such as Guynaud (1693) and Bareste (1840), on modern misunderstandings of the 16th-century French texts, or on pure invention. Even the suggestion that quatrain I.35 had successfully prophesied King Henri II's death did not actually appear in print for the first time until 1614, 55 years after the event [Brind'Amour, P: Nostradamus astrophile, 1993] [Lemesurier, The Unknown Nostradamus, 2003].
On top of that, the academics [Lemesurier, Peter, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997] [Randi, James, The Mask of Nostradamus, 1993] [Wilson, Ian, Nostradamus: The Evidence, 2002], who themselves tend to eschew any attempt at 'intrepretation', complained that the English translations were usually of poor quality, seemed to display little or no knowledge of 16th-century French, were tendentious and, at worst, were sometimes twisted to fit the events to which they were supposed to refer (or vice versa). None of them, certainly, were based on the original editions: Roberts had based himself on that of 1672, Cheetham and Hogue on the posthumous edition of 1568. Even the relatively respectable Leoni had had to admit on his page 115 that he had never seen an original edition, and on earlier pages had had to indicate that much of his biographical material was unsourced.
However, none of this was originally known to most of the English-language commentators, purely by function of the dates when they were writing and, to some extent, of the language it was written in. Hogue, admittedly, was in a position to take advantage of it, but it was only in 2003 that (largely on the basis of Lemesurier's Nostradamus Encyclopedia [Lemesurier, P: The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997] ) he started to admit that some of his earlier biographical material had in fact been 'apocryphal'. Meanwhile the scholars [Lemesurier, The Unknown Nostradamus, 2003] were particularly scathing about later attempts by some lesser-known authors (Hewitt, 1994; Ovason, 1997; Ramotti, 1998) to extract 'hidden' meanings from the texts with the aid of anagrams, numerical codes, graphs and other devices. 
On the evidence of the many other Nostradamus interpretations that have appeared in recent years, it thus seems likely that it will be a long time yet before the findings of the scholars are more widely known among the English-speaking public at large. --PL 16:11, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: One or two of the internal links in the above don't seem to have worked. Can anybody fix them, please? --PL 16:29, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now tightened up on some of the language and added a few items to paragraph 4. --PL 08:53, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

text: You're probably right. But you don't think that it would be too long for the main article, or make the article itself too long? --PL 15:50, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

text: OK, I've inserted it in the main article for now, and trimmed the preceding entry to minimise unnecessary duplication. I've also eased the flow into the following section. Perhaps Jim would be kind enough to turn the square-bracketed bits into proper note-references with his usual technical efficiency? --PL 09:10, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: C'est fini! •Jim62sch• 10:19, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

text: Many thanks, Jim. An excellent effort! It has the incidental effect, too, of shortening the section considerably! --PL 15:42, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternative views

message: Coming soon - you'll see, only 7 hours and 25 minutes left until the earth turns to flame and the antichrist rises!! - you'll see! Benjaminstewart05 15:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Alas, no trumpets, no broken seals, no horsemen, the sun is still shining, the moon was not red.  Bummer.  •Jim62sch• 09:38, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think you're interpreting Benjaminstewart05's words too literally.  For such an active Nostradamus contributor you should have wider ideas of how to interpret predictions. anyway I second that we should archive all the stuff above, with a note maybe for anyone to feel free to move back any section they'd still like to continue  87.97.8.244 18:37, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: End of the world