Peter Shor

@ClaraDíazSanchez I haven't read any of Bessie Head's works, so maybe you're the one who's doing better.

Oops -- typo: Arun Kolatkar.

I got Arum Kolatkar's book Jejuri out of the library, and so far, most of my questions have been answered reasonably satisfactorily by the footnores (except maybe for the poem An Old Woman -- I'll try to formulate a good question about that one).

@Randal'Thor The first three paragraphs of that answer would make good comments on my answer, although they don't really make that good an answer by themselves. (The last few paragraphs are less relevant, even though I think they're still interesting.) Is one of the moderators interested in turning them into comments?

@bobble Elision in French (and, I believe, Latin) poetry is determined by definite rules which leave virtually no wiggle room for adjustments to accommodate the meter. This has never been true in English poetry.

@ClaraDíazSanchez Upvoted comments are good for the pundit badge: "Leave 10 comments with score of 5 or more." Of course, @verbose had already gotten it, and you can only get one of these.

@GarethRees Good job!

The "vision" Wordsworth refers to is the divine or spiritual vision that is often hidden or obscured by the "mist" of everyday life and concerns. The poem is about the importance of finding peace and beauty in nature, which can help us see beyond the mundane.

Google AI says: The lines "To mark a vision in our trust/ Too bright for us and dim for mist" are a quote from William Wordsworth's poem, "The Tables Turned." The poem is a response to a question about whether one should spend time in the study or in nature.

@CowperKettle Catching Google AI out on literary references is as hard as shooting fish in a barrel.

@CowperKettle At least Google AI got the author correct; it's from Kidnapped: "ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head!"

@ClaraDíazSanchez That answers my question of what kind of Peruvian accent pronounces loose as lewse. It's not pronunciation, it's spelling.

@CowperKettle The original of this has to be one of the most parodied pieces of poetry in existence.

@ClaraDíazSanchez I assume bobbie is complaining about their question being downvoted (I see no reason it should have been).

Paul Laurence Dunbar also wrote many poems in standard English, and was somewhat aggrieved that everybody (both black and white audiences) seemed to like his dialect poems better.

Countee Cullen also made some very disparaging comments about poets who wrote in dialect. But a little research showed that most black poets at the time thought it was a bad idea to write in broad dialect (the way Paul Laurence Dunbar did a quarter century earlier).

@verbose I decided that my answer was similar enough to your (excellent) answer that it would be better just to write a comment on your answer.

@bobble Good luck!

Dunbar died (young) in 1906, well before the Harlem Renaissance. Since we're discussing Countee Cullen, I thought I'd post one of Dunbar's poems here.

Excerpted from “When Malindy Sings”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

When Malindy Sings,

@verbose My answer is very similar, but not quite the same. I'll try to find some evidence for it, and post it.

@verbose I have some ideas, too. If your ideas don't agree with mine, I'll post another answer. Otherwise, I'll let you take care of it. (I don't really need any more imaginary points right now, since I've just passed 15,000).

I've now posted an answer to "Best of the 1st Quarter." Three nominees in addition to yours.

@ClaraDíazSanchez I have one nominee for the "best of the quarter", and I was looking around for another one.

@Randal'Thor Given that one of the answers to the Meta question has +4 votes, and the other answers are -2 or less, I don't think we can say there's no clear consensus.

And if the book isn't in Wikipedia, if it's been translated into English, we could use the English title by default. And if not, use the original title. How many books have been translated twice with different titles and are not in English Wikipedia?

@Randal'Thor To make an arbitrary decision, why don't we make default tag be the title in English Wikipedia. So for the book Le Grand Meaulnes, the English tag would be Le Grand Meaulnes, and The Lost Domain, The Wanderer, The Lost Estate, and Big Meaulnes could be tag synonyms.

@verbose Pale Fire does not have the same kind of off-putting underage sexuality (an understatement, I know) that either Lolita or Ada does. On the other hand, it might be off-putting for a somewhat different reason. There's a not very nice gay character in it, and I don't remember at all whether it's implied that the gayness is related to the not-very-niceness, or whether it seems like just a coincidence that the character has these two qualities.

@verbose So maybe I've been misinterpreting the way "murder being once done," is usually used.

He has a copy of Timon of Athens in Zemblan, and he actually quotes the four lines containing the source of the quote in his commentary, but since they've been translated into Zemblan and back to English, the relevant words are now silvery light rather than pale fire, so he completely misses the connection.

This reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov's book Pale Fire, where Charles Kimbote is trying to figure out which of Shakespeare's plays the title of John Slade's poem Pale Fire came from (he knows it's from Shakespeare because Slade says so).

And let me say that even if you had taught Utopia from the Robinson translation, nobody would blame you for missing the source of the quote.

@verbose Thanks! I completely missed the note in Murder Being Once Done about the soucrce of the epigrams (I was looking for something like it).

Let me thank all of you, especially @Tsundoku, for helping me figure out the meaning of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poem Dans l'été. This enabled me to translate it without horribly distorting the meaning.

@CowperKettle I’ve only read a couple of John Green’s books, but I’ve liked them. Unfortunately, Looking for Alaska isn’t one of the ones I’ve read.

@Steve: The generally accepted theory of quantum mechanics says that you can have different results even when you start with the same initial condition. So according to you, generations of quantum physicists are totally misguided and have not been doing science. While it's possible that quantum mechanics is deterministic, your theories are maligning almost all quantum physicists ... and these quantum physicists include some people who are incredibly smart.

@Aliénor Les français ne croient pas que les anglais prennent un "full English breakfast" tous les jours? Étonnant! (Et si quelqu'un vous propose une full English breakfast, et vous ne demandez que les ouefs et le bacon, vous recevrez probablement une très petite portion d'oeufs et de bacon.)

@temporary_user_name Order toast and croissants, and put the jam that comes with your toast on your croissants. (Or would ordering both toast and croissants also be a faux pas?)

@BertranddeBayardduGuesclin Merci Beaucoup!

You ask "Is it in danger of getting into the Standard English Dictionary?" Too late; it's already in the OED. Although it says "now only dial., or vulgar."