Nobody leads the cow
To the greenery cropped and dry
To the greenery without caresses,The grass which receives it
Must be sweet as a silken thread,
A thread of silk sweet as a thread of milk.Ignored mother
For the children it is not lunch,
But the milk on the grass
The grass before the cow,
The child before the grass
That is by Paul Eluard, translated by Ted Hughes. I’ve still been very much enjoying Letters of Ted Hughes.
Elsewhere in the world of fiction, I found the "philosophical" European bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog precious and unbearable; I couldn’t get to page 30. The new John Updike novel, The Widows of Eastwick, has been mostly panned, but I agree instead with this very positive NYT review.
Ah, yes. Another intersection between economics and cows….
By the way, the original French is at least pleasant-sounding rhyming nonsense, which the too-literal-minded English above just sounds barbarically silly.
Finally, “strand” might work better than “thread”, for both silk and milk. In English, a thread is usually something of hairlike thinness; you can’t really speak of a flowing twisting braid of milk being poured as a “thread” of milk. Strand covers both meanings, and I believe that French “fil” does too: for example, you can speak of “un fil de perles”, while in English, Google confirms that it is more common to speak of a “strand of pearls” than a “thread of pearls”, although “string of pearls” is considerably more common still.
Pleased to hear some confirmation of my Blink-style reaction to The Elegance of the Hedgehog when I picked it up in a bookstore.
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It is enlightening!
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