larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (science!)
[personal profile] larryhammer
Tag-team reading can produce interesting effects. Normally I wouldn't expect a chicklitty corporate fantasy and a thumping chanson de geste (I adore the horses' expressions on that cover. Adore. They are the world's most dubious equines. With perms!) to play well together, but Aymeri's battles with Moors and Katie's against industrial espionage ping nicely off each other. Unexpected, that.

OTOH, Imagination's Other Place goes well with neither. The subtitle claims this is Poems of Science and Mathematics compiled by Helen Plotz. It's actually a stunning gallimaufry of verse: a few bits good, many banal, and all too much bathetic.
Behold within our Hayden Planetarium
More stars than there are fish in the aquarium
begins a straight-faced Ode to that institution by one Authur Guiterman. Undistinguished A.E. Housman is followed by dreadful Carl Sandburg, followed in turn by a limerick about a young man from Trinity. More odes to Newton and Einstein than you can shake a pentameter at. And then there's an extract of W.H. Mallock's translation of Lucretius into rubaiyat stanzas.

Pause to let [livejournal.com profile] sovay and [livejournal.com profile] dancinghorse shudder at the thought.

Its flavor can be adequately conveyed with the last stanza:
Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--
    Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--
How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!
I am in awe that not just the translator but the editor thought this was a good idea. Just not the good sort of awe.

---L.

Date: 5 October 2006 12:01 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] casacorona.livejournal.com
I join you in awe.

Just to start, technically, it should be "O Science", you were are going to use such a repellant phrase to start with.

Date: 5 October 2006 12:36 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com
OW MY EYES

I mean, it's pretty difficult to get Fitzgerald to spin in his grave because of the lack of quality of verse, y'know?

Date: 5 October 2006 12:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] marith.livejournal.com
Oh, it has a certain charm, surely. I find myself wanting to declaim the lines in the style of Girl Genius. "Who has deactivated my beautiful frogs? It is a glorious day for SCIENCE!"

Date: 5 October 2006 09:43 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gillpolack.livejournal.com
Don't forget to note any gore in chansons de geste. Even though it isn't a particularly gory one. ( am overworked this week hence the need to ignore verse in favour of potential gore)

Date: 9 October 2006 02:27 am (UTC)
sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
From: [personal profile] sovay
Oh Science, lift aloud thy voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills--
    Thrills through the conscience the news of peace--
How beautiful thy feet are on the hills!


Excuse me while I drink myself insensible.

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