Could anyone please tell me about international universities? I'm a very good student in the International Baccalaureate, graduating with two language B's (fluent English, French, and Spanish,) and probably two years of calculas, and maybe twenty AP's, so I don't worry THAT much about getting into schools. I'm looking at McGill mostly, which I know has a lot of Americans, but what about European schools? Are they expensive for nonnationals? And how do the billion American schools of Tokyo do so far as being good schools? I'm planning to study linguistics, if that helps. Do schools in Japan (I'm assuming European ones are like us, vodka belt and all) "party?" If you have any experience with this, please tell me about the applications process/getting scholarships (I'm not eligible for finanical aid, I think, and my only "minority" is being Jewish and possibly a daughter of the revolution/adjusting to a new language, etc.)Thanks for any information you can give.

Nazim Hikmet (turkish/french) Bir eski Acem şairi :
«Ölüm âdildir» — diyor,—
«aynı haşmetle vurur şahı fakiri.»
Şişeyi bırakın Ahmet Cemil.
Boşuna hiddet ediyorsunuz.
Biliyorum,
ölümün âdil olması için
hayatın âdil olması lâzım, diyorsunuz...
<em>Nazim Hikmet, ÖLÜME DAİR

</em>La mort est juste dit un poète Persan
Elle est d’une égale majesté en frappant le pauvre et le Shah
Laissez cette bouteille, Ahmet Djemil.
Vous vous fâchez en vain,je sais ce que vous voulez dire
Pour que la mort soit juste
Il faut que la vie soit juste.


Seviyorum seni
ekmeği tuza batırıp yer gibi

Geceleyin ateşler içinde uyanarak
ağzımı dayayıp musluğa su içer gibi ...

E T'AIME

Toi je t'aime comme je mange la pain avec du sel
Comme me réveillant dans la nuit brûlant de fièvre
Pour boire de l'eau j'appuie ma bouche au robinet
Comme j'ouvre agité, joyeux, inquiet
Le lourd colis postal on ne sait quoi
Toi je t'aime comme si pour la première fois je traversais la mer en avion
Comme certaines choses qui frémissent en moi
Quand doucement la nuit tombe sur Istanbul
Toi je t'aime comme on dit "grâce au ciel, nous vivons..."

English language poetry Robert Hass-

MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS

<table nowrap=""> <tbody> <tr> <td> <pre>All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of <em>blackberry</em> corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: <em>justice</em>, <em>pine, hair, woman, you</em> and <em>I</em>. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called <em>pumpkinseed</em>. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying <em>blackberry, blackberry, blackberry</em>.</pre> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table>
Faint Music



Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days--
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears--
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one--
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence--can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend once told about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word "seafood,"
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said "landfood." He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he'd reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast--and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put "fish" up on their signs,
and when he woke--he'd slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child--the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he'd used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They'd have just finished making love. She'd have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. "God,"
she'd say, "you are so good for me." Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
"You're sad," he'd say. "Yes." "Thinking about Nick?"
"Yes," she'd say and cry. "I tried so hard," sobbing now,
"I really tried so hard." And then he'd hold her for a while--
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall--
and then they'd fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
                           And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It's not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized--,"
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had this idea that the world's so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps--
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

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In French, is <<comme>> used like the English "like?" Like, if someone were speaking, and they had to stall a little bit while explaining something, would they be like: <<Bien, comme, si tu vois que sur cette carte, comme...>> Besides eh, bien, etc. what words are used to stall?