translators-from-the-united-kingdom

"My father taught history at Calcutta University but he had so many diverse interests. He was also a film critic, a theatre critic, and he sang very well. He wrote poems and novels, but he did it in a way that was rather wonderful: he'd suddenly say, ‘oh I wrote this poem yesterday’ or he would say, ‘oh by the way, I'm going to be in this play’. There was this sense that you can just do what you want to do."

"The gaudy minstrel of the morn."

"All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

"A similar fate must have overtaken many Iranian villages in the past, among those which did not willingly embrace Islam; and the question seems less why it happened to Turkabad than why it did not overwhelm all other Zoroastrian settlements. The evidence, scanty though it is, shows, however, that the harassment of the Zoroastrians of Yazd tended to be erratic and capricious, being at times less harsh, or bridled by strong governors; and in general the advance of Islam across the plain, through relentless, seems to have been more by slow erosion than by furious force. The process was still going on in the 1960s, and one could see, therefore, how it took effect. Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroastrians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore posses the truth; and also on how many material advantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youth waylaid and bullied individual Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so another village was lot to the old faith. Several of the leading families in Sharifabad and forebears who were driven away by intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Yazd; and a shorter migration had been made by the family of the centenarian ‘Hajji’ Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious, had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad) when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life. Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi become in 1961. [The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in 1961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters.] It was noticeable that the villages which were left to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of water, where farming conditions were hard.”"

"“…in the mid nineteenth century disaster overtook Turkabad, in the shape of what was perhaps the last massed forcible conversion in Iran. It no longer seems possible to learn anything about the background of this event; but it happened, so it is said, one autumn day when dye-madder – then one of the chief local crops – was being lifted. All the able-bodied men were at work in teams in the fields when a body of Moslems swooped on the village and seized them. They were threatened, not only with death for themselves, but also with the horrors that would befall their women and children, who were being terrorized at the same time in their homes; and by the end of the day of violence most of the village had accepted Islam. To recant after a verbal acknowledgement of Allah and his prophet meant death in those days, and so Turkabad was lost to the old religion. Its fire-temple was razed to the ground, and only a rough, empty enclosure remained where once it had stood."

"The original name of the Indo/Iranian Goddess was Sarasvati ‘she who possesses waters’. In India she continued to be worshipped by this name which she gave to a small but very holy river in Madhyadesa (Punjab) whereas in Iran Sarasvati became, by normal sound changes Harahvati, a name preserved in the region called in Avestan Harakhvaiti and known to the Greeks as Anacosia, a region rich in rivers and lakes. Originally, Harahvaiti was the personification of the great river which flows down from the high Hara into the sea Vourukasa and is the source of the waters of the world, and just as the wandering Iranians called the great mountains near which they lived Hara, they gave Harahvaitis name to the life giving rivers and their Indian cousins did the same."

"In Sharifabad the dogs distinguished clearly between Moslem and Zoroastrian, and were prepared to go, with a diffident politeness but full of hope, into a crowded Zoroastrian assembly, or to fall asleep trustfully in a Zoroastrian lane, but would flee as before Satan from a group of Moslem boys. Moslems are not, of course, invariably unkind to dogs. Some themselves own herd- or watch-dogs, and apart from this there are naturally many Moslems who would not deliberately harm any creature. But undeniably there are others who are savagely and wantonly cruel to dogs, on the pretext that Muhammad called them unclean; but there seems no factual basis for this, and the evidence points rather to Moslem hostility to these animals having been deliberately fostered in the first place in Iran, as a point of opposition to the old faith there. Certainly in the Yazdi area na-najib Moslems found a double satisfaction in tormenting dogs, since they were thereby both afflicting an unclean creature and causing distress to the infidel who cherished him. There are grim old stories from the time when the annual poll-tax was exacted, of the tax gatherer tying a Zoroastrian and a dog together, and flogging both alternately until the money was somehow forthcoming, or death released them. I myself was spared any worse sight than that of a young Moslem girl in Mazra' Kalantar standing over a litter of two-week old puppies, and suddenly kicking one as hard as she could with her shod foot. The puppy screamed with pain, but at my angry intervention she merely said blankly, ‘But it’s unclean.’ In Sharifabad I was told by distressed Zoroastrian children of worse things: a litter of puppies cut to pieces with a spade-edge, and a dog’s head laid open with the same implement; and occasionally the air was made hideous with the cries of some tormented animal. Such wanton cruelties on the Moslems’ part added not a little to the tension between the communities."

