(no subject)
In celebration of the Bard's birthday, I've been rereading the sonnets both in English and in the classic Russian translation by Samuil Marshak. I used to love those translations very much, but lately I've gone off them... as translations. They're lovely as poems, but for my taste they sound way too classicist for Shakespeare. I think he does Burns better... then again, it may be just that I'm not up to reading untranslated Burns.
Which sonnet is your favourite, dear flist? Mine's the 5th.
Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.
Which sonnet is your favourite, dear flist? Mine's the 5th.
Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distilled though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.