The Second Mister Read Online Free PDF

some sort of crab started to scrape at the bottom of my diaphragm . I understood what she had said but its enormity did not allow me to absorb it, as if my psyche had been rammed into a turnip pulper by her few verbs and nouns. I wanted to cry, I wanted to throw myself on the ground, I wanted to chase my old Medea of an aunt through the evergreens into which she had again disappeared and tear her to pieces bit by bit.
    Of course I did nothing.
    Eventually, a chill gust of wind from the west brought me to my senses and I started to walk away, without saying goodbye. Three beech leaves were suddenly lifted off the ground and they swirled around each other at extraordinary speed, reminding me of myself seconds before, a lifetime before. I went slowly towards the gate and when I reached it I looked back. Aunt Gethsemane’s head appeared suddenly in the middle of the shrubbery.
    “ I’ve cut you out of my will” she cried, as I moved away with a quickened stride.

    Footnotes
*She was given this name as a result of an event that took place not long after my parents’ marriage. My father, who had drunk several bottles of light ale with his lunch, went out into her garden to relieve himself behind her favourite tree, a chamaecyparis nootkanensis pendula. My Aunt unexpectedly came upon him before he had even started to undo his pants and then gave him a lecture that went on for over an hour on the respective merits and deficiencies of floribunda and hybrid tea roses. My father afterwards described the incident as “The Agony In The Garden” and went on to confer on my aunt the name by which she was subsequently known.

T HE POET FROM HIS DEATHBED
WRITES TO A FRIEND HAVING FALLEN
INTO DESPAIR FOR VARIOUS REASONS

J ULY TWELFTH

M ATRIMONY

L INGUISTIC R EFORM
    B en Jonson, Dryden, Lord Byron and I have, at various times, attempted to translate into something resembling standard English the works of Quintus  Horatius Flaccus, otherwise known as Horace . Whatever about the quality of the work of the first three gentlemen, I can say without hesitation that my own intensive efforts in this area possess a unique grace that resembles the hoof-prints of a drunken pack mule, described in shaky Braille.
    The reasons why Horace is so difficult to render into English are various. Even among his classical peers his work was regarded as a model of intensity and concision. The absence of definite and indefinite articles and certain other technical peculiarities of Latin add to the translator’s woes. In spite of this, I knew one young man who managed to greatly improve a phrase of the master.
    It was a long time ago, towards the end of April 1963. I was preparing for my Leaving Certificate examination. My Latin teacher was an elderly cleric, who was personally as unfamiliar with humour, as he was with cuckoldizing concubinage in Calcutta. There is some reason to believe that he may have smiled, or even laughed, a year or two before the Eucharistic Congress of 1932. The modern view however, is that this was probably a reflex action of his facial muscles due to bilious indigestion or, (Heaven forbid ! ), trapped wind. Anyway, a classmate of mine, was  translating Ode VII Book Four under the teacher’s rhadamanthine eye . All went well until he came to the fateful words “ Gratia…nuda .” These, he brilliantly translated as “ Grace, in the nude, Father ” . The priest reacted in a highly alarmed manner, then composed himself once more, and said:
“ No ! No ! Not at all ! It is ‘Grace lightly clad, because of warm weather’ .”
    And so, many happy hours were spent in the remaining weeks before our examination speculating as to which of the two states Grace was in at any given time, and how she might be induced to change from one to the other !
    Unfortunately, in most schools Latin has long since disappeared from the curriculum. I often feel sympathy for the young scholars of today, who have to face the worst that the Department of