"The women had descended on the Lane like locusts, looking for bargains. ("Breaking the Fast")"

"She was standing over the candles and with both hands covering her face she had softly poured out her heart to God in heaven. ("Breaking the Fast")"

"Bill looked straight through the old man. His thoughts were very far away. ("Becoming a Tramp")"

"The baker's wife, who had been tut-tutting as her husband spoke, rejoined: "That's how they are. They don't know anything about compassion. For them, if you have money, you're lucky. If you don't, you can start digging your own grave. ("Becoming a Tramp")"

"People make their way through the library like a dense forest, not knowing where it begins or where it will end. ("Two Libraries")"

"The teacher is still basking in the beauty of his own creativity, when he realises that his only listeners are the walls. ("Two Libraries")"

"The small house stands on its own, completely isolated. The houses on either side have been reduced to high piles of burned, crumbling bricks, broken, rickety furniture, and the charred remains of enormous black beams. All kinds of tools and appliances are lying around amidst endless mountains of broken glass. Inside the house, destruction weaves its silent web, just like the cobwebs appearing between the flowers and the grasses, which have sprung up wild and free among the ruins. (first lines of "She is Not Blind")"

"Satisfied, filled with the warmth of the bright sun, the birds were singing cheerfully, oblivious of the war taking over the world. ("Blitz")"

"And there it was, in the ruined street, among the piles of bricks, earth, bent metal joists and glass, and the smoke and smouldering fires which the firemen had not yet managed to extinguish: the high-pitched, regular ticking of their office clock. It was still hanging on the one remaining wall, which was covered in black smoke. It ticked monotonously, vibrating slightly, like the only soul left living in a cemetery."

"The earth lay there like a corpse prepared for an autopsy, its innards wet and glistening. Sewage pipes were sticking out everywhere, like intestines falling out of an open belly."

"Bella was lying in her narrow, child's bed. She listened to the roaring Nazi aeroplanes and to the dull, faraway explosions and gunfire, which became increasingly clear as the planes came nearer. She heard the whistling sound of the bombs, which by now were coming down almost onto her own roof. As they fell, some of them wept like little children, others howled like mad dogs. She could see the flames through the window, rising up to the sky. Then another fire exploded in the blazing sky with such force it was as if somebody had poured a barrel of petrol onto a burning building. It lit up her girlish bedroom and the bed she was lying in."

"The alleyway exuded an air of Yom Kippur - beautiful, sad and eerily quiet."

"The air downstairs in the cellar was grey and foggy. It smelled of mould and the chill of graves."

"The small front garden was ablaze with colours and bursting with birdsong. The bright flowers of late summer were talking to each other intimately in their own, wordless language."

"It was the Sabbath. And even the wind and the snow rested from their labours. (first lines)"

"Hannah's words had pricked her like a needle. (Chapter III, p35)"

"Sometimes, however, even the poems failed her, her harrowed mind would not be soothed, and then she would run out of the home and post herself in the gateway of the house. Or she would lean up against a lamp-post which stood a few yards away and which had not been lit up for years, and she would watch the children at play, gaze after the passers-by who came and went, intent on their trivial tasks, completely absorbed in their humdrum, humble lives. Healthy-minded people. They got on with their work stead-fastly, and it never entered their minds to ask what was it all about? What did they live for? Why? Why? (Chapter VI, p98)"

""So there's no lack of poverty anywhere-not even in Warsaw! Ah, well, you'll find plenty of misery everywhere..." (Chapter VIII, p150)"

"The festive season was over, and this was the time of year when an old folk song haunted the air in town and village an old familiar melody that evoked a smile here and a sigh there: "Father, my Father, winter is drawing near, And Father, O Father, a Jew should know no fear, But look, O look, the snow is falling fast, And hark, O hark, at the spiteful wintry blast. See, there goes my roof, the water's coming through, Hurry, Father, hurry, send succour to a poor old Jew!""

"In modern Yiddish writing, the moral, spiritual, and emotional capital of generations of Jewish women was utilized by male and female writers alike...Female prose writers, such as Fradl Shtok, Esther Kreitman, Rokhl Korn, Kadia Molodowsky, and Khava Rosenfarb, also deepened the awareness and understanding of the feminine contribution to Jewish civilization."

"As the only female writer in what many consider the most singular family in the history of Yiddish literature, Esther Kreitman and her small literary output have been overshadowed by the voluminous works of her brothers I.J. and I.B. Singer. Her notable contribution to Yiddish literature, unheralded in her lifetime, was to write in Yiddish in support of the haskalah (Jewish enlightenment) from a female perspective, an achievement made all the more remarkable by her lifelong struggle with depression and perhaps other undiagnosed emotional and physical illnesses which disrupted her ability to write. Her ruthless depictions of women’s place in hasidic society remain as painful as fresh wounds. In her autobiographical novel Der Sheydim Tants (Deborah) she wrote: “In his heart of hearts, Reb Avram Ber disapproved of his wife’s erudition. He thought it wrong for a woman to know too much, and was determined that this mistake should not be repeated in Deborah’s case. Now there was in the house a copy of Naimonovitch’s Russian Grammar, which Deborah always studied in her spare moments, but whenever her father caught her at this mischief he would hide the book away on top of the tiled stove out of her reach, and then she would have to risk her very life to recover it.”"

