I'm not certain he had elections in mind, but Confucius did say, "There is no spectacle more agreeable than to observe an old friend fall from a roof-top".

Although, like others, I have a feeling there may well be further agreeable spectacles in our future, it is now time to make a show of getting on with life.

It's August. This is a time for travelling in the deep north. If not, it's a time for lying, as though dead, in deep shade.

It's also time to think about choosing a book or two to take into that deep… whatever it is.

It's an odd year for books - the best-seller lists seem flat, unless reading about how breathless it all made Hilary Clinton feel is your cup of tea. It most assuredly is not mine. Anyway, I thought that should have been Monica Lewinsky's line.

But there are a number of what look like really excellent off-the-beaten-track efforts to choose from.

My first choice is a book which, for some reason, its publisher, Harper Collins, calls "God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible"in the United States, but "Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible"in the United Kingdom.

It was written by Adam Nicolson, who used to write a fine column called "The View from Perch Hill" in the Sunday Telegraphmagazine. He has also written several other books, including "The National Trust Book of Long Walks in England, Scotland and Wales".

I don't need any persuasion about the importance of the King James Bible as a work of literature. It delivers the Word of God, you might say, in words God would have chosen.

But I had little idea of how it was written, and by whom, and I had no idea of its political importance at the time of its writing. In truth, I had only a vague and dimly-remembered knowledge of Britain at the end of Elizabeth's life and at the beginning of King James's reign.

It should have counted for much more with me - it was, after all, from the conditions of this period in British history that many of the colonists who went to the New World were fleeing. This was the early boundary of the ground on which was sown American Independence and the birth of American Democracy. Fascinating stuff.

It has been the very sharpest of pleasures to learn about it all from Adam Nicolson's deft pen. To have that history lesson set against the backdrop of the language of the King James Bible... well, sublime is a word that comes to mind.

I know irrelevance bothers some readers, but I think of myself as made of sterner stuff. So I'll take advantage of this opportunity to recall a favourite line from this most urbane version of the Bible - from 2 Corinthians 3:8. "How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?"

Evelyn Waugh? Max Beerbohm? Quentin Crisp? Instead, you'll learn from Adam Nicolson that those words came from a committee of over 50 people! How that could possibly be is, on its own, worth the price of admission.

Long ago, I had a little 18th Century quarter-bound volume, now sadly lost, that contained the anonymous Arthurian Legend, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight".

I'm not sure it was in the original Middle English - it seems unlikely I would have been able to read that - but I do remember how very difficult it was, even if I was simply reading a 18th Century version.

It's one heck of a good yarn, though, so once into it, you can't put it down. It relates the many adventures of Sir Gawain, who has to journey to find, and forfeit his life, to a knight in green armour (mounted, of course, on a green horse).

The Green Knight, at one of King Arthur's New Year's Eve parties, had announced that he would allow anyone one cut at his head with a sword or an axe, as long as his challenger was prepared to allow him a cut in return.

Gawain, who owned a very sharp axe indeed (and who might well have been at the mead that night), thought he was on to a good thing and whacked the poor man's head off in one. Imagine his consternation when the Green Knight picked up his head and rode off with it into the grey dawn, or the gathering dusk or whatever it was.

What a plot! Eat dust, Hulk!

It is also an interesting work from the standpoint of poetic form, because it consists of 101 laisses, or verse paragraphs. Although these laisses have fairly complex similarities of form, they can vary quite considerably in length.

The universal problem for translators is striking a balance between telling the meaning of the poem in a new language, and being faithful to a verse structure into which the new language almost always refuses to fit.

Yale Middle English scholar Marie Borroff published, in 1967, a translation of Sir Gawain that is now the standard in academic circles. It is well regarded because she sticks so closely to the complex alliterative and rhyming scheme of the original. I haven't read Ms Borroff's version, but I'd be willing to bet that in order to stick to the verse structure, she sacrificed a lot of the meaning and the vigour of the poem.

