Please hurry over to Poemas del rio Wang, where you will find, as MMcM says, a most informative discussion about the Bär aus „Pisam”. As always Studiolum, who is by training an art historian, has some wonderful photographs–this time from Vienna and Bern.
And More Bad Taste:
As a bad-taste follow up to mab’s Pictures To Make You Puke (about Moscow’s building frenzy), Julia, a sometime contributor to Poemas del rio Wang, has at her other blog, in Argentina, Meliora Latent, some really extraordinary photographs from la Pampa, in Argentina, including a peculiar International Style cathedral. In contrast to the Moscow buildings, which are the kind of thing you can see all over the place nowadays (just worse), the la Pampan ones are very local and all the more interesting for that.
A Bad Guide 
Thank you, AJP.
Though my photos aren’t from la Patagonia, but from la Pampa (another Argentinian region that we have to travel across to go from Buenos Aires to the Patagonia)
I know, it’s a tiny detail… But I have to put it right.
In conclusion, bad taste is everywhere!
Except at Studiolum’s :-), of course.
I’m sorry, I’ve corrected it; I’m reading too fast. We have guests at the moment, so I’m skimming a bit.
Thank you very much for your kind recommendation, Megkoronázott. That post would have not been born without the inspiration and careful research of you, Language Hat, MMcM and bruessel. What I did was nothing more than checking the source of Schlosser and adding this little gallery der Bären von Bern. It was a fun, and I hope that the hunt for the bear in Vienna (which now seems to be postponed after Easter) will be just as much fun and a fruitful one to that.
Oh, thank you again, AJP!! I see now that you’ve corrected your text (you’re too kind, there weren’t no need, actually)
It’s spring here. Except:-
I wand’r’d lonely as a cloud,
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
Not once did I espy a crowd:
‘s a dearth of golden daffodils!
Studiolum:
Finding another crocodile would be the cherry on the ice cream, or some similar food metaphor. Die Berner Bären look strangely similar to the Bär aus Pisam. It must be their guns.
Dearieme,
What about blossom?
Julia,
One doesn’t want to look sillier than necessary, so I correct mistakes in the text. I know some bloggers mark changes in an “update”; I’m not so scrupulous, because I don’t see the necessity.
AJP,
Complete success: you don’t look silly at all!
Dearieme,
Don’t worry, autumn is coming here (sniff !) so your turn is near, now.
Blossom? Only the winter-flowering cherries. Nothing springlike yet, except catkins on the hazels. Lots of crocuses, mind, snowdrops, aconites and a few wee irises.
Yes, it is absolutely not impossible that the little Ambras bear was a gift of some embassy from Bern to the Archduke.
And what a happy coincidence: just now I discover that the bear-post was born precisely on the hundredth birthday of Alexander Lénárd, translator of the Latin Winnie ille Pu. The humanist bear searching for honey in the helmet could have also sung Winnie’s honey-hunting song:
Cur calleo cantare
Dum nequeo volare?
Egeo dulcis mellis,
Sed mel stat in stellis.
Blossom? Only the winter-flowering cherries.
That must be what I saw on a trip to London one Feb or March. It was so surprising, so different from snowy Norway at that time.
Studiolum,
I meant to remark on those bees and the two helmets in your bear post. That’s really wonderful and odd.
I thought you had done a post about Lénárd Sándor /Alexander Lenard and The Valley of the Latin Bear, but I can’t find one.
Is that his extremely free translation of Isn’t it funny, How a bear likes honey, Buzz, buzz, buzz, I wonder why he does?
No, I had not. We only spoke about him here. I only planned to write one, but unfortunately I have not done it yet. What a pity: it would have been a beautiful homage on his birthday.
Nevertheless, the Hungarian blog Laudator temporis acti focusing on the modern use of Latin, where I was recently invited as a co-author, has dedicated a festive post to him. Although it is in Hungarian, it includes a comparison of the first paragraph of Milne’s original English and Lénárd’s Latin, pointing out that his translation was much more faithful than the (otherwise extremely enchanting) Hungarian translation by Frigyes Karinthy.
Is that his extremely free translation
I am not sure. I do not have the English version at hand (and curiously I cannot find any on the web), so I cannot check the place. Instead, I have scanned and uploaded for you those two pages from the Latin version where the story is told: here and here.
Yes, Lénárd was very free in the translation of the poems, he translated faithfully only the prosaic parts.
I can’t look it up either.
Sometimes his translation is better than the original:
“Well, there you are, that proves it,” said Piglet.
‘Ecce tibi, quod demonstrandum erat,’ dixit Porcellus.
Thanks, that’s it!
The Cur calleo cantare one is a bit different (I’ve found my daughter’s copy):
It’s a very funny thought that, if Bears were Bees,
They’d build their nests at the bottom of trees.
And that being so (if the Bees were Bears),
We shouldn’t have to climb up all those stairs.
My mother ought to be writing this, she knows both books by heart.
Just now I see, here you can officially download the whole Latin text from the site of the Hungarian National Library: http://www.mek.iif.hu/porta/szint/human/szepirod/kulfoldi/milne/micimac2/
and here’s a NYT article on it
So he was only 62 when he died.
Apparently a translation of The House At Pooh Corner is available, though it’s probably not the same without Lénárd.
…and here’s an unpublished English manuscript of Lénárd himself on why he translated Winnie to Latin.
Oh, thanks. He really deserves to be collected into one volume.
Well, all this should be a post, Studiolum…
Ok, I will try to write it soon. Even if now you know everything about his Winnie, but there is still his Cookbook of Rome, the Seven Days of Babylonian, his correspondence in Latin with Robert Graves and so on, all imbued with his wise stoic humor.
A short remembrance of Lénárd’s son Giovanni of his father, in Portuguese: http://giolenard.blogspot.com/2009/04/meu-pai-sandor-alexander-lenard.html
Very nice. He seems to have lots of descendants.
Correspondence in Latin with Robert Graves! I would love to read that (or at least try to).
Alexander Lenard – Robert Graves: Epistolae.
¡¡¡¡¡ – !!!!
And he writes from Blumenau, Santa Catarina (tengo saudades de Brasil!)
MMcM deserves a Nobel prize for his sniffing-out skills.
Look, this is Blumenau, a city full of germans and german folklore in the middle (or in fact, the south) of Brazil.
Not surprisingly it has the highest human development of the country.
How’s the beer?
Essential, fundamental and a basic necessity good for a town of Germans and Brazilians.
(But I never taste it, actually, last time we went there I was little)
Gratias, MMcM! (I think that is correct)
One more article on Lénárd’s Latin Winnie, from the 21 April 1961 edition of Life.