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Quote of the Day: Michelangelo on Transformation
— Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni in a sonnet
Few natives of the Anglosphere may know just how much of a Renaissance man Michelangelo was. Not only a painter and sculptor, but also a poet. Here he describes the process of creating a statue from marble, wasting away bits of the marble until only the statue is left. Sometimes, we don’t like to see waste. We don’t like to see people without or between jobs, but we are collectively shaping our country and our economy into something new each day. There will be chips of marble separated off that cannot be used for a smaller statue or for any other high purpose. Some will just wind up as dust and gravel, perhaps to mend a road. It will all be used in the end.
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It’s like the old joke. How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Take a block of marble, and cut away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
You’re going to make me do it again, aren’t you?
True genius often sparks jealousy in lesser lights.
Besides, it’s his 543rd birthday. Just wish him a happy birthday and give the guy a break.
hello
I don’t think Twain is jealous so much as irritated with the habit of lesser men borrowing reflected glory.
Bon jour, Monsieur. Table for one?
That’s a grand old age. Happy Birthday!
Yeah, Twain does that to me too.
I think it was a comment on the general tendency of Europeans to stand on their laurels as reflected through the specific tendency of tour guides to try to mold their presentations to their perceptions of their (in this case American) audience.
Some of my favorite sculptures are the incomplete ones of Michelangelo in Florence. It’s like watching the work living, emerging from the stone. Awesome to see.
ones of living, breathing female (dare i say feminine) types.
Not me. I just give him an Incomplete for those.
Once we start grading on a curve, our standards will erode, and before you know it, all art will be judged for its timeless beauty and transcendent insight into intangible truths, instead of on measurable nationwide objectives.
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These days you might be able to make it into a modern arts museum by calling a block of marble an unfinished sculpture.
It has probably been done.
Sculpting is an interesting craft. You take things away to reveal what you want. Wonderful words from Michelangelo.
So did Michelangelo write Sonnets in English, or did someone translate this so it rhymes?
Translated. Obviously, he would have been writing in the Italian dialect of his place and era. I could probably find the poem in one of the volumes I have on my Kindle.
Unfortunately, my source did not have the original. I have a collection of over 300 of his poems in the original, but I do not seem to be finding this one, unless the unknown translator used a very, very loose translation of certain words that should be easy to find with a search. Let me look a bit more to see if I can find the original.
That’s kind of why I brought it up. It’s really hard to translate a poem to rhyme without changing the tone of the poem.
Okay, a little closer:
Okay, I think I know which sonnet it is now. Let me find it.
This may be it, but if so, the translation in the book on Colonna and quote is just really bad (and free).
Depends on the languages involved and how much of a poet the translator is. English is a rhyme-poor language compared to Italian. Of course, that quote I originally used does have a rhyme, but it seems incidental at best, and certainly not in the pattern Michelangelo used. You’ll note the one I think it may be is a full Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet. Seeing the fuller version in the book, we get thirteen short lines out of Michelangelo’s fourteen full lines.
Kind of a late promotion.
I’ll take it, though.
Maybe there is still hope for my stinky feet post.
You have to take this in context. Twain was one of the first — if not the first — modern travel correspondents. He often complained about tour guides who would give out false, exaggerated information about their subjects (reflected glory?).
This included scepticism about supposed artifacts of The Cross and other religious artifacts that he encountered again and again in various churches in the Holy Land and Europe.
After the Civil War, there was a spate of travel correspondents. Twain was satirizing them too, to a degree, by giving the actual interactions his group had with Ferguson (the name that he says the group assigned to all their guides “to avoid confusion”).
Wasn’t most of the poetry at that time written in Latin? The local Italian being thought too pedestrian for elevated art? I thought that was one of the groundbreaking achievements of Dante, writing in Italian.