Translators From The United States

"I discovered that the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet."

": Journal of Discourses 21:65"

"[A]s a commencement the Lord appeared unto Joseph Smith, both the Father and the Son, the Father pointing to the Son said, "this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him" Here then, was a communication from the heavens made known unto man on the earth, and he at that time came into possession of a fact that no man knew in the world but he, and that is that God lived, for he had seen him, and that his Son Jesus Christ lived, for he also had seen him."

": Journal of Discourses 20:167"

"None of them was right, just as it was when the prophet Joseph asked the angel which of the sects was right that he might join it. The answer was that none of them are right. What, none of them? No. we will not stop to argue that question; the angel merely told him to join none of them that none of them were right."

": Journal of Discourses 20:257"

": March 2, 1879"

"When Jesus sent forth his servants formerly he sent them to preach this Gospel. When the Father and the Son and Moroni and others came to Joseph Smith, he had a priesthood conferred upon him which he conferred upon others for the purpose of manifesting the laws of life, the Gospel of the Son of God, by direct authority, that light and truth might be spread forth among all nations."

": Journal of Discourses 18:325-6"

": December 31, 1876"

"Again, there are other things associated with these matters, all bearing more or less upon the same points. When God selected Joseph Smith to open up the last dispensation, which is called the dispensation of the fullness of times, the Father and the Son appeared to him, arrayed in glory, and the Father, addressing himself to Joseph, at the same time pointing to the Son, said, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.""

": January 4, 1880"

"I remember something Stanley Kunitz once told me. He said, "Poetry explores depths of thought and feeling that civilization requires for its survival.""

"I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature."

"In the best painting as in authentic poetry one is aware of moral pressures exerted... choices are important, moral pressure exists to make right and wrong choices."

"I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes."

"Things come to me, they speak to me. Stanley Kunitz has had an enormous impact on my life. He once said that poetry is only half language, the other half is a quality of perception, a function of the imagination, a particular form of paying attention. For me, it's a stilling of the self, waiting for this language to speak to me before I utter it."

"If ever there was a fish made to endure, it is the Atlantic cod—the common fish. But it has among its predators man, an openmouthed species greedier than cod."

"To a cod, ocean floors mean safety. That is why they were rendered commercially extinct by bottom draggers."

"Most of the fish we commonly eat, most of the fish we know, could be gone in the next fifty years. This includes salmon, , , , and ."

"Salt is certainly a worthy successor to Kurlansky's phenomenally successful Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Readers with a passion for cookery will love it just as much, especially as Kurlansky once again litters his narrative with ancient and modern recipes garnered from all over the world."

"It is harder to kill off fish than mammals. But after 1,000 years of hunting the Atlantic cod, we know that it can be done."

"As long as fisherman can catch a fish, they resist the idea that the species is in trouble. But with cod, they all recognize that there is a problem."

"The Magnuson Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 had extended the exclusive U.S. fishing zone to 200 miles offshore and set up as regulators regional fishery management councils dominated by fishing interests. Fishermen never had been good regulators, but they were virtually encouraged not to be by loan guarantees and other financial incentives that led to a massive growth in the U.S. fishing fleet. In 1994, when the National Marine Fisheries Service counted fish stocks, it concluded that the fleet was about twice as large as the fish stocks could sustain."

"Politics and nationalism often play far greater roles than conservation in the decision-making process."

"Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us."

"Whatever steps are taken, one of the great obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty."

"Commercially successful fish farms reduce operating costs by feeding pellets of pressed fish meal rather than wild bait fish. In the case of salmon they are also fit artificial coloring to give them the pink tin to the acquire in the wild from eating crustaceans. Gastronomically, a wild salmon and a farmed salmon have as much in common as a side of wild boar has with pork chops."

"Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all."

"But while the new, offshore all-Canadian fishery was prospering, the inshore fisherman found their catch dropping off. They suspected the reason was that the offshore draggers were taking so many cod that the fish did not have a chance to migrate in the shore to spawn. The inshore fishermen complained to the regulatory agency, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but the government had invested in offshore fishing, not inshore, and its political priority was to make its investment a success story."

"The 200-mile limit was not seen in Canada, the United States, or anywhere else as a conservation measure, but rather as a protectionist measure for the national fisheries."

"The ocean floor left behind is a desert. Any fish swimming in the vast area of these nets is caught. The only control is mesh size. Fish that are smaller than the holes in the net can escape. While mandating minimum mesh sizes has become a favorite tool of regulators, fisherman often point out that once the back wall of the cod end has a good crop of fish in it, few fish of any size can escape, regardless of how big the mesh. Millions of unwanted fish—undesirable species, fish that are undersized or over quota, even fish with a low market price that week—are tossed overboard, usually dead."

