winestory

as tonight's pasta cooked, i raced to the grocery for bread and the wine shop for a li'l sangiovese and goats du roam.

funny how a baguette or two seems to cry out for friendly attention. g'head and try it -- carry a loaf of bread into the shop on your next visit and just listen to the ensuing banter.

i figure it must have something to do with linking bread and wine in the rubáiyát. here's fitzgerald's famous translation:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

hmm. if one really craved attention, i suppose it would be helpful to carry, say, the poems of john keats along with that baguette. here's a newer, though century-old, translation by arthur talbot:

25.

If in the Spring, she whom I love so well
Meet me by some green bank - the truth I tell -
Bringing my thirsty soul a cup of wine,
I want no better Heaven, nor fear a Hell.

40.

Whether my destin'd fate shall be to dwell
Midst Heaven's joys or in the fires of Hell
I know not; here with Spring, and bread, and wine,
And thee, my love, my heart says "All is well."

149.

Give me a scroll of verse, a little wine,
With half a loaf to fill thy needs and mine,
And with the desert sand our resting place,
For ne'er a Sultan's kingdom would we pine.

155.

Let Fortune but provide me bread of wheat,
A gourd of wine a bone of mutton sweet,
Then in the desert if we twain might sit,
Joys such as ours no Sultan could defeat...