I worked on adding to my iPad music library this weekend. I also discovered that I can read Adobe .pdf documents with the iBook application. So I decided to try and salvage the contents from a CD that I bought in 2000 in South Africa with large collection of Afrikaans poetry on it (‘Die Groot Verseboek’/ ‘The Big Book of Poems’). It wasn’t easy. The CD had customized reader software on it, that could only run on pre-Windows 7 computers. I dusted off an old notebook computer that still had Windows XP on. Then I had to manually cut and paste the content from the reader frame into MS Word. The reader application crashed several times during these attempts : either because it was unstable, or because it was loathe to give up its digital treasure. But hey, I bought the CD, and I want to transfer the content over to my iPad. So I ended up with a 600 page Word doc, which I will reformat and see if I can add an index and links into.
I show one of my many favorite poems below, with a rough translation of the last verse in English. It is by Gottfried Watermeyer, was written in 1948 and is titled ‘Ballad of the Drunk Party’.
Love is the bitter glass
the dry glass, the dark glass;
love is the after-sorrow
that fits the hollow of the heart.
