“They Forgot to Sing”—
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/they-forgot-to-sing/
H/T Powerline blog.

https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/a-e-housman/to-an-athlete-dying-young

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

There are some branches of “science” that find the scientific method to be an obstacle and have resorted to the “political / ideological” method to promote certain
agendas.

Fascinating story.

While in the Cornell cafeteria he saw a student spinning a plate and noticed how it wobbled. He began to work out the physics of the wobble, not because it was a cutting-edge problem, but just for the fun of it.

It worked and later Feynman remarked (after Hans Bethe had chastised him for his interest in the problem):
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I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it!

https://www.creativitypost.com/article/spinning_plates_and_the_serious_play_of_richard_feynman
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Everything I got good at it, I got good exploring them on my own terms.

E for effort and not half-bad! Just getting the lines to rhyme per Housman is impressive in my book. (Though Spanish is an easier rhyming language than English.)

You probably were procrastinating — so I suspect was that splendid fellow, who built a rope bridge for his cat. But I salute such efforts to make learning real and alive on one’s own terms.

Standard education can be so deadening. Hence, all the students who emerge from school hating poetry, foreign languages and math. Those three subjects are particularly poorly taught IMO. I love all three yet I understand why others don’t.

Joseph Brodsky, “Stanzas” (“In no country or churchyard…”)

In no country or churchyard
Do I choose to lie;
To Vasilevskii Island
I shall come back to die.
Your dusk-colored wall
I shall fail to find,
To the asphalt I’ll fall
Between faded lines.

And headlong my soul
Through the mist will zoom,
And flash above bridges
In the Petersburg gloom.
And the drizzle of April,
And snow on my head,
And a voice that intones
“See you later, friend.”

And, pressing my cheek
To my indifferent country,
On the Neva’s far shore
Two lives I shall see:
As if playmates and sisters
From unlived years,
They wave to the boy
Through valedictory tears.

(1962)

My version is fairly faithful to the original until the last few lines. Here’s what Google Translate produces:

I don’t want to choose either country or graveyard.
I’ll come to Vasilievsky Island to die.
I won’t find your dark blue façade in the dark,
I’ll fall on the asphalt between the faded lines.

And the soul, tirelessly
hurrying into the darkness,
will flash over the bridges
in the Petrograd smoke,
and the April drizzle,
snow on the back of my head,
and I’ll hear a voice:
– Goodbye, my friend.

And I’ll see two lives
far beyond the river,
pressing their cheeks to the indifferent fatherland.
Like little sisters
from unlived years,
running out onto the island,
waving after the boy.

Pretty close, except I have the poet pressing his cheek to his indifferent fatherland, not the two apparitions on the far bank of the Neva. Given the context, I think that’s correct.

You can hear Brodsky reciting the original Russian at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pspV9iLvrGE

Sounds like a bootleg recording. By the way, I attended a Five College seminar on Mandelshtam that Brodsky gave at UMass in the early 1980s. He really did recite poetry in that chanting, nasal, sing-song manner.

A young man loves a girl,
who has chosen another;
the other loves another,
and has married her.

Out of anger, the girl marries
the first man
who crosses her path;
the young man is in a bad way.

It’s an old story,
but it remains ever new;
and whoever it happens to,
will have their heart broken.

Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen,
Die hat einen andern erwählt;
Der andre liebt eine andre,
Und hat sich mit dieser vermählt.

Das Mädchen heiratet aus Ärger
Den ersten besten Mann,
Der ihr in den Weg gelaufen;
Der Jüngling ist übel dran.

Es ist eine alte Geschichte,
Doch bleibt sie immer neu;
Und wem sie just passieret,
Dem bricht das Herz entzwei.

…which somebody translated as follows:

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.

…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.