Illiterate princesses

I've just finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans" to help with a translation I'm working on.

It seems to me that if they'd given the young princess her own diamond pencil and gold slate and sent her off to school with her brothers instead of having her sit at home on a plate-glass stool looking at her pretty picture book, she'd have been a lot better equipped to write things down when she was forbidden to talk in later life, and would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

Evidently, however, being beautiful and pious was much more important than being clever in these fairy tales. I'd like to think all has changed now, but a glance at the recent Target toys catalog that was delivered to us shows pretty clearly how we're shaping our children from early on. Girls: pink pages, princesses, castles, ovens, pink ovens that look like princesses' castles. Nourish, look beautiful. Be a little bitchy to other girls now and then if you have a bit of an edge. Boys, blue pages, guns, spaceships, building sets. Build, discover, destroy.

All the rivers of the world...

Last week I was driving to work thinking about the classes of the day and how I'd like to be back in bed, trying to keep enough attention on the road not to run into any people or kill any squirrels, and listening with about a fifth of one ear to an interview on NPR about Middle Eastern poetry, when I was suddenly jolted awake by this poem:

I live like a bird that does not know why it sings, like a tree that does not know why it grows, like a breeze that does not know why it blows, and like a fish that does not know why all the rivers of the world empty in the frying pans.

(I don't know where the line breaks are, though I can guess. The text is taken from the transcript on npr.org, where you can listen to the program too.)

It is by a contemporary Iranian poet Hamid Reza Rahimi, and is entitled "A Quarter to Destruction." It was the last line that caught me off guard - after three images of nature doing natural things (albeit without knowing why), unexpectedly the image of the fish, not swimming, but roasting in an incomprehensible drought that focuses the entire world, for the fish, in that inescapable frying pan.