Rick Polito of the Marin Independent Journal described The Wizard of Oz this way: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”

Similarly, one day I was discussing Blade Runner with my wife when my four-year-old asked what it was about. I said, "It's about a guy who has a dream about a unicorn, and then another guy gives him an origami unicorn, and that's how he knows he's a robot."

It's kind of a compilation of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars.

The original "Hamlet" myth was just your run-of-the-mill revenge story. Amluth's uncle murdered his brother. Amluth presumably felt he couldn't do anything about it in the short term. So, he goes to England, gets a wife and a baby, then comes home and murders everyone. I guess Shakespeare felt it necessary to drag out that story for three hours, thus all the bullshit about Hamlet pretending to be insane (or was he pretending?), etcetera.

I think I prefer the original.

Thanks, Brendan. Hadn't seen this Cavafy poem before, and it's wicked lovely. Which translator, which edition?

Sure thing, TAT! Translated by either Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard, from their "Collected Poems, Revised Edition," originally 1975 then revised in 1992. Princeton is the publisher.

Er, strike that "either." Apparently, I'm still a little rusty at the whole typing thing.

I'm just thankful that Schoenberg and Boubill have not made an insufferable but crowd pleasing musical out of it. I shudder at the songs they'd create for Ophelia and the inconsequential voices that would sing them.

Just got back from Burma myself! We might have seen each in Yangon or Bagan without knowing it.

Ah yes, Burma/Myanmar. Did you go there after visiting Germany/Deutschland and Poland/Polska?

The individual lines aren't doing too much for me (though obviously, that's often the thing that a translator needs to sacrifice in order to make the whole sensible), but the arrangement's a wonderfully intelligent underwheming. Thanks for posting it, I liked it quite a lot.

I heard from an Egyptian poet (Maged Zaher) that Cavafy, because he wrote in Alexandria, is a big deal in Egyptian poetry as well, particularly for the Christian minority in that country. Obviously, his language was Greek, so those that claim him as their own have to read him in translation too.