"Esther Singer Kreitman was called many things in her lifetime: unattractive, household drudge, hysteric, epileptic, madwoman, controlling mother, a woman possessed by a dybbuk. These were the words—or epithets—her family used. Less often used were the words that should have been associated with her: novelist, short story writer, translator."

"His eyes burn like torches but he does not say a word. He looks at his mother with pity and clenches his small fists, thinking of Khetskel, of Shoshe, and of a way to escape. ("Shloyme")"

"There was the Temperance cause, a plain duty if there ever was one. ... There was the emancipation of women. ... There was Home Rule for Ireland. There was the protection of all who were, or were likely to be, oppressed: Russians, Egyptians, subject nations and coloured races and of course 'the poor' everywhere. I was more than ready to absorb this atmosphere. I had learnt philosophic radicalism from J. S. Mill and much the same faith in a more idealist and less critical form from Shelley."

"In Athens and Rome...every ultimate problem was theirs, as it is ours, and the more you open your soul to their appeal the more profound your pity for stumbling humanity, the more eager your effort to bind together the family of man rather than to loosen it. It is no blind chance that has led one of our greatest scholars to devote his life to the ideal of the League of Nations. Rather it is his desire to make his contribution to redeeming the failure of those very Greeks whom he, more perhaps than any living man, has helped this modern world to understand."

"Gilbert Murray...delivered a series of lectures in 1928 whose general burden was to affirm a passionate belief in the League of Nations, and yet which contained penetrating, even lethal, criticisms of it. He noted the weakness of conciliation as a means of solving international disputes... To solve this problem he proposed that all nations should agree to submit disputes to compulsory arbitration by the International Court, so that "if things came to the worst, the last resort would be Law and not Force". But here Murray was relying once more on belief in the power of parchment, for a determined and unscrupulous aggressor was hardly likely to honour its obligations to submit to arbitration when force offered more certain results... Murray ruled out the use of the most powerful and readily available armed forces at the disposal of the League... First disarm the French army and the Royal Navy, in order that all nations should be equally weak and then, wrote Murray, sanctions become both a genuine expression of the will of the community of nations and a safe and a necessary part of the Covenant. It was an argument of less than Murray's usual clarity."

"I had got to know him very well as Vice-Chairman of the Executive Committee of the League of Nations Union. He was a most delightful colleague, charming as a companion and invaluable as an assistant."

"[W]e need a number of educated poets who shall at least have opinions about Greek drama, and whether it is or is not of any use to us. And it must be said that Professor Gilbert Murray is not the man for this. Greek poetry will never have the slightest vitalizing effect upon English poetry if it can only appear masquerading as a vulgar debasement of the eminently personal idiom of Swinburne. These are strong words to use against the most popular Hellenist of his time; but we must witness of Professor Murray ere we die that these things are not otherwise but thus."

"Professor Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language. We do not reproach him for preferring, apparently, Euripides to Æschylus. But if he does, he should at least appreciate Euripides. And it is inconceivable that anyone with a genuine feeling for the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect the William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just equivalent. As a poet, Mr. Murray is merely a very insignificant follower of the pre-Raphaelite movement. As a Hellenist, he is very much of the present day, and a very important figure in the day."

"Gilbert Murray, just retired at Boar's Hill as Regius Professor of Greek, became a friend. As a young man, Bernard Shaw had taken him as the model for Adolphus Cusins, the hero of Major Barbara. A tall courtly Edwardian, with the exquisite diction of his period, he was an active Liberal, and a supporter of the League of Nations... All these men [Louis de Brouckere, Camille Huysmans, Martin Tranmael, Otto Renner, General Koerner, Leon Blum] had a serene humanity and a broad culture which is all too rare in modern politics. They were also gentlemen in the truest sense of the word. The only man I knew in Britain with a similar quality was Gilbert Murray."

"The Trojan Women powerfully depicts the horrors of war, and Murray assumed that Euripides meant it as a protest against atrocities committed by his own side in the war against Sparta and her allies that Athens was fighting at the time. This view still has some advocates; but those who are aware of the difference between a tragedy and a drame engagé see the play not as a protest against the behaviour of any actual persons, but as a portrayal of what the poet regards as a permanent feature of the human situation. This view of Euripides as a crusader for contemporary causes is eloquently expressed in Murray's book Euripides and his Age, published in 1913; the work is delightfully written, and (if you will forgive a personal reminiscence) did more than any other to make me want to be a scholar when I read it at the age of fourteen. But I now believe it to be almost totally misguided."

