'Translation is very much like copying paintings.'
--Pasternak

Bright colors now mean Toys & Snack Food.

"This wild fastidious hope is quick to languish;
Its smooth diaphanous escape is swifter
Than the pack of truth; no mortal can distinguish
Its trace upon the durable hereafter." --Elinor Wylie

'Yet though all night I reel under the feet of the gods,
dawn ever returns me to the mystic, white sea.'
--Callimachus, The Lock of Berenike (tr Lombardo
& Raynor, 1988)

'The dead are tired of poppies.' --Marina Tsvetaeva

"Story is the anathema of the true philosopher."
--John Hawkes, Whitejacket (1988)

"Chopin's music gradually becomes tubercular." --Gilbert
Highet

S[ensing]: I see it, I want it. / [I]N[tuitive]: I imagine it,
I want it.

"Democracy as pap, sir, is on a trial basis." --Dr Awkward

'...Night, night,
once you were the bride of mysteries
adorned with lilies of shadow--
In your dark glass sparkled
the mirage of all who yearn
and love had set its morning rose
to blossom before you--
You were once the oracular mouth
of dream painting and mirrored the beyond.

Night, night,
now you are the graveyard
from the terrible shipwreck of a star--
time sinks speechless in you
with its sign:
the falling stone
and the flag of smoke.' --Nelly Sachs

"Like bagpipes rotting through the walls." --Edith
Sitwell

"There is a stone, a cubic mile in size, a million
times harder than diamond. Every million years a
very holy man visits it to give it the lightest possible
touch. The stone is in the end worn away. This works
out at something like 10 to-the-35th years..."
--Littlewood's Miscellany

"A too-persistent research student drove his supervisor
to say 'Go away and work out the construction for a
regular polygon of 65537 sides'. The student returned
20 years later with a construction (deposited in the Archives
at Gottingen)." --ibid