Never Not Tired

Hi! Aw, that’s such a lovely idea. Honestly I mostly read English-writing authors (you must have noticed...) but I do have a few things to recommend.

• Rainer Maria Rilke’s works, most notably Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies trans. by Martyn Crucefix, but also The Book of Hours trans. by Babette Deutsch.

• Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, trans. by Jane Kenyon, though I also like Stanley Kunitz’s take, and Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems, trans. by Elaine Feinstein.

• Odysseus Elytis’ What I Love, trans. by Olga Broumas, and my favourite The Sovereign Sun, trans. by Kimon Friar, who also translated Sodom and Gomorrah by Nikos Kazantzakis. Also, C. P. Cavafy’s The Complete Poems, trans. by David Mendelsohn or Poèmes, trans. by Marguerite Yourcenar (what??) and Constantin Dimaras.

• Federica Garcia Lorca’s A Season in Granada, trans. by Christophe Maurer, and Octavio Paz’s Collected Poems, trans. by Eliot Weinberger, others (including Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Bishop) and Octavio Paz himself. Also, Kelly Martínez-Grandal’s Zugunruhe, trans. by Margaret Randall, and of course Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems, trans. by several translators (among others, W. S. Merwin and John Updike.)

• Speaking of W. S. Merwin, he translated a lot of poems, spanning centuries and languages, and he’s a beautiful translator; I’d recommend his Selected Translations. 

• Edith Södergran’s We Women, trans. by Samuel Charters, and Matilda Olkinaitė’s Matilda, trans. by Laima Vince. 

• Adonis’ Selected Poems (trans. by Khaled Mattawa) and Saadi Youssef’s Without An Alphabet, Without a Face (by Khaled Mattawa too). 

• I’m also thinking of Women of the Fertile Crescent: An anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women. You can find a lot of beautiful excerpts on @soracities blog.

• I know it’s not 20th century, but I have a soft spot for modern translations (some more interventionist than others) of classic poetry. My very favourites include Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter (obviously), Mary Barnard’s Fragments of Sappho, Renée Vivien’s Sapho, Marguerite Yourcenar’s La Couronne et La Lyre, Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese (some of them you can find in this one—though be careful! Sometimes Rexroth claims he’s translating for shits and giggles when he’s really the writer, like in The Love Poems of Marichiko), A. K. Ramanujan’s The Interior Landscape: Classic Tamil Love Poems and the gorgeous Andal’s Autobiography of A Goddess, trans. by Priya Sarrukai Chabria and Ravi Shankar. 

• In the same vein, though they’re plays rather than poems, I’d recommend Oliver Py’s very cheeky take on Shakespeare’s Roméo et Juliette, and Anne Carson’s Bakkhai (Euripides) and An Oresteia (Aiskhylos, Sophokles, Euripides). 

Human, suddenly sucked by portal into a Magical Land: damn I wish I came from a magical world lol

Elf wizard dude: hahaha bro what are you talking about

Human: well, my world is just—

Elf wizard dude: what about the magic rocks????

Human: What magic rocks?

Elf wizard dude: You know, the magic rocks. The ones that generate near infinite energy by tearing apart the fabric of their reality? You know, like, uranium? You haven’t found those yet?

Human: Wait wait wait. That’s not—

Elf wizard dude: And like, come on, you even have some low level necromantic spells over there, like—

Human: We do not have necromantic spells, what are you talking about

Elf wizard dude: didn’t you say your friend was an EMT though? they do that shit all the time. Hell, you don’t even have to be like a high level caster or some shit, it takes like a few weeks to learn CPR

Human: Wh—

Elf wizard dude: You guys do have CPR, right?

Human: I mean yes but—what the—CPR is not necromancy!! That’s not how it works, it doesn’t bring people back from the—well I guess technically it does but that doesn’t—

Elf wizard dude: Next you’re going to be telling me Mothman doesn’t “count” either.

Human:

Human: …

Elf wizard dude: Ohhh. You got just the cursed magic rocks.

Human: …

Human: Well I mean—there is that one type of parrot but like that doesn’t—

Elf wizard dude: And no sapient animals? At all?

Human: Well ... I mean, depends what you call ‘sapient’. Crows remember who’s nice to them and bring them presents, and will get the whole flock to attack people who are mean to them, and cats basically conned us into lavishing them with food and attention--

Elf wizard dude: And that?

Human: Oh, that’s a pigeon. They’re really dumb, though.

Elf wizard dude: It’s getting on your public transport network!

Human: Yeah, it’ll get off at its stop-- wait.

[source]

But if the conversation with the composer goes

“We need a theme tune for this character.” “Great! What can you tell me about their personality, role and narrative development?” “Nothing.”

In the end, the justices decided companies were not, in fact, legally liable for what happened in Ivory Coast—even though it appeared to constitute a form of child slavery, which is outlawed internationally. The key weakness, they said, was that the case failed to show that a lot of the business decisions leading to child labor happened on U.S. soil. End ID] Link to article

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Please boycott Nestle’s chocolate. Also, please remember that Nestle is far from the only United States chocolate corporation who directly perpetuates and profits from child slave labor in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. This ruling defended all of these U.S. corporations engaging directly in this slave economy. Boycott them too.

So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you're like 'these are unconnected critters,' right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There's this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we're gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.

And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.

If there's a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they'll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn't much potassium.

And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.

Trees will share so much of their resources, they'll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn't able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!

You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago... but if you scrape the stump it's still green wood. The tree's still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.

I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here's where we get to them.

In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they've developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.

So what do they do?

They feed baby trees.

Baby saplings in an old forest can't reach up to the sun. There's no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can't get on her own, she'll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.

And one of the best parts - she won't just do it for her own species. She'll connect to all kinds of trees, because they're all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She'll adopt the whole forest's children.

Sometimes in forests you'll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil's more fertile from the decomposition.

But no.

“On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works,” she said. “I thought so.”