"Dr. Murray was like Wilson a professor, a Liberal, an idealist... Because of the confusion of thought that has surrounded the word ‘pacifist’ he was often thought of as a non-resister, a believer in unilateral disarmament, whereas those who know him and have studied his speeches realize that he was from the first a believer in League action and in clear-sighted preparations for sanctions. Distinguished as his services have been, the label ‘doctrinaire’ has been affixed to his policies."

"He is devoted to the study of literature; but, if I am not mistaken, this devotion is the expression, not merely of his taste and pleasure in reading, but of his whole moral nature. Classical education in his hands will not be a mere engine of literary culture, but a general training of the character and affections."

"I find him oppressively virtuous and intellectual. He is too self-conscious about it. There is something feminine in his conviction that he is right and that all who differ from [him] have a touch of wickedness about them. He would make an admirable Father Confessor to a Nunnery."

"The problem...was...how to induce the nations to disarm while they were afraid to do so, because, as Murray all too clearly perceived, "war can still be made, and there is no certainty that the nation attacked will be defended by the rest of the League". Nor were stricter and more elaborate obligations to support the League the answer...because, Murray pointed out, the present obligations were perfectly adequate, if only – if only – the members of the League lived up to them. That a man like Gilbert Murray could see so plainly the paradox on which the League of Nations was insecurely built, and yet remain the League's wholehearted supporter and propagandist, indicates how easy it was for faith in the League to blind the faithful... For the League of Nations itself the Japanese aggression raised as an urgent practical issue that fundamental question of power – military and naval power – which had so troubled Gilbert Murray in theory, but which had always been ignored or played down by most other moralising internationalists. Here was a bandit state engaged in open robbery; now therefore was the time for the law-abiding powers of the world to uphold the law against the wrongdoer; to act as policemen. Unfortunately the policemen had been persuaded to give up their truncheons."

"An old eagle, a blind eagle, who waits hungry and cold and still; He seeks nothing, he fears nothing: he stands lone on a lonely hill."

"It seems to me important that liberal feeling in England should keep fully in touch with the war...for the sake of the peace settlement afterwards. ... If we win, as seems on the whole probable, we must do our very best for a generous treatment of Germany. ... I think we ought also to go for a strengthening of the Concert and reducing armaments by treaty. Anyhow, whether it is practicable or not, it is enormously important not to have a mere grabbing or jingo settlement."

"Have you read Keynes on the Economic Consequences of the Peace Conference? I think it is important as giving in a clear and definite form the criticism of a Liberal-minded man who saw the proceedings from the inside... I can not help thinking that it really gives the scheme of a bold Liberal policy in foreign affairs. Aim, the re-integration of Europe, both political and economic. Method, the correction of the Versailles settlement by the L. of N. [I]t gives us a real fighting policy which has the further advantage of being right."

"[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment."

"This service of civilization is our true work; the occupation that gives meaning to life. We need peace, inward and outward, because peace leaves us free to attend to it; while war—or, indeed, any violent hatred—interrupts and wrecks and perverts."

"Is it pedantic, is it the mere result of my special education, that I fall back again upon Aristotle? He tells us that Happiness in the highest sense, or the true end of human life, is first activity, next unimpeded activity, and lastly unimpeded activity "according to virtue"; that is to say, on right lines and for good ends. Surely we want, both as individuals and as a community, to pursue that quest for the attainment or the creation of "a good life for man"; we want to get to that work unhindered and uncrippled, and therefore, apart from other reasons, we need above all things peace."

"As we get further away from the England of the nineteenth century, and see it separated from us by the great gulf of the war, we shall perhaps be better able to see it as it really was, to appreciate its extraordinary greatness, its peculiar faults and flaws, and to a remarkable degree its unity. Beyond question it was a very great age indeed. For Great Britain especially it marked the zenith of national success, the widest expansion over the world of British government, British commerce, British political thought, British morals, philosophy, science, poetry and prose literature. It was a time when Indian rajahs and Chinese mandarins learnt to play cricket and read Macaulay, as now they are learning baseball and frequenting the movies."

"The advance in humanity and care for the alleviation of suffering is also, so far as I know, without a parallel: in England alone in this period we find the abolition of slavery—at the cost of £20,000,000 of public money willingly given: the sweeping reform of the old criminal law and the barbarous penal system which accompanied it... We find the reform in the treatment of lunatics; the laws against cruelty to children and to animals; the Factory Acts; the Married Women's Property Acts; the immense spread of education in all it stages, both by public authority and by private experiment; the beginnings of the care for public health; the...greatly decreased consumption of alcohol... [I]t was, of course, the great age of Liberalism."