Colorado in the Fall

These are the colors of Colorado in the fall...

L'Infinito

In Italian schools they used to have students memorize poems - tons of them, beginning with easy ones in elementary school, going up to long sections of the Divine Comedy by the time you were in high school. 

At the time, I resented having to repeatedly read and recite verse, but now that I've long forgotten most of the poems I had memorized, the few that remain have become treasured possessions.

Here is one of the best of them: Giacomo Leopardi's L'Infinito

L'Infinito

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,

e questa siepe, che da tanta parte

dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.

Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati

spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani

silenzi, e profondissima quïete

io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco

il cor non si spaura. E come il vento

odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello

infinito silenzio a questa voce

vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,

e le morte stagioni, e la presente

e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa

immensità s'annega il pensier mio:

e il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

Giacomo Leopardi

What I've been doing instead of blogging

This year I've been blogging a lot less than in the past few years. Part of the reason was blogging fatigue, but mostly because I've been working on a special project for the Italian Language Division of the ATA: our new revamped website.

I started out thinking it would be a quick job of selecting a nice template and adding some updated content, and I ended up by hand-coding or tweaking all the pages and creating some special graphics for the site (such as the banner image of the home page).

In addition to that the ILD Twitter account is now active: @ATA_ILD, and of course, Tradurre (the ILD's blog) has been active for years.

Comment spam

In the last couple of weeks this blog has been on the receiving end of a real tsunami of comment spam, mostly from one sort or another of sleazy term paper mills, but also from sundry fly-by-night translation agencies that have somehow got the (mistaken) idea that sending contentless comments here (and, I've no doubt, to many other blogs as well) would somehow increase their web presence and lead to translation wealth.

This means I've had to delete dozens of comments, both from the (fairly efficient) Blogger spam folder, but also from the automatically published comments.

If in doing so I have inadvertently deleted a real comment of yours, I'm sorry, and I apologize.