Khayyam and Esperanto

A very rare book

I love old books. I could easily be blogging about my love of poking around used bookstores, sometimes coming home with piles of old things. I love old books. Every once in a while, you find something that’s a bit of a rarity, but the book that was described in the New York Times on July 17, 1909 was a true rarity: it was produced in an edition of twenty-copies. That’s all.

The book in question is an Esperanto translation of the Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám based on the translation by Edward FitzGerald. My searching lead me to a bibliography of the Rubáiyat, which lists the first Esperanto translation as coming in 1915 (which was the product of John Pollen, the head of Esperanto Association of Britain). But Pollen’s 1915 translation of of Khayyám can’t the be subject of a 1909 bookstore ad. I mean, advance copies are one thing, but what bookstore can get a book six years before it’s printed?

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Limericks in Esperanto

Ŝi havas grandegan kapon.

Here, once again, I’m complaining about journalists not doing their job. Even for a joke, you need to stick to the facts. The first cartoon with joking caption in the “Our Funny Man’s Column” in the Whitefish Pilot of June 22, 1911 makes a completely untrue statement about Esperanto. Where were the outraged letters to the editor noting that the Pilot had been complicit in spreading a scurrilous lie about the noble language Esperanto?

This was (at least as indexed at Chronicling America) the final time that the Pilot made any reference to Esperanto (Chronicling America only has it for 1908 through 1912, though the paper started in 1904 and is still published). The early press on Esperanto is filled inaccurate statements, including odd claims that the inventor of Esperanto was a Spaniard, or that he created the language while serving a long prison term. Not true. Not true.

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The Third Esperanto Jest

On June 16, 1903, the Chicago Tribune humor column “A Line-O’Type or Two” included an item headed “Our Esperanto Department.” This was followed up on June 18 with the second “lesson” of “Esperanto in Six Easy Lessons.” If, on June 20, 1903, Tribune readers turned to the column with anticipation of more Esperanto, they were not to be disappointed.

Well, not yet.

Near the end of the column, Bert L. Taylor, did include a third Esperanto installment, this one titled “Esperanto in Six Easy Lessons—III.” I would caution anyone who thinks this might be a substitute for learning Esperanto on Duolingo, or with the book Saluton, or at the site Lernu, that Taylor’s “easy lessons” don’t actually teach Esperanto. This third installment brings up an interesting question.

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Spencer’s Sleeping Knight — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 8

Knighty knight.

It’s been a while (again) since I did a post on The Faerie Queene. The book has (seemingly permanent) residence on my desk, and so it hurry it back to its location on my shelves, I really need to get this blog post out. It’s not that I haven’t read Book 2, Canto 8, I have. I read it, started writing, and put it aside.

When I was an undergrad, one of my professors commented that “‘it bored me to tears’ is always a perfectly reasonable critical response.” It bored me to tears. This suggestion comes too late for Edmund Spenser, but perhaps it will save someone else: don’t put your protagonist into a deep slumber. Sure, it worked for Sleeping Beauty, but face it, that story is really about the prince (who has a thing for comatose women).

Like the sleeping princess, stuff happens around Sir Guyon while he’s asleep, but he’s really not involved in any of it. I’m not looking to Elizabethan poetry for white-knuckled excitement, but at least if we had shifted our focus to another character, we wouldn’t have Spenser reminding us, “that guy is sleeping through all of this.” I blame Edmund Spenser for the tardiness of this post.

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Mad Money — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 7

I could take it that way, but
couldn't you just write me a check?

It’s been a while since I last dipped into The Faerie Queene. Initially, I figured I’d treat it like a class assignment and rip through it, but it didn’t work that way. I am still intent to get to the end of this work. Equally, though, I am insisting that this should be a pleasure, not a burden. After a month’s delay (not a single post on this subject in November), I return to the poem.

I’ve been doing some other stuff with some tight deadlines, and let me be blunt (as I frequently am about this): these pages don’t get a lot of traffic. In the last ten days, five Faerie Queene posts have been read, one each, from a four locations. You people might want to get together. Since I was in the midst of something with fixed deadlines, I cut back on the posting, and let my copy of The Faerie Queene gather (metaphoric) dust.

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Fighting Fire with Fire — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 5

We're looking for fire imagery

Remember Acrasia? When I started this canto, my first thought was that Spenser had somehow forgotten her. The action picks up with the arrival of Pyrochles, whose varlet carried the shield reading “Bunrt I doe burn.” Just in case we didn’t get it from the name and shield, Spenser is quick to load on the words to remind us. Pyrochles is in “bright armes” off which “the Sunny beames do glaunce and glide,” and the sun throws forth “sparkling fire, That seem him to enflame.” And that’s just in the second stanza.

Pyrocles rides a steed that is “bloody red,” and that steed is soon going to be bloodier. Guyon is on foot, since he lost his horse in the second canto. Here we have a great moment of medieval warfare: a armored knight on horseback charging a swordsman on foot. Usually, the guy on horseback wins this sort of thing, but not in Canto V.

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Hit the Woman First — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 4

This canto tells of a
who could have used
a sword.

I return to my dilatory reading of The Faerie Queene.[1] I’d rather post these at intervals instead of rushing through because I “have to” finish a Faerie Queene post. Sir Guyon seems to have a knack for attracting all those who, for no readily apparent reason, want to attack a noble and virtous knight. The allegorical figures are just laying in for him.

