Hilton Head Island: swimming; sailing; METAMORPHOSES; RETURN TO THE SEA; two poems

Carol and I went for a swim in the condo pool the other afternoon.  This was our first swim of the year and I who once was a strong swimmer felt like a fish out of water, not one in it.  I have been dutifully doing my various workouts, walking and biking, but swimming uses very different muscles.  I managed only eight laps of our modest size pool.  I'll go again this afternoon.  Maybe those muscles will come back.

I would like to go sailing.  Just locally and anchor out a night or two.  It is hot, but I have a small portable fan that operates off the ship's batteries and can handle the heat.  But we have thunderstorms in the forecast forever.  Yesterday afternoon one struck suddenly and I glanced up and saw through almost blinding rain the Spanish Moss horizontal in the wind.  That initial burst of wind and rain soon ended, but light rain persisted and distant thunder was almost continuous for three hours.  I don't recall thunder sustained for so long.

I have just finished reading Ovid's METAMORPHOSES for the third time each in a different translation.  This last was translated by Stephanie McCarter, the first English translation by a woman in sixty years.  I am not sure that the sex of a translator is of any significance beyond marketing.  I like her translation and particularly the many useful footnotes that were easy to access and easy to return from.  The other two translations I have are by men, David Raeburn and Allen Mandlebaum.  I think Mandlebaum's is the best.  I also think that three METAMORPHOSES is enough for one lifetime.

After METAMORPHOSES I started to reread RETURN TO THE SEA.  I had forgotten that there is no Kindle edition of RETURN TO THE SEA and will try to do something about that, but am having to read it in hardcover, which does not provide me with passages most underlined by readers as Kindle does, so I will simply post passages that I particularly like.

Here is the first page.

A little further on during the passage with Jill from Auckland to Punta del Este, Uruguay, via Cape Horn.

On all but the worst days when heavy water poured over the deck as RESURGAM pounded to windward and leapt off waves, I put on my foul weather gear in the afternoon and spent an hour or two in the cockpit.

 

One afternoon an albatross glided down and hung beside us.  He turned his head toward me.  Eye met eye.  Life acknowledged life amidst desolate mountains of water, until with an almost imperceptible curvature of one wind, he arched away and was gone.

I have never forgotten that eye contact.

And in Montevideo, Uruguay, 

In late afternoon we walked along the promenade beside the harbor.  We passed two couples sitting on benches partially sheltered by the seawall.  Only a few feet apart, they were oblivious to one another.  The first couple were young lovers.  The second, dressed in black, were a middle-aged man and an old woman.  The woman, whom we assumed to be the man's mother, was crying.  They seemed to have just come from a funeral.  The couples were the same:  a man with his arms around a woman, her face buried against his chest:  the embraces of love and death identical.

I have never forgotten those two couples either.

From Mei Yao-Ch'En, 1002-1060.

From Su Tung-P'o, 1037-1101