John Baker's Blog » french

Presque vu LXII

john baker — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:13:34 +0000

Romanian villagers have voted to re-elect a dead man as their mayor, to prevent his living rival winning. “I know he died, but I don’t want change,” one villager told Romanian TV.

BBC Scotland have a video of a French announcer at Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station who is proving to be a hit with female commuters.

Without Chuck Berry we wouldn’t even be here. Laura Barton on The Guardian’s Music blog asks, “Who is the world’s greatest lyricist?” But you have to spend time with the comments to get right down to it.

Lhasa locked down for procession of the Olympic torch. A one-minute video from Tibet, lest we forget . . .

Royal Academy – The Russian Paintings

john baker — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 08:19:44 +0000

A day out yesterday, to the Royal Academy to see some of the paintings we’ve never seen before.
From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg

The exhibition presents modern masterpieces drawn from Russia’s principal collections: the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

The biggest surprise was the colour and vibrancy of Matisse’s The Dance; but there were many other paintings on show, by Braque, Picasso, Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Chagall, Kandinsky, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and others, including a section devoted to Russian Cubo-Futurism.

The exhibition will remain at the Royal Academy of Arts until the 18th April.

An Old French Poet

john baker — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:36:41 +0000

Sully Prudhomme was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901. His best known poem was La vase brisé, of which the following is a translation by Pete Crowther:

The Broken Vase

A fan’s light tap
Was enough to chip
This flower vase
In which the roses
Now are dying.
No sound it made

But a hairline crack
Day after day
Almost unseen
Crept slowly round the glass
And dropp by dropp
The water trickled out

While the vital sap
In the roses’ stems
Grew dry.
Now no-one doubts:
“Don’t touch”, they say,
“It’s broken”.

Often, too, the hand one loves
May lightly brush against the heart
And bruise it.
Slowly then across that heart
A hidden crack will spread
And love’s fair flower perish.

The original French version is available here.