Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Early and often
Is no longer adequate.
Will Dems move rightward?
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Barack Obama!
Double down, you clever guy.
We need more Scott Browns.
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Scourge of Amiraults,
Martha was unappealing.
(The best they could do?)
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(Feel free to add your own contribution in the comments.)
On July 4, 1941five months before Pearl Harbora long poem titled Listen to the People, written by Stephen Vincent Benet, was presented on nationwide radio. The full text was also printed in Life magazine. Here’s the whole thing. I posted an excerpt of this poem at Chicago Boyz in 2006…in the comments, Steve Barton points to a podcast of a 1943 performance of this work.
UPDATE: Some Independence Day thoughts from Cassandra. Worth reading more than once.
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:
Urgent! Must search Web
But IE has other plans:
Windows Update, stat!
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Stockpiling ammo
Thousands of rounds in basement
Dems in power now
—-
Eating vegan food
With your new lefty girlfriend
Is she worth the gas?
—-
Wow, great idea
But with no bank financing
You’re driving a cab
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Britney concert’s out!
Now, in the crowded subway
I feel twice my age
UPDATE: Edited because I just realized that ‘idea’ has three syllables. How embarrassing.
Remove Batt. daily.
This fancy Internet phone
Doesn’t work for shit.
Overconfidence:
Home DSLR cleaning.
You killed the sensor.
Latest and greatest
Windows is bloated and slow
Like the old Elvis.