William Butler Yeats. Ezra Pound. James Joyce. Henry James. General Motors. Microsoft. Bill Murray. Seamus Heaney in German. Mickey Owen. Battle of the Bulge. Ingrid Bergman. Jackie Robinson.

Where else in one scintillating place?

William Butler Yeats got the Nobel prize in 1924, British literary establishment objected. Ezra Pound said do it again, elect an Irishman, viz. Joyce, a "heimatlos" (exile). It was P's last word or action for Joyce, whose Ulysses had been stopped in both U.S. and Britain -- in the former without complaint by any writer. Neither British nor American therefore should get the prize, said Pound.

Henry James had to be cajoled into writing a commendation of William Dean Howells when H. got an award in the U.S. What he did write was not used, being insufficiently laudatory. Pound refers to this in his spring 1924 "Le Prix Nobel" in a Berlin journal. [Pound/Joyce, 216]

Language problem: General Motors tried to sell its Chevrolet Nova in Mexico some years back, never thinking that "no va" in Spanish means "doesn't go." For Chevrolet it also meant "doesn't move," as out of showrooms.

More recently, Microsoft peddled a Spanish-language thesaurus with some stunning suggestions, as told in the 7/8/96 Wall St. Journal. For black people, for instance, it suggested man-eater, cannibal, and barbarian. For people of mixed race, bastard. For lesbian, vicious and perverse. For Indians, man-eating savages.

Microsoft had its excuses and promised to change things, but historian Fernando Benitez had an early verdict: "Those who made this thesaurus are imbeciles and cretins."

Distance learning: When Gilbert & Sullivan's Arthur Sullivan was preparing a U.S. tour 100-plus years ago, his life insurance company asked where Los Angeles was. "Near San Francisco, about 200 miles distant," Sullivan told them, which gave them a good enough idea even if it was about 200 miles off. West of Chicago, he might have said, and they would have nodded sagely.

Sharp comment: "Not the sharpest knife in the drawer," said comedian Bill Murray of State's Atty. Jack O'Malley at a fund-raiser for O'Malley's opponent Dick Devine. Murray said he asked O'Malley what he thought of the witness protection program, O'Malley said he didn't know but wanted to know what time it was on.

Marx restated: Activism is the opiate of the conscientious.

Languages: Die Hagebuttenlaterne. The Haw Lantern (DTV, 1995) has poems by Seamus Heaney, the Irishman, with Heaney's English on one side and a translator's German on the other. Makes for a nice little language study, the Deutsch being close enough to English to help understand Heaney's meaning, at least for those of us who grew up with war movies in the '40s.

Or who like me once worked on German pronunciation with a German Jesuit friend, down whose stoical countenance ran a tear when I gave Goethe all I had, reading it aloud though understanding none of it. He understood and wept to hear it. Typical sentimental German.

When Heaney uses "or" with a certain tantalizing ambiguity and the translator makes it "ja," I get it: the "or" is for emphasis, as we say something, then take it a step further with "Yes, even . . ."

So from Heaney's "The Old Team": "A railed pavilion/ Formal . . . in the sepia/ Of . . . Edwardian /Ulster. Which could be India/ Or England. Or any old parade ground ?" For the "Or" the translator has "ja," which I take as "Yes, even . . . "

Good catch: by reader Phil, a Francophone by acquisition, who reminds me how "of the" works itself out in French: "de le" (masculine) becomes "du," but "de la" (feminine) stays "de la." So in a post it should have been, as any self-respecting Francophone knows, "headline de la semaine," not "du semaine." As my old Latin teacher used to say, "Is anything clear?"

Or as Brooklyn Dodger fans said after the 1941 World Series in which Mickey Owen dropped the third strike: "We do appreciate good catchers."

General Montgomery, I presume: During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, German soldiers were infiltrating U.S. positions with intent to do harm. U.S. sentries quizzed everyone, asking not about the Declaration of Independence -- easy to study and learn -- but about who won the last World Series, etc. Non-Americans might know the one, they probably wouldn't know the other.

U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley, stopped, had the capital of Illinois right and knew where the guard lined up in those days -- between tackle and center. He didn't know Betty Grable's current husband (Harry James), however. But the sentry let him go, pleased at knowing something Bradley didn't.

For the British commander, Gen. Montgomery, it was another story. Impatient, Montgomery "imperiously directed his driver to ignore the sentry" with his inane questions (which Montgomery couldn't answer), and the man shot his tires out, holding the great man for several hours. When Eisenhower, the Allied commander, heard this, he had his first laugh in many days.

This is from Gerald Astor's Blood-Dimmed Tide, quoted by John O'Sullivan in The New Criterion for September, 1996. O'Sullivan's point was, there's more than the "ideological component" (as in the Declaration, for instance) to being an American. Important as it is, ideology is "merely the conscious political expression of a much more extensive national culture . . . results of a common language, history, institutions, and . . . the shared experience of living together . . . "

Mister Bowman, I trust? Had I availed myself of the option of leaving the Jesuits in 1954, after four years of reading no newspapers, and had I been drafted and sent to Korea, and had I been asked such questions as Bradley and Montgomery were asked, I would have had my tires shot out too.

For two of the four years of my Jesuit life, I had America, the Jesuit weekly, to peruse, with all its folderol about some senator named McCarthy. But that was it. Ingrid Bergman was still married to a Swede, as far as I was concerned, and Jackie Robinson was winding up his starring career with the Dodgers. Did you know he once took second on a walk? Caught the pitcher napping. By 1954 that was old news.