David Foster

Just Because I Like It

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A young lad loves a maiden
she likes another one
that other marries another
whose heart and hand he won

The maiden weds in anger
the first man she can snare
who comes across her pathway
The lad is in despair

It is an old, old story
yet new with every start,
and every time it happens
it breaks a loving heart.

–Heinrich Heine

Poetry, of course, is notoriously difficult to translate. The Heine translations of which the above is an example (done by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry) are among the fairly rare examples in which the poem as rendered in the target language preserves much of the rhyme and rhythm of the original. This is done, though, at the sacrifice of precision of meaning: even with my mostly-forgotten high school and college German, I can tell that the line

Dem bricht das Herz entzwei

doesn’t say anything about “breaking a loving heart”–rather, if refers to “breaking a heart in two.” Also, the translation uses some rather strange English phrasings (new with every start?) Still, though, I think this kind of translation is a very nice supplement to the more-precise-but-drier translations which seem to be much more common.

A few more Heine poems from the same translators:

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Demonizing Energy Producers

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In a statement intended to help justify the proposed “cap and trade” energy tax, Barack Obama said:

At a time of great fiscal challenges, this legislation is paid for by the polluters who currently emit the dangerous carbon emissions that contaminate the water we drink and pollute the air we breathe.

There are so many things wrong with this that one scarcely knows where to begin.

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Obama, Liberty, and Iran

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Joshua Muravchik, writing in Commentary:

The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear. If people aren’t secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.”

There is, of course, some truth in Obama’s point. If people are starving, they are likely to care more about their next meal than about what may seem to them as the relatively abstract rights to voting, free speech, etc. But what Obama is missing here is that the cause-and-effect flows in both directions. Societies that have economic and political freedom are far more likely to develop economically–up to a point where people can think about things other than basic survival–than those that do not.

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Where Is Everyone?

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An article in the Israeli publication Ma’ariv wonders: Where are all those demonstrators who so loudly denounced Israel during its Gaza operation? Why aren’t they out there protesting the beatings and killings of Iranians at the hands of the Iranian government?

All the peace-loving and justice-loving Europeans, British professors in search of freedom and equality, the friends filling the newspapers, magazines and various academic journals with various demands for boycotting Israel, defaming Zionism and blaming us and it for all the ills and woes of the world—could it be that they have taken a long summer vacation? Now of all times, when the Basij hooligans have begun to slaughter innocent civilians in the city squares of Tehran? Aren’t they connected to the Internet? Don’t they have YouTube? Has a terrible virus struck down their computer? Have their justice glands been removed in a complicated surgical procedure (to be re-implanted successfully for the next confrontation in Gaza)?

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A source who is connected to the Iranian and security situation, said yesterday that if Obama had shown on the Iranian matter a quarter of the determination with which he assaulted the settlements in the territories, everything would have looked different. “The demonstrators in Iran are desperate for help,” said the man, who served in very senior positions for many years, “they need to know that they have backing, that there is an entire world that supports them, but instead they see indifference. And this is happening at such a critical stage of this battle for the soul of Iran and the freedom of the Iranian people. It’s sad.”

via Robert Avrech and Soccer Dad.

To Serve Man

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In a famous episode of The Twilight Zone, aliens come to earth and declare their desire to help humankind in every possible way. Their benign intentions seem confirmed when it is discovered that they have in their possession a book titled To Serve Man.

Turns out it’s a cookbook.

Allen West, who is running for Congress in Florida, very cleverly uses this episode as a metaphor for the current political situation.