Now, a well-known American poet, W.S. Merwin, has translated Sir Gawain afresh. He is a Bollingen and Pulitzer Prize winner who is interested, anyway, in experimenting with verse form.

In his version, he sacrifices structure in favour of writing a successful poem. My guess is that this will produce a much more accessible and, ultimately, more satisfying result. Merwin's translation, published by Alfred A Knopf, is on my list of must-haves for the summer.

"So What" is the title of the first track of Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue", the best selling jazz album of all time and, some say, best jazz album of all time. It's also the title of a new Miles Davis biography, published by Simon and Schuster and written by John Szwed, who is the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, Music and American Studies at Yale University.

There are already several biographies of Miles Davis, as well as several volumes of reminiscence and the like, but this is the first one written since his death ten years ago, and it allows Szwed to settle the trumpeter in his proper place in the pantheon of jazz.

Every jazz fan knows who Miles Davis is. He was the best trumpet player ever, who played with the best of the best. His disciples - the likes of Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett - are at the top of the current jazz heap.

But that fails to tell the whole story. Perhaps the best way of explaining who Miles Davis really is is by re-telling an old story: A jazz fan dies and passes to the other side. With St. Peter, he heads to a crowded club and recognises the other customers as Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker.

The jazz fan sees a man, with his back toward the rest of the crowd, dressed in black, sitting at the far end of the bar, and asks St. Peter, "Who's that?" "Oh," St. Peter responds, "that's God. He thinks He's Miles Davis."

People who knew him might suggest that conversation couldn't have taken place, because wherever it was Miles Davis went when he died, St. Peter and God were highly unlikely to be living, or even visiting, in the same district. But there's no question Davis lived a wild and a wonderful as well as a wicked life, and Szwed does a very workmanlike job indeed of telling the tale.

Finally, Grove Press two years ago published a remarkable little volume that I knew nothing of until just a few weeks ago, when I came across a copy in my favourite book-browsing spot, Strand Book Store in New York. It is "The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa", not the best known of men, but one who is certainly the greatest Portuguese poet.

This book is a companion to one published by Grove some time ago - "Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems". The American Library Association's magazine, Booklist, described that one as "a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the Twentieth Century," which is a very pretty thing to say.

During his life, Pessoa published poems both in Portuguese and in English. He wrote under his own name and, when the spirit moved him to be different, under three other names as well.

The American critic Harold Bloom, despite knowing of this odd subterfuge, described Pessoa and two of his personas as "great" poets in their own right, and the third is an "interesting minor poet". In all, Pessoa invented 72 alternate literary selves with which to express himself.

He never married, or, it's said, even went out on a date. Once, he fell in love with a 19 year-old girl who worked in his office, Ophelia. He had one of his other personalities write her, telling her of his admiration.

Then he had another personality write to warn her about the personality of the first. It sounds a little like something Larry, Moe and Curly might have done. I don't think it did Pessoa much good with Ophelia, though.

Pessoa was a highly intelligent man, and his writing is sometimes pretty hard to wrap your head around. This is a translation by Keith Bosley of a poem called "Autosicografia".

Dozens of other translators have offered versions of this poem, I suspect none of them absolutely nails his meaning to the page, but I think this one gets as close to it as any:

The poet is a fake.

His faking seems so real

That he will fake the ache

Which he can really feel.

And those who read his cries

Feel in the paper tears

Not two aches that are his

But one that is not theirs.

And so in its ring

Giving the mind a game

Goes this train on a string

And the heart is its name.

Bosley gets a nice first verse, goes a bit wrong in the middle and tries so hard to end on a good note that he lets the meaning slip away from him, I think. But you can sense what a difficult row that was to hoe.

There's much more of Pessoa to come. When he died in 1935, he left a trunk containing over 25,000 unpublished items of prose and poetry behind, which is still being sorted out by scholars.

If Pessoa hadn't existed, Jorge Luis Borges would surely have invented him... or perhaps might simply have found him on the shelves of the Library of Babel.

gshorto@ibl.bm