University of Alabama Football Report for 8/24/07

The Alabama Crimson Tide concluded fall camp this week and begins regular game preparation from here on. You are forgiven if this tidbit slipped your attention, as most observers have been dissecting Simeon Castille’s disorderly conduct arrest.

Cecil Hurt came down on the side of forgiveness and flattery. The Great Leader took pains to support his player while trying to forfend anyone from popularizing Tuscaloosa as not a good place to be if you’re young and black. After all, most recruits aren’t 59.

Besides, anyone who’s been to an SEC football game knows that disorderly conduct isn’t a crime but a characteristic. Too much prerogative is afforded those who elevate order as a virtue. In small doses (for example, to celebrate the completion of an arduous training camp), disorder can lead to wonderful places--and also, truth be told, to the back seat of a cruiser.

Not everything frowned upon should be criminal. I certainly don’t approve of the Zbigniew Herbert translations released earlier this year, but I wouldn’t throw Alissa Valles in the clink over it. Michael Hofmann might, but not me.

Yet, using the scope, one would think that Valles has done more harm than a boisterous cornerback in a college town. Weighing in at nearly two pounds, her volume will likely not be replaced in my lifetime. To a generation of English readers, this Herbert will be their only Herbert. The smaller, scattered, and selected volumes we’ve known will eventually fall out of print, if only because of college syllabi pragmatics.

What a shame it will be to lose this other Herbert, my Herbert. Valles’s decision, or (according to some) defalcation, to value the colloquial over the classical diminishes a good deal of what English readers have come to treasure in John and Bogdana Carpenter’s earlier translations. And she defends herself with the catchall of being “true” to the Polish. In the translator’s game, this is the same, sorry line as “just following orders.” In this regard, Valles pleads guilty to the charge some have leveled against her translations as being “unthinking.”

For to the English reader, I think it not important to be true to the arbitrary mechanisms of Polish grammar as it is to be true to Herbert, as best we can surmise his intent. So although Valles seems proud to exorcise articles from (the) verse--as Polish grammar does not apparently use any--a quiet voice asks, “but what if Herbert had written in English?”

That same voice is the one I remember in the earlier translations, where Herbert’s poems seem to be written for Western Union rather than the Western canon, telegram messages from some great celebration or tragedy. That Herbert’s collected volume registers such a hefty mass is impressive given that he rarely extends a line to ten syllables.

Hofmann’s critique of the new translations lost some traction when critics of the critic pointed out that he does not (or cannot, to use his words) read Polish. Irrelevant! Hofmann, as a translator himself, knows that the mother tongue never makes it to the finish line. Our problem here is thoroughly English.

Still, enough of the Herbert I remember makes it through to make the reading worthwhile (after all, he was a tough guy who withstood worse occupiers), so I bear no real enmity toward Valles. When it comes to print crimes these days, I’m more concerned with gimmick infringement!

Roll Tide.

University of Alabama Football Report for 5/25/07

From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded. I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!

Jesus, in the Gospel of Luke (or Toby McGuire, in Spiderman 3)

The off-season for college football, as connoisseurs know, doesn’t really begin the second week in January. No, as the last seconds tick down in the national championship game, the last thing on the college football purist’s mind is victory or defeat, but on the next game: recruiting. An oft-told joke in that vein has Bear Bryant hated in country clubs throughout Texas and Oklahoma because his arrival at Texas A&M essentially snuffed out any chance of bumping into your school’s coach out on the summer links.

Perhaps that’s the bright spot in Nick Saban’s miserable performance in last week’s charity golf outing.

But the Great Leader has more to worry about than his handicap. Breaking “news” from Miami has Alabama guilty of recruiting violations right out of the starting gate. The minutiae are thus:

-- The current rules state coaches may observe high school prospects during this time period.
-- Said high school prospects and coaches may not converse beyond what the NCAA bylaws only describe as a “greeting.”
-- Two high school players in Miami have talked with the Great Leader, as some reports have it, up to ten minutes. Gasp and horror!

A popular bit of pabulum holds that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I doubt I’ll ever know who said that first. It’s been attributed to everyone from Eli Wiesel to (get this) Gunter Grass to a horde of crackpot pop therapists. But success has many baby-daddies, so I’ll not quibble.

Alabama has had its bright moments in recent years (remember the SI cover?), but that’s all. Moments. A passing foretaste that graces the appetite with promise and nothing more. On the other hand, Alabama has had its fill of indifference.

The violations listed above are laughable not because the accusations are false, but because they are most likely true! They are also most likely never adhered to. By anyone. As attested to by the University of Miami’s head coach being at the same high school, at the same time, talking to the same players.

Am I to believe that an American teenaged football player is allowed to be “observed” by prospective future coaches (who offer prospective future scholarships, which offer prospective future million-dollar paychecks) and will not talk his fool head off? If you have a teenager in your life, first, my prayers, secondly, try to engage in a simple “greeting” as the NCAA demands. You will receive, depending on the teen’s view of what you offer, either the tortuous drips of grunts and mumbles or the deluge of every embarrassment the youth’s half-hollow head can tip out.

This is abstinence education for the mind.

The Great Leader is not omniscient, and he has learned something from this. He has learned he will not be ignored. He has learned where he is not loved. He has learned he is hated. This we can work with. This feels right.

He who preceded the Great Leader’s arrival was, for better or (more often) worse, loved and loving. So, initially, when the Great Leader did not say our battle cry and did not wear our colors, some could not be faulted for their worrying. We have abandoned love for the highest priced whore in town.

But remember, love will get you six wins a season.

Roll Tide.