Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 3:00 pm
EN: The tour de my paintings continues with another Germanic language, namely English, which I have illustrated through "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliott, who was born in St.Louis, Missouri, but ended up as a naturalized arch-English Anglican-Catholic London-dwelling academic poet with a Nobel Prize on his notice board - and a polyglot too. In the Waste Land he starts out with this dedication to Ezra Pound:
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
"Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;" respondebat illa: "Ἁποθανεῖν θέλω"
Those readers who are scared away by this threeheaded Kerberos at the front gate are probably not members of the targeted segment, and the poem carries on with quotes in half a dozen languages. And although I do know a few Greek words I had to look up "αποθανεῖν" (to die). The construction is not possible in Modern Greek, where the infinitive long ago has been awarded the privilege denied to Sibylle, namely to leave this vale of sorrow. She is of course the one depicted as hanging in the bottle.
In the middle you see Madame Sosostris, "famous clairvoyante (...) known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (..)" .. whom you see just above the Greek Merchant, Mr. Eugenides from Smyrna. "I do not find The Hanged Man." sayeth the seeress - but that's her own fault. He is hanging just behind her back, in the company of "Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts". Ahem, whence came the tits attributed to this seer from the Iliad? Well, you can read the story here, but basically the French poet Apollinaire wrote a play based on a legend that claimed that a lady named Teresa had undergone a gender transformation and become a blind male fortune teller in the service of a certain Homer. Or maybe it was Ovid's unfounded claim that Tiresias became female for seven years by looking at copulating snakes. A propos, did you know that the name Ομήρος means "hostage" in Greek? And why is Homer supposed to have been blind? Could this be a reaction to his description of the sky as the same colour as bronze? Nevermind, I'm digressing. The little man in the upper left corner is of course Mr Eliot, e
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon— O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
"Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;" respondebat illa: "Ἁποθανεῖν θέλω"
Those readers who are scared away by this threeheaded Kerberos at the front gate are probably not members of the targeted segment, and the poem carries on with quotes in half a dozen languages. And although I do know a few Greek words I had to look up "αποθανεῖν" (to die). The construction is not possible in Modern Greek, where the infinitive long ago has been awarded the privilege denied to Sibylle, namely to leave this vale of sorrow. She is of course the one depicted as hanging in the bottle.
In the middle you see Madame Sosostris, "famous clairvoyante (...) known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (..)" .. whom you see just above the Greek Merchant, Mr. Eugenides from Smyrna. "I do not find The Hanged Man." sayeth the seeress - but that's her own fault. He is hanging just behind her back, in the company of "Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts". Ahem, whence came the tits attributed to this seer from the Iliad? Well, you can read the story here, but basically the French poet Apollinaire wrote a play based on a legend that claimed that a lady named Teresa had undergone a gender transformation and become a blind male fortune teller in the service of a certain Homer. Or maybe it was Ovid's unfounded claim that Tiresias became female for seven years by looking at copulating snakes. A propos, did you know that the name Ομήρος means "hostage" in Greek? And why is Homer supposed to have been blind? Could this be a reaction to his description of the sky as the same colour as bronze? Nevermind, I'm digressing. The little man in the upper left corner is of course Mr Eliot, e
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon— O swallow swallow
Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih