It’s a big day in my law class: the midterm exam. It’s worth 50% of the grade, so it’s bigger than the final, which is not cumulative and is only worth 40%. (The other 10% comes from a quiz.) I’ll let you know how the kids do.
On much more important matters (i.e., our usual nonsense), comments on Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” got ugly today. It came up because the puzzle focused on poets and Burns (Robert, not George, Gracie’s husband) was one of them.
Commenter Aerulus started it off with:
Especially liked seeing Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” written in November 1785 when Burns felt a kinship with a mouse for ruined “best laid schemes of mice and men” after his plow (that is, plough) scattered her comfy nest and left her homeless, and in winter!
Here’s the stanza and its translation:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
[OK, fine, right? Not by a mile, says commenter Nancy:]
Aerulus,
When I see a clunky translation like the one you cite for one of BURNS’s “To a Mouse” stanzas, I shudder. If one is translating a poet blessed with one of the greatest poetic “ears” ever, you don’t take a sledgehammer to his gorgeous meter. You reproduce that meter perfectly: it’s part of your bleeping job. And if the task proves beyond you, then give the task to someone else.
Here’s a beautiful translation of that particular stanza:
But little mouse, you’re not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid plans of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us only grief and pain,
For promised joy!
[And, I would add — hrrrumph!]
The puzzle was pretty clever, IMHO. The central answer was POET’S CORNER, clued with “Westminster Abbey section hinted at by this puzzle’s architecture.” And each corner of the grid featured two poets meeting at the corner, so there were 8 in total in the four corners. And each of the 8 poets had a name that was also a plain word, that the clue aimed at, along with giving an example of the poet’s work. So, e.g., the clue at 51D was “Incinerates (‘To a Mouse’)” for BURNS. Get it? And the S from BURNS was also the S in STEIN (Gertrude), clued with “Drinking vessel that may have a lid (‘Sacred Emily’).” If I lost you there, to hell with it — it’s just a puzzle.
Poet’s Corner, of course, is the section of Westminster Abbey where poets are buried as a great honor. So, get this, — according to Aerulus — Thomas HARDY is buried there. Or, according to interestingliterature.com, at least most of him. The website says Hardy wished to be buried in Dorset, his birthplace, but those in charge said someone so important to the literature of the land must be in Westminster Abbey. The compromise: His heart was buried in his local parish church in Dorset and the rest of him received “full honours” in the Poets’ Corner.
Just a tad gruesome, amirite? When Lenny Bruce got a tattoo on his arm when he was in the Navy, his parents were very upset. It violated Jewish law and they were concerned it would prevent his being buried in a Jewish cemetery. He suggested that when the time comes they just lop the arm off, bury it with the gentiles, and the rest can go with the Jews. It seems reasonable.
The puzzle beat me up good today. Couldn’t finish a Wednesday — oh, the shame of it! Here’s what did me in:
30D: “Ikea founder Ingvar _____” was KAMPRAD.
34A: “_____ Estby, Norwegian-born U.S. suffragist,” was HELGA
62D: “Customizable Nintendo avatar” was MII
66A: “SNL alum Pedrad,” was NASIM.
Ridiculous, right?
Helga Estby’s story is something. I hadn’t heard of her before doing this puzzle. Desperate to save her family from financial ruin after the Panic of 1893, she entered into a bet that she could walk across the country from Washington State in 6 months. She’d get $10,000 (in 1896 dollars). She set off with her 17-year old daughter Clara, and was offered shelter and aid along the way by kind strangers, but missed the deadline by a few weeks, so she didn’t get a penny and lost the family home. When she got back to Washington, she learned that two of her children died from diphtheria in her absence. And she was shunned by her (Norwegian) community for abandoning her family.
Don’t you hate when that happens? Her husband started a construction business and Helga became a suffragist. She died in 1942. Here she is with her daughter Clara.
My favorite comment today was by egsforbreakfast. It was on 64A. The clue was “Prokaryotic model organism,” and the answer was ECOLI. Egs wrote: “I don’t consider ECOLI to be a ‘model organism’ whether Prokaryotic or not. Gigi Hadid is a model organism.”
In case you forgot (hard to imagine), here’s the lovely Ms. Hadid again.
Thanks for popping by. See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 