Travel Between The Pages

Best of lists are always subjective but can be helpful if you’re planning a trip. Here’s one from a newspaper that has gotten some bad press of late. A list of the 20 best art museums in America, including the Wadsworth Atheneum, MoMA, MFA Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the top dog, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

”

Google Translate has become a powerful tool for breaking down language barriers. It helps millions of people communicate across different languages every day. As of October 2024, Google Translate supports 244 languages for text translation.

This wide range of languages covers many regions and dialects around the world. Google recently added 110 new languages to its translation service. These additions include Cantonese, NKo, and Tamazight. The new languages represent over 614 million speakers globally.

Google Translate offers various ways to use its service. People can access it through a website, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and an API for developers. The API allows creation of browser extensions and software that use Google’s translation technology.”

You can read the rest of this helpful article on Google Translate right here, I use it every day.

A Dog Has Died

By Pablo Neruda

My dog has died.

I buried him in the garden

next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,

but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,

his bad manners and his cold nose,

and I, the materialist, who never believed

in any promised heaven in the sky

for any human being,

I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.

Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom

where my dog waits for my arrival

waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,

of having lost a companion

who was never servile.

His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine

withholding its authority,

was the friendship of a star, aloof,

with no more intimacy than was called for,

with no exaggerations:

he never climbed all over my clothes

filling me full of his hair or his mange,

he never rubbed up against my knee

like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,

paying me the attention I need,

the attention required

to make a vain person like me understand

that, being a dog, he was wasting time,

but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,

he’d keep on gazing at me

with a look that reserved for me alone

all his sweet and shaggy life,

always near me, never troubling me,

and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail

as we walked together

on the shores of the sea

in the lonely winter of Isla Negra

where the wintering birds filled the sky

and my hairy dog was jumping about

full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:

my wandering dog, sniffing away

with his golden tail held high,

face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,

as only dogs know how to be happy

with only the autonomy

of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes

for my dog who has died,

and we don’t now and

never did lie to each other.

“Frankenstein”

by

John Gardner

(August 26th, 17—)

The myth is unchained: it staggers north,
insane. A ghost of lightning glows
in its eyes; its slow hands close in wrath
like child’s hands seizing flowers.

I hunt it, cavernous with hate—
my brain’s projection: speculum
of my dim soul, life-eating heart—
to tear it limb from limb

and lash it again to the bloodstained table
at Ingolstadt, beyond dark hallways,
sealed against night, where the busy smell of
death consumes like flies.

I made it giant. All its parts
of blood, bone, flesh must stand more plain
than life. Teased frail organic bits,
the mechanic dust of pain,

and so at last set loose my image,
mysterious as before, a monster
tottering now toward love, now rage.
He watched me like a stranger.

Make no mistake: I was not afraid,
not overawed, though I watched him kill
and stood like stone. I understood
his mind by a spinal chill.

But he bawled the woes of rejected things.
I could not say for a fact he lied
though I’d fathomed the darkest pits of his brains
and carved each scar on his hide.

And so he taught me nothing. He was.
Usurped my name, split off—raves home-
ward now by his own inscrutable laws
to his own disintegration,

staggering north. Outside my power,
beyond my understanding. And I,
who made him, cringe at my blood’s words:
None more strange than I

This may be a real alternative to Goodreads, Storygraph and Hardcover, BookWyrm is a decentralised, open-source social platform for tracking reading, sharing book reviews, and discussing literature, built on the ActivityPub protocol. Users can create personal bookshelves, follow other readers, and participate in a federated network of book lovers.