Author: Isaac

The Prophet

Translated from the Russian of Pushkin by Maurice Baring

With fainting soul athirst for Grace,
I wandered in a desert place,
And at the crossing of the ways
I saw the sixfold Seraph blaze;
He touched mine eyes with fingers light
As sleep that cometh in the night:
And like a frighted eagle’s eyes,
They opened wide with prophecies.
He touched mine ears, and they were drowned
With tumult and a roaring sound:
I heard convulsion in the sky,
And flights of angel hosts on high,
And beasts that move beneath the sea,
And the sap creeping in the tree.
And bending to my mouth he wrung
From out of it my sinful tongue,
And all deceit and idle rust,
And ’twixt my lips a-perishing
A subtle serpent’s forked sting
With Right hand wet with blood he thrust.
And with his sword my breast he cleft,
My quaking heart thereout he reft,
And in the yawning of my breast
A coal of living fire he pressed.
Then in the desert I lay dead,
And God called unto me and said:
“Arise, and let My voice be heard,
Charged with My Will go forth and span
The land and sea, and let My Word
Lay waste with fire the heart of man.”

(Published in Life and Letters, 1931, vol. VII, no. 39.)

I did not know Montaigne from Adam

“Where the development of talent is concerned we are still in the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading from childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life as a migratory worker and the other half as a longshoreman. The Hitler decade started me thinking, but there is an enormous distance between thinking and the act of writing. I had to acquire a taste for a good sentence — taste it the way a child tastes candy — before I stumbled into writing. Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on my way to do some placer mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch that I would get snowbound. I had to get me something to read, something that would last me for a long time. So I stopped over in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book was about — history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything, so long as it was thick, had small print and, no pictures. There was at that time a large secondhand bookstore on Market Street called Lieberman’s and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to Sausalito. Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so whenever there was an argument about anything — women, money, animals, food, death—they would ask: ‘What does Montaigne say?’ Out came the book and I would find the right passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the John Florio translation. The spelling was modem, but the style seventeenth century — the style of the King James Bible and of Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them which stick in the-mind; they make platitudes sound as if they were new. Montaigne was not above anyone’s head. Once in a workers’ barrack near Stockton, the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an hour or so. When he returned it he said: ‘Anyone can write a book like this’.”(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)

A Mountain

Barzun, A Stroll with William James

Anyone brought up in the Alps and taking trips among them knows that “a mountain” is never twice the same — in shape, color, and “character.” It is “one thing” by a fiat helped by a name.

Bagehot, “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration”

Human character is a most complex thing, and the impressions which different people form of it are as various as the impressions which the inhabitants of an impassable mountain have of its shape and size. Each observer has an aggregate idea derived from certain actions and certain sayings, but the real man has always or almost always said a thousand sayings of a kind quite different and in a connection quite different; he has done a vast variety of actions among “other men” and “other minds”; a mobile person will often seem hardly the same if you meet him in very different societies. And how, except by discussion, is the true character of such a person to be decided? Each observer must bring his contingent to the list of data; those data must be arranged and made use of. The certain and positive facts as to which every one is agreed must have their due weight; they must be combined and compared with the various impressions as to which no two people exactly coincide. A rough summary must be made of the whole. In no other way is it possible to arrive at the truth of the matter. Without discussion each mind is dependent on its own partial observation. A great man is one image — one thing, so to speak — to his valet, another to his son, another to his wife, another to his greatest friend. None of these must be stereotyped; all must be compared. To prohibit discussion is to prohibit the corrective process.

IWP Authors

Some of the authors at IWP Books:

  • Walter Bagehot
  • John Jay Chapman
  • Erwin Chargaff
  • G. Lowes Dickinson
  • E. M. Forster
  • Aldous Huxley
  • Desmond MacCarthy
  • Albert Jay Nock
  • José Ortega y Gasset
  • Agnes Repplier
  • Alfred Sidgwick
  • Anne Goodwin Winslow

Montaigne

New at IWP Books: Jacob Zeitlin, 1934, Montaigne. The book first appeared as the introduction to Jacob Zeitlin’s translation of the Essays, published in 1934–36. The translation itself is not available online, and a physical copy is a rare find. Donald Frame, who published his own translation in 1958, thought the introduction was “excellent.”

Durable as Brass

A new collection of Horace translations, including 134 English translations of Exegi Monumentum (ode 30, book III), is available at the collections of translations page. A few of the first lines of different translations:

I have reared a monument outlasting brass
I have reared a monument to outlive bronze
I have wrought out a monument more durable than bronze
I here have reared a monument
I now have rais’d a firmer monument
In princely state, by Egypt’s scorching sand
In vain the future snaps his fangs
I’ve a monument reared more enduring than brass
I’ve built a monument of brass
I’ve built a monument to outlast
I’ve built my monument outlasting brass
I’ve finished all constructive pains
I’ve made a monument to outlast bronze
I’ve made a monument to pass
I’ve rais’d a lasting Monument t’ out-vye
I’ve rais’d a Monument
I’ve rais’d a trophy firm o’er brass
I’ve rais’d a Work, that shall surpass
I’ve raised a monument outlasting bronze
I’ve raised a monument than brass more durable
I’ve raised a Monument which will endure
I’ve raised a pillar that shall last
I’ve rear’d a monument, my own
I’ve reared a fame outlasting brass
I’ve reared a goodly monument
I’ve reared a monument alone
I’ve reared a monument more strong than brass
I’ve wrought a Monument more strong then Brass
I’ve wrought a monument more tall

Yours Respectively

New at IWP Books: Albert Jay Nock (Editor), 1924, Selected Works of Artemus Ward.

Be sure and vote at leest once at all elecshuns. Buckle on yer Armer and go to the Poles. See two it that your naber is there. See that the kripples air provided with carriages. Go to the poles and stay all day. Bewair of the infamous lise whitch the Opposishun will be sartin to git up fur perlitical effek on the eve of eleckshun. To the poles! and when you git there vote jest as you darn please. This is a privilege we all possess, and it is 1 of the booties of this grate and free land.

At a special Congressional ’lection in my district the other day I delib’ritly voted for Henry Clay. I admit that Henry is dead, but inasmuch as we don’t seem to have a live statesman in our National Congress, let us by all means have a first-class corpse.

“My female frends,” sed I, “be4 you leeve, I’ve a few remarks to remark; wa them well. The female woman is one of the greatest institooshuns of which this land can boste. It’s onpossible to get along without her. Had there bin no female wimin in the world, I should scacely be here with my unparalleld show on this very occashun. She is good in sickness – good in wellness – good all the time. O, woman! woman!” I cried, my feelins worked up to a hi poetick pitch, “you air a angle when you behave yourself; but when you take off your proper appairel & (mettyforically speaken) get into pantyloons – when you desert your firesides, & with your heds full of wimin’s rites noshuns go round like roarin lyons, seekin whom you may devour someboddy – in short, when you undertake to play the man, you play the devil and air an emfatic noosance. My female friends,” I continnered, as they were indignantly departin, “wa well what A. Ward has sed!”

The Col. says it is fortnit we live in a intellectooal age which wouldn’t countenance such infamus things as occurd in this Tower. I’m aware that it is fashin’ble to compliment this age, but I ain’t so clear that the Col. is altogether right. This is a very respectable age, but it’s pretty easily riled; and considerin upon how slight a provycation we who live in it go to cuttin each other’s throats, it may perhaps be doubted whether our intellecks is so much massiver than our ancestors’ intellecks was, after all.