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The Vandalic language

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

An epigram from the Latin Anthology, De conviviis barbariis, which gives one of the few attestations of the language the Vandals spoke:

Inter “eils” Goticum “scapia matzia ia drincan!”
non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus.
Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho.
ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.

Which is understandably much disputed in rendering but, according to a recent translation by Magnus Snaedel, goes basically as follows:

Amid the Gothic “Hail! Let’s get [something to] eat and drink”
nobody dares to put forth decent verses.
Calliope hurries to depart from tipsy Bacchus.
A drunken Muse may not stand on her feet.

I’ve seen another rendering where scapia (related to schaffen?) has a sexual sense that would seem to fit equally well.

In this marsh, where every norm is ceaselessly subverted

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

On Ravenna, from the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris (1.8.2ff). The translation is from the citation in Giusto Traina’s 428A.D. (pg.53) while the text is the Loeb edition.

I once saw a Harley Davidson of Ravenna biker club party that ended with one of the biker’s ~7ish year old daughter singing everyone Taylor Swift songs. Maybe less has changed than would first seem.

IN this marsh, where every norm is ceaselessly subverted, the walls fall and the waters stand firm, the towers shift on the water’s surface and the ships do not move, you freeze in the public baths and you swelter in the private houses, the gods are thirsty and the buried swim, the thieves stand guard and the authorities sleep, the cleric charge interested on loans and the Syrians sing psalms, the traders serve our Lord and the monks engage in trade, the elderly think about playing ball and the youths about dice, the eunuchs are interested in warfare and the foederati in culture. What could you expect of a city … that could more easily have a territory than it could have earth!

 in qua palude indesinenter rerum omnium lege perversa muri cadunt aquae stant, turres fluunt naves sedent, aegri deambulant medici iacent, algent balnea domicilia conflagrant, sitiunt vivi natant sepulti, vigilant fures dormiunt potestates. faenerantur clerici Syri psallunt, negotiatores militant milites1negotiantur, student pilae senes aleae iuvenes, armis eunuchi litteris foederati. 3. tu vide qualis sit civitas ubi tibi lar familiaris incolitur, quae facilius territorium potuit habere quam terram.

Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Tristram Shandy:

Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest, and has wit in it, and instruction too,—if we can but find it out.

—Here is the scaffold work of Instruction, its true point of folly, without the Building behind it.

—Here is the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors, governors, gerund-grinders, and bear-leaders to view themselves in, in their true dimensions.—

Oh! there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with learning, which their unskilfulness knows not how to fling away!

—Sciences May Be Learned by Rote But Wisdom Not.

An easy topic we might have in common

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Antal Szerb’s A Garden Party in St. Cloud:

Rapidly, and by foreordained necessity, I set about flirting with a little Highland Scots girl, an Arts student. With my usual boyish enthusiasm, and looking for an easy topic we might have in common, I expounded St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of time to her. “Yes, yes,” she replied — pronouncing that ‘yes’ with the wonderfully impenetrable simple-mindedness that makes British girls so attractive.

αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Apollo’s approach to the camp of the Achaeans in the Iliad 1.40ff:

ὣς ἔφατ᾽ εὐχόμενος, τοῦ δ᾽ ἔκλυε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων,
βῆ δὲ κατ᾽ Οὐλύμποιο καρήνων χωόμενος κῆρ,
τόξ᾽ ὤμοισιν ἔχων ἀμφηρεφέα τε φαρέτρην:
ἔκλαγξαν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὀϊστοὶ ἐπ᾽ ὤμων χωομένοιο,
αὐτοῦ κινηθέντος: ὃ δ᾽ ἤϊε νυκτὶ ἐοικώς.
ἕζετ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἀπάνευθε νεῶν, μετὰ δ᾽ ἰὸν ἕηκε:
δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ᾽ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο:
οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπῴχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς,
αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ᾽ αὐτοῖσι βέλος ἐχεπευκὲς ἐφιεὶς
βάλλ᾽: αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί.

But Hodge shan’t be shot

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he showed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”

This reminds me of the ludicrous account which he gave Mr. Langton, of the despicable state of a young Gentleman of good family. “Sir, when I heard of him last, he was running about town shooting cats.” And then in a sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favourite cat, and said, “But Hodge shan’t be shot; no, no, Hodge shall not be shot.

And now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From David Hinton’s translation of Li Po – The Selected Poems of Li Po

Something said, waking drunk on a spring day

It’s like boundless dream here in this
world, nothing anywhere to trouble us.

I have, therefore, been drunk all day,
a shambles of sleep on the front porch.

Coming to, I look into the courtyard.
There’s a bird among blossoms calling,

and when I ask what season this is,
an oriole’s voice drifts on spring winds.

Overcome, verging on sorrow and lament,
I pour another drink. Soon, awaiting

this bright moon, I’m chanting a song.
And now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why.

A pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (pg 17)

A chalk pit, a picture gallery, a brown figure in the sun, a skin, here, redolent of salt and smoke, and here (like Mary’s, he remembered) savagely musky.  Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random, shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely.  There was no chronology.  The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after.  The pit was as real and vivid as the gallery.  That ten years separated flints from Gauguins was a fact, not given, but discoverable only on second thoughts by the calculating intellect.  The thirty-five years of his conscious life made themselves immediately known to him as a chaos – a pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic.

what does he have at home / a shelf full of nothing but books

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Red Pine’s translations of Cold Mountain (poem 31)

A mountain man lives under thatch
before his gate carts and horses are rare
the forest is quiet but partial to birds
the streams are wide and home to fish
with his son he picks wild fruit
with his wife he hoes between rocks
what does he have at home
a shelf full of nothing but books

With commentary:

The expression yi-ch’uang (a shelf) can also mean “a bed,” and some translators have preferred this interpretation.  I would think, though, that the presence of his family would encourage him to keep his bed clear of books.  In any case, the emphasis here is on both lack of possessions and the importance of books for someone who chooses, rather than is forced into, the simplicity of mountain living.

As someone who has just moved the day’s pile of books from the bed so his wife can sleep, I disagree with this argument.  And – though I admittedly know nothing of the import of the image in Chinese culture – I personally find the bed full of books a better depiction of a spirit freed from the dictates of etiquette and living in natural ease.