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Apr 08, 2007 11:34

1. The Bishop of Lincoln is obsessed with my girlfriend's breasts. (Now how's that for a sentence you don't get to read every day.) He has told more than one erstwhile colleage at the Beeb about this interest, in unnecessary detail. ‘Last time she interviewed me,’ the right reverend apparently said, ‘I spent the whole time staring at her magnificent chest. I think she knew...I could hardly answer her questions.’

‘Pull yourself together, man - you're the Bishop of Lincoln!’ my friend told him. An excellent riposte.

Hannah is a bit freaked out, as you might imagine.

2. ”Her question made me remember that the word ‘idiot’ comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain.”

This is from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Rather a startling statement to come out with, particularly from Rebecca West who thought of herself as a feminist. The book is full of these perfectly-expressed little weirdnesses; I don't think I've ever underlined so many phrases in any book before.

Almost as an afterthought to this comment, she has a stab at even-handedness: “It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.”

I wonder if there is any sense in which these kinds of sweeping generalisation were somehow truer in 1942, when this was written. I doubt it - for a start, West herself seems to be a living disproof of her own thesis. It reminds me of university when I had Germaine Greer as a lecturer - never have I heard so many comments I disagreed with expressed so beautifully.

3. Something I picked up in Montenegro was a copy of Gorski Vrijenac (‘The Mountain Wreath’), the Serbian national epic written by the alst Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, a fascinating man called Petar II Petrović Njegoš. I had never heard of this poem; it's awesome, though the plot is a little awkward for modern tastes (a load of Montenegrins convert to Islam - so the local chieftains kill them all! Hurrah!) Here is a rousing speech before they go into battle:

neka bude što biti ne može,
nek ad proždre, pokosi satana!
Na groblju će iznići cvijeće
za daleko neko pokoljenje!

Which means something like: Let happen what could never happen, let hell devour and Satan reap! The cemeteries will bring forth flowers, for some other distant generation! The Serbian is beautiful though, especially that final line. In James Wiles's rather fanciful verse translation from the last century (still I think about the only one available) it becomes:

Let come those things men thought could never be;
Let hell devour; let Satan swing his scythe:
Still graveyard turf shall bring forth many a flower,
For coming kindreds in Time's later Hour!

Wiles's translation is good fun, but not entirely to be relied upon.

wearing the old coat, serbian, rebecca west, girls who are boys who like boys to be, poetry, b

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