"All revolutions are to some degree about money."

"The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy."

"In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force."

"The native s of the New York area and their residents, ', are believed to have first appeared about 10,000 B.C. The oldest Atlantic , in , has been carbon-dated to about 6950 B.C. give or take a hundred years—long before the arrival of the three thousand years ago. This marks the oldest evidence of humans ever found in the ."

"In 1968 called the "the first music born in the age of instant communication." In June 1967 the Beatles had performed the first live international concert broadcast by satellite."

"... explanation for the human obsession with this common compound is ... offered ... in the 1920s, by the Diamond Crystal Salt Company of , in a booklet, "One Hundred and One Uses for Diamond Crystal Salt." This list of uses included keeping the colors bright on boiled vegetables; ; whipping cream rapidly; getting more heat out of boiled water; removing rust; cleaning bamboo furniture; sealing cracks; stiffening white ; removing spots on clothes; putting out grease fires; making candles dripless; keeping fresh; killing poison ivy; and treating , s, s, and s. Far more than 101 uses for salt are well known."

"Without the music to shout over, few people bothered saying anything. (Remarking on a power cut while in a bar in the Dominican Republic)"

"In spite of muzzling the press, imprisoning thousands, and engaging in torture, kidnapping and murder, the Gonzalez government was still vulnerable to the accusation of being "soft on Basques." To demonstrate the sincerity of its stance, the new government decided to have the entire twenty-three-person directorate of Herri Batasuna arrested."

"A group of Israeli rabbis has issued a call for the Sharon government to cease its policy of cavalierly allowing the killing innocent civilians in the [Palestinian] Occupied Territories in the course of its military operations against radical groups. They say such actions are inconsistent with the essence of the Jewish religion. Too right! Judaism has given us so much that is noble in ethical religion, and what the Likud is doing is an insult to that long and glorious tradition. Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist Revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism."

"“A second issue was the attitude of Shi‘i clerics, government officials, and laypersons toward Hindus. The clerical attitude can be easily summarized. Sayyid Dildar ‘Ali Nasirabadi harbored an almost violent animosity toward Hindus, arguing that the Awadh government should take stern measures against them. He divided unbelievers into three kinds, those (harbi) against whom Muslims must make war, those (dhimmi) who have accepted Muslim rule and pay a poll-tax, and those (musta’min) whom their Muslim rulers have temporarily granted security of life. He insisted that Imami Shi‘ism accepted only Jews and Christians as protected minorities (dhimmis), and even they could only achieve this status if they observed the ordinances governing it. He differed with Sunni schools that considered Hindus a protected minority... He wrote that Muslims could only grant infidels personal security (aman) in a country they ruled for one year, lamenting that the government had long treated as grantees of personal security the Hindus of northern India, who openly followed their idolatrous religion, drinking wine, and sometimes even mating with Sayyid women. He complained that the irreligious Sunni Mughal rulers of India neither made war against the Hindus nor forced them to accept Islam. Legally, nonetheless, the lives and property of Hindus could be licitly taken by Muslims.” (p. 225)"

"In his response, Foreign Minister Jack Straw said that September 11 had not come in response to any Western attack, and was itself in part responsible for the Iraq War. Straw seems unaware that according to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon's threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready. As for Straw's contention that September 11 caused the Iraq war, he should be reminded that Paul O'Neil reported that the very first Bush cabinet meeting he attended, in late January 2001, was "all about Iraq" and that the 9/11 Commission found no evidence for operational cooperation between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaeda."

"One of his charges is that I am accusing the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon of "dual loyalties." That is true, but not in the way Lake imagines. I believe that Doug Feith, for instance, has dual loyalties to the Israeli Likud Party and to the U. S. Republican Party. He thinks that their interests are completely congruent. And I also think that if he has to choose, he will put the interests of the Likud above the interests of the Republican Party."

"The precise reason for Hitchens’ theft and publication of my private mail is that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having “threatened to wipe Israel off the map.” I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel’s Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people. But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that “the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time.” It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks."

"The state of Israel is a project of Jewish nationalism that is as legitimate as any other national project. But Israel as a state is not perfect and cannot be above criticism in democratic societies, including practical criticism."

"I started in to cry and call his name, Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head. ... I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: But whether this was false or honest dreaming I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead."

"Last night I saw the grass Slowly divide (it was the same scene But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green) And saw the dog emerging."

"Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man."

"My dog lay dead five days without a grave In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine. I who had loved him while he kept alive Went only close enough to where he was To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell Twined with another odor heavier still And hear the flies' intolerable buzz."