Sabina Messeg translates Gerard Manley Hopkins
Sabina Messeg is a Hebrew poetess, mainly writing about the geo-physical environment. She lives in nature, in monastic conditions. She also regularly visits real monasteries because she is interested in the religious experience in all its variety and in contemplative life. She has written and published more than 20 books, among them children’s books (published under the name Adula) and translations of poetry from English, French and Norwegian. She has won many literary prizes, however, the greatest prize (in her words) was when she discovered one day the book of “The Spiritual Exercises” of Ignatius of Loyola – a real manual for poets.
Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (1844-1889) was an English Jesuit and innovative poet whose use of the English language created a revolution in English poetry.
Sabina Messeg published a review of the translation of Hopkins’ poems by Professor Shimon Zandbank in the daily “HaAretz”: View and read (in Hebrew)
Pied Beauty
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
For Hebrew translation see Hebrew text.