Mr Al-Khapoun's Christmas Quiz, 2007

Mr Al-Khapoun, of the Philistine/Liberace Organisation, posted a copy of his annual quiz on a CD to Mr Al-Khatraz. It never arrived and was not encrypted, so the answers can probably be obtained for a small fee from a dodgy bloke in a pub. It may be better, though, to try to identify the ten quotations below, all in their original languages, yourself. As usual, Mr Al-Khapoun has supplied some free translations of those that are not in English. Very belatedly, he has also supplied some clues of an unhelpful nature, and finally the answers.
  1. Why should we injure our health by close study? The exalted pleasure which intellectual pursuits afford would scarcely be equivalent to the hours of langour that follow; especially, if it be necessary to take into the reckoning the doubts and disappointments that cloud our researches. Vanity and vexation close every enquiry: for the cause which we particularly wish to discover flies like the horizon before us as we advance. The ignorant, on the contrary, resemble children, and suppose, that if they could walk straight forward they should at last arrive where the earth and clouds meet.

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  2. Der Tempel steht gegenwärtig auf einem verwitterten Felsen; von hier aus erstrecken sie die Stadtmauern gerade ostwärts auf einem Kalklager hin, welches senkrecht über dem flachen Strande, den das Meer früher und später, nachdem es diese Felsen gebildet und ihren Fuß bespült, verlassen hat. Teils aus den Felsen gehauen, teils aus denselben erbaut waren die Mauern, hinter welche die Reihe der Tempel hervorragte.

    The temple stands today on a barren cliff. From here the town walls stretch directly eastwards to a limestone escarpment, which cuts across the flat beaches that the sea has left, long ago and more recently, after it made these cliffs and washed at their foot. The walls behind which the row of temples stood was partly carved from the cliffs and partly built of stone from them.

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  3. Forse tutta l'Italia va diventando Sicilia... A me è venuta una fantasia, leggendo sui giornali gli scandali di quel governo regionale: gli scienziati dicono che la linea della palma, cioè il clima che è propizio alla vegetazione della palma, viene su, verso il nord, di cinquecento metri, mi pare, ogni anno... La linea della palma... Io invece dico: la linea del caffè ristretto, del caffè concentrato... E sale come l'ago di mercurio di un termometro, questa linea della palma, del caffè ristretto, degli scandali: su su per l'Italia, ed è già oltre Roma...

    Perhaps all of Italy is turning into Sicily. I had this idea, reading in the newspapers about the scandals in the regional government: scientists say that the palm line, the climate that suits palm trees, is rising, coming up northwards, at five hundred metres a year I think. The palm line...I'd say, the ristretto line, the strong coffee line. And it's rising like the column of mercury in a thermometer, this palm-coffee-scandal line, up and up through Italy, and it's past Rome already...

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  4. He hated injustice as he hated cruelty and he lay in his rage that blinded his mind until gradually the anger died down and the red, black, blind, killing anger was all gone and his mind now as quiet, empty-calm and sharp, cold-seeing as a man is after he has had sexual intercourse with a woman that he does not love.

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  5. The effect of this would be that the white people of the United States and Canada would find themselves marooned on a hostile continent, with the rest of the white world probably unwilling and certainly unable to come to their aid. All this is not, to my mind, the most imminent of possibilities, but if I were a Muslim, this is the possibility that I would find myself holding in the centre of my mind, and driving towards. And if I were a Muslim, I would not hesitate to utilize - or, indeed, to exacerbate - the social and spiritual discontent that reigns here, for, at the very worst, I would merely have contributed to the destruction of a house I hated, and it would not matter if I perished too. One has been perishing here so long!

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  6. I can all but hear the soft suck of a hubble-bubble in the café next door, and if I half-open my eyes and look at the tower of the Apostoli, along the street, I swear I can see the muezzin up there in the belfry, taking a deep dogmatic breath before summoning us to prayer.

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  7.             And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP and
                            you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP and he says
                            one set of glasses won't do.

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  8. C'est à très juste titre que Freud a fait porter sa critique sur le rêve. Il est inadmissible, en effet, que cette part considérable de l'activité psychique (puisque, au moins de la naissance de l'homme à sa mort, la pensée ne présente aucune solution de continuité, la somme des moments de rêve, au point de vue temps, à ne considérer même que le rêve pur, celui du sommeil, n'est pas inférieure à la somme des moments de réalité, bornons-nous à dire: des moments de veille) ait encore si peu retenu l'attention.

    Freud is entirely justified in turning his attention to dreams. It is quite wrong that this large part of psychological activity should have been so disregarded; for, at least between a man's birth and his death, thought is certainly not a continuing state and the total amount of dreaming, in terms of time, even only taking into account pure dreaming while asleep, is no less than the total amount of reality, or let us say of wakefulness.

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  9.             Qual in colle aspro, ad imbrunir di sera
                            L'avezza giovinetta pastorella
                            Va bagnando l'herbetta strana e bella
                Che mal si spande a disusata spera
                Fuor di sua natia alma primavera
                            Cosi Amor meco insù la lingua snella
                            Desta il fior novo di strania favella
                            Mentre io di te, vezzosamente altera
                Canto, dal mio buon popol non inteso
                            E'l bel Tamigi cangio col bel Arno.

    As at dusk on the high mountain the expert young shepherdess waters the beautiful exotic plant, which struggles to flourish in different surroundings, transplanted from its native soil: so love makes from my unpractised tongue new sounds bud forth, when I sing of you, lovely and remote: my own people do not understand me, and I give the beautiful Thames for the beautiful Arno.

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  10. His letter had one effect that would have astonished him. Worried and put out of temper by it, I slouched to the wicket after lunch without caring a hoot whether I stayed there or not. The result was that, favoured by a fair amount of luck, I "carted" the bowling all over the field; at the end of our innings I was not out forty-three. This was the highest score I had ever made for the village; and, although we lost the match by five wickets, I finished the day in a glow of self-satisfaction which was undamped by a tremendous thunderstorm which overtook us on the way home.

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