Omar Khayyám, The Rubaiyat #1

I am a big fan of poetry and "The Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyám is one of my favorites. Naturally, I have first discovered him in Russian translation and I still enjoy it the most (by far), but recently I have been exploring English translation of his work as well; and some things are not bad at all.

So, I decided to do a few posts of my favorites in both languages to showcase the differences and the similarities. This is a first one (hopefully, of many):

You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse

I made a Second Marriage in my house;

Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

***

Мы чашей весом в ман печаль сердец убьем,

Обогатим себя кувшинами с вином.

Трикраты дав развод сознанью, званью, вере,

На дочери лозы мы женимся потом.

Comments

Alan Mathison Turing

Update (11/23/2013): " Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon." ( http://usat.ly/19bLZET ) Long overdue!!! With academic background in applied mathematics and computer science and years of experience in Information Technology it would be incredibly surprising if I didn't know of Alan Turing, or so I thought. Sure, I knew who he was and had a good idea of what he had contributed to the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and of course computer science, which he basically founded; and things like Turing Machine, Turing Test, and Enigma Code-breaking have been widely popularized. I also knew that he died relatively young, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding his premature death. That is until I read the following in the book titled "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: "Turing's hom

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter coverage , or all of these and few other things put together. But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the world of oral culture; to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to further developments of abstraction, symbolic logic, and mathematics; to the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book justice. So, I would simply s

Free to Choose

A while back I have written a post about two popular books by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freidman . Books that had, through their undeniable logic, a profound and lasting effect on my socioeconomic and political views: Now, through the digital powers of social networking the legendary 10-part PBS TV series "Free to Choose" (1980), based on the book of the same name, is available on YouTube. Yes, one would be committing about 10 hours of one's life to watch through all of these; but, in my opinion, this would be time well spent. So, enjoy - " Free to Choose ".

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