The second poem from this collection.

The painting is by Australian artist, Russell Drysdale (1912-1981), titled A Football Game, from 1943.

My Plough

Seems my strength is too little,
Seems my plough is too heavy:
I just can’t quite
Toss up any furrows…

It starts well.
But in a brief distance -
The ploughshare sticks
Into the yellow clay.

I wrecked my horse,
I wrecked myself.
Dad, who gave me such a
heavy plough…

Fricis Bārda

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iheartwinterr:

On Wednesday I bought a plane ticket and next day by noon I was flying to Venice. I landed in Venice with no plan, no place to stay at and no idea about what’s to see, where to go, etc. I spent the best part of the day trying to find a shop that accepted credit card, so I could buy a map and…

Wow! I am somewhat jealous of this crazy level of spontaneity….

Fricis Bārda’s first main collection of poetry was Zemes Dēls (Son of the Land), from 1911. Once again, I’ll have a go at translating some of these into English, with the Latvian originals in the read me section.

For the image I’ve got Odlion Redon’s, Woman with Flowers. This French symbolist artist had very poetic images; many of which are quite strange (go on: hunt down his smiling spiders!)

Son of the Land

In your hands you carry
shackles of blossoms.
To the land’s flowers
you’re a prisoner…

Oh, the country flowers
can bind so gently:
It seems at times - your
very hands are blooming..

It seems at times - these flowers,
are the one and all.
The heavens, nothing but
a distant fable.

But when night comes
and the eternal constellations climb -
you quietly state: in these shackles
your hands are hurting…

Fricis Barda

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curiositycounts:

Periodic Table of Typefaces: Popular, Influential & Notorious

(via)

katybutler:

Me taking a minute to talk about clothes and bodies, cause I can, okay?? :P Hidden behind a read more to protect your sensibilities.

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As daring as you aivlysann, stepping out in clothes?

dayvmattt:

I’m selling a book of my street photography to help pay for a new Camera.Check it out!

How does one get from Latvian poetry to The Smiths, via the paranormal? Simple, it happens like this:

1. I am posting translations of Latvian poetry on tumblr, like any normal person..
2. Since she is interested in all things Latvian, misssprings follows me, and with her promotion of Latvian culture (and dresses?!) I follow in return..
3. ..and find a few cool quotes she has posted by someone called Zenta Maurina, whom I’ve never heard of..
4. ..and so looking up in Wikipedia, I find a pathetic two-line stub, giving just her being a writer, and birth/death details. But it does mention that the Latvian Vikipēdija has more info…
5. ..which I translate and investigate to flesh out the English article, and so I look up her her husband..
6. .. who was an “EVP researcher’. Turns out EVP is Electronic Voice Phenomena - i.e. he was a psychic nutter (in my view), making thousands of hours of recordings “from the dead”…
7. …of which it turns out that the Smiths used the sound-bite: “You are sleeping, you do not want to believe…” in their song Rubber RIng. I’m sure I read that in Wikipedia yesterday, but can’t find it now, so here is a reference.

There you have it! Thanks, misssprings: now we all know this fascinating trivia, and English Wikipedia now has a half-decent article about this significant Latvian writer.

misssprings:

“The rainbow has seven colors, love - seven by seven.”

                                                                -Zenta Maurina

reminds me of Matthew 18:21-22

The Tin Drummer Grows

(My first gif animation. Wow, what a lot of fun! Thanks to GIMP, Paul Klee, and this for how to (ab)use GIMP...)

Although the book was written after Klee’s painting, The Tin Drum is a brilliant but disturbing (and fairly autobiographical) novel by German author, Güther Grass. I like to view the book and painting as connected.

Yep, should go to Rīga one day…