Word: bardic
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...would read in its entirety - he decided to tackle a blend of two shorter versions: the 1855 rendering by the Urdu poet Ghalib Lakhnavi, and an 1871 text by the Urdu scholar Abdullah Bilgrami, who took Lakhnavi's edition and added various flourishes and refrains to restore its original bardic character. Even so, Farooqi's translation is almost a thousand pages in total. It was a Herculean labor. "When I looked at the first page," Farooqi confesses, "I thought 'What the hell is this?'" Translating the heavily Persian form of classical Urdu required seven years, which Farooqi spent shuttling between...
ALLEN GINSBERG (1927-1997) He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
...should be conjured up. Until the middle of last week, I had been working on the conceit that Bill Clinton is Lyndon Johnson Without Tears--both Clinton and Johnson being big-hearted, triple-slick Southern boys, and mama's boys, with a genius for politics, and a bardic gift for storytelling, and huge egos and insecurities interbraided, and minds aggressively intelligent, instinctive, fiercely absorptive, and with a love of people, and a general incapacity to tell the truth. Or anyway (let's be nice) a way of thinking of the truth as only one of life's creative possibilities...
Among the Irish, a bardic genius for remembering, the grievances singing in the genes, has kept the kettle of sectarian vengeance boiling since the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. Israel became a state in 1948, and for 49 years Palestinian children have gone to sleep to stories of the nakba, the disaster, that destroyed the village, the fig, the olive, the Palestinian Eden from which nakba meant exile. Tribal memory is the plutonium of revenge. The mother shows her son the martyr-father's bloody shirt and sings the song of blood feud: Make them...
...BETTER COME HOME, by Garrison Keillor, with paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Viking; $15.99), presents the sage of Lake Wobegon in bardic mode, with a talking blues for cat owners. Puff disdains the low-rent cat food her master serves and hightails it for the big city. Her master pleads, "Come home, old Puff, come home to us,/ There's a lot of new benefits I'd like to discuss." No dice. "I saw her six months later in a cat magazine./ She was the Number One TV cat-food queen/...I could tell it was Puff even...