International Literary Festival July 2009
Multilingual Translation Workshop
Marie Curie University, Lublin, Poland.
This is the poems selected for the innovative Multilingual Translation Workshop July 2009. We hope you enjoy this this unique exploration of Hopkins's Carrion Compfort, led by Dr. Kedzierska, with a group of scholars and enthusiasts for Hopkins's poetry from many different cultural and linguistic groups including: Russian, Japanese, Spanish Austrian, Gaelic, French, German and more.
The purpose of this unique Multilingual Translation Workshop is to allow visitors from many different cultural and linguistic backgrounds to explore diverse meanings and delights in this Hopkins poem, this year, Carrion Comfort ....
To enable you to prepare for this Workshop as you come to Monasterevin, we have here the text of the selected poem which you may like to examine before the Workshop.
We hope you enjoy the exercise!
Carrion Comfort
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoìd thee and
flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whóm though? The héro whose héaven-handling flúng me, fóot tród
Me? or mé that f{'o}ught him? O whích one? is it eách one? That níght, that yéar
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
from Gerard Manley Hopkins edited by Catherine Phillips, Oxford University Press 1986
Programme for 2009 Gerard M Hopkins Festival
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