11.45 TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
Poem for translating for Workshop 2014: God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Director: Despina Pirketti (Cyprus)
with visiting translators from Hungary, Japan, France, Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Cyprus, South Korea
MC: Derek Egan, Hopkins Festival Committee
God's Grandeur
by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed.
Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)