Kitchen Garden Forum

Following Monika's post here on Karel Čapek's gardener's prayer:

O Lord, grant that in some way it may rain every day,
Say from about midnight until three o'clock in the morning,
But, You see, it must be gentle and warm so that it can soak in;
Grant that at the same time it would not rain on
campion, alyssum, helianthus, lavendar, and others which
You in Your infinite wisdom know are drought-loving plants -
I will write their names on a bit of paper if you like-
And grant that the sun may shine the whole day long,
But not everywhere (not, for instance, on the
gentian, plantain lily, and rhododendron) and not too much;
That there may be plenty of dew and little wind,
enough worms, no lice and snails, or mildew,
and that once a week thin liquid manure and guano
may fall from heaven.


I was inspired to do some searching for the text of this delightful book.

If anyone is interested you can see (some of) the English text by clicking HERE.

For Monika, the Czech text is HERE.

Thank you for that, Alan! Although I went to a Czech school when I was very small, I am afraid I am no longer fluent in it. Strangely, though, my Russian is much better and, using that knowledge, if I can mentally transpose the Latin script of Czech into Cyrillic script, I can just about get the gist!

It's a lovely prayer, isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if it could be fulfilled? Though it might be rather boring if we didn't have the vagaries of our weather and we would have much less to talk about!

Google translator is a great tool. I have used it for all sorts of lanaguages - sometimes it is a big iffy but definitely gives you the gist of what has been written.

glallotments wrote:Google translator is a great tool. I have used it for all sorts of lanaguages - sometimes it is a big iffy but definitely gives you the gist of what has been written.

Mmmm?

Here's Google's go at the first paragraph

Garden can be the foundation in several ways, the best is that it takes the gardener. Gardener you there nasází all kinds of cane, wicker and košťátka, which claims that it is maple, hawthorn, lilac, vysokokmeny, polokmeny and other natural kinds, then digging in the dirt, it zobrací turn it upside down and bribes, makes the slag path , nastrká here and there in some of the country withered leaves, which claims that it is Peren, our next lawn seed, which is called English Jílek a brown top, Meadow, buckwheat and Bojinka, and then leaves, leaving behind a garden brown and bare as it was on the first day of creation of the world, you just put on the heart, you have all the dirt carefully sprinkled the country every day, and the grass will come up that you have to bring sand paths. Well well.

It does seem to have lost that little something.

Maybe Czech isn't its strong point!

Or maybe it's our strange old English it cant get to grips with.

glallotments wrote:Maybe Czech isn't its strong point!

It's one of the few online translation engines which do Welsh, but it doesn't do well

Here's the first verse of Hen wlad fy nhadau (National anthem)

Fathers in the old country my dear me,
Country of poets and singers, renowned celebrities;
Its gwrol warriors, gwladgarwyr tra mad,
Collasant their blood for freedom.


Even we are not mad enough to sing that

I do like the renowned celebrities part, they must be trying to include you Alan, word must have got out about the forum.