Sabina Messeg translates Gerard Manley Hopkins


Sabina Messeg, a poetess and translator, visited our Haifa community, asking about Father Elias Friedman, a Carmelite monk and one of the pioneers involved infounding the Hebrew-speaking Catholic communities in Israel. Sabina told us that she is translating Father Elias' English language poetry into Hebrew and that she has also translated some poems of the great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. We are honored that she has allowed us to publish here one of Hopkins' poems.

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.

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