In terms of narrative, this is somewhat strange, because as the canto opens, all he’s doing is looking for his horse (which Sir Braggachio made off with). Clearly, at some point, Sir Guyon and Sir Braggachio are going to meet. For that matter, the Book clearly has to end with Sir Guyon encountering Acrasia. but not yet.

Spenser starts us off with a brief (one stanza) digression on the difference between the low- and high-born, with the suggestion that the nobility are simply naturally better at some things, such as feats of arms and love of entertainment. Even horseback riding

seemes a science
Proper to gentle blood;

although Spenser doesn’t prove this. It’s ironic because our noble knight has lost his horse anyway, so it doesn’t matter if he’s naturally good at horse riding, given that he does’t have a horse. Then again, he would have had to dismount anyway to help the man he sees in the third stanza.

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Poetess’s Legacy to Universal Language

Eliza Pittsinger. California poet.
Could have benefited
universal language

It is safe to say that Eliza A. Pittsinger, a poet who died in San Francisco in 1908, is among the forgotten poets of California, but at the beginning of the twentieth century, she seems to have been something of a celebrated poet. She was born in about 1820 in West Hampton, Massachusetts,[1] to John and Mary Pittsinger. In 1842, she married one Professor Mayo[2] in Hartford, Connecticut. They separated and later divorced, with Eliza went back to using the name Pittsinger (if she ever used Mayo).

As early as 1862, Pittsinger had moved to San Francisco, where she described her profession as “poetess.” She had certainly established herself as a poet by this time, contributing a poem to the ceremonies for laying the corner stone of the New Pioneer Hall of the Society of California Pioneers, in July 1862. According to the Society of California Pioneers, this building was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Miss Pittsinger, was not a California Pioneer, as the term is reserved for those who settled in California before 1850, at which time she was still in Northampton, although the San Francisco Call described her as such in an death notice of her sister, in May 1907. At the time of Pittsinger’s death, the Call stated that she arrived in California in 1852.

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A Braggart, A Horse, A Deceiver, and A Woman — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 3

This is actually Justice,
but you try finding pictures
of armed women.

I really should be more diligent about reading and commenting on The Faerie Queene. First, I want to get this done. Second, according to the blog stats, someone actually found a Faerie Queene post through a search. I hope he or she didn’t go away disappointed. So, I’m back. I've been somewhat busy lately, but I do want to continue to make time to get through the poem.

In Book II, Canto II, Sir Guyon tried to wash the blood off the hands of child of the couple who died due to Acrasia’s evil doings (in Book II, Canto I), but found that the spring they were near was too pure to allow itself to be contaminated with blood. It seems that the blood isn’t coming off by any means, because he leaves the kid with Medina (who doesn’t seem to have volunteered), and the kid’s hands are still bloody. But now he gets a name: Ruddymane, that is to say “bloody hands.” I’d wear gloves.

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The Unhappy House of Medina — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 2

The Knight of the Dish
(Is that shield a pink triangle?)

Back to The Faerie Queene. I’m still trying to finish a canto each day (although I’m beginning to contemplate taking the weekend off). I keep giving myself these writing assignments for the blog, but they can get in the way of other things I need to write and do. It feels really good to be sitting at the computer and writing. It feels really good to be reading an Elizabethan poem and jotting down my thoughts on it. Can I stand this much pleasure?

One of the pleasures of the text is that it is a tough one. This is tougher than reading an uncorrected Shakespeare text. Part of the problem is that the edition I’m using has really bad layout. In order to get two columns of text, long lines are often wrapped (in a bracket) either above or below the line they continue. Total pain. Probably adds to the confusion.

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Damsels, Distressed and Not — Faerie Queene, Book 2, Canto 1

Have a good knight

Onward with Sir Guyon, the allegory of Temperance (so it’s rather fitting that my earlier post today dealt with just that). We have a new hero! We may have a new hero, but we get the same old villain, the Archimage, at least at the beginning. And the Archimage is at the very beginning of the canto, getting the first four stanzas all to himself, with Sir Guyon showing up at the end of the fifth:

A goodly knight, all arms in harness meet,
That from his head no place appeared to his feete.

He’s well armored. That gives the Archimage an idea, though how he prepared for this one, the poem doesn’t make clear. Okay, he tells Sir Guyon that he saw a fair maiden attacked by a knight.

When that lewd rybauld, with vyle lust advaunst,
Laid first his filthie hands on virgin cleene.

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A Return to the Faerie Queene

Was this a
temperate
knight?

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged about Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queene. I left off on May 23rd, with the last canto of the first book. So, my intention to blog through the book carried me for just under two weeks. Since then, I’ve kept The Faerie Queene in mind, intending to returning to it.[1] Several things kept me from going back:

1. Travel. They’re tough pieces to write when away from my normal routine, even though all I use is the text itself. I’m done with travel for a bit.
2. Response. In those early days of the blog, the Faerie Queene posts were guaranteed to get fewer readers than anything else. People voted with their clicks, and I wanted to give them what they wanted.[2]
3. Scheduling. For a while, I was writing and publishing, writing and publishing. I’m breaking that cycle. By the end of a day, when I had tried to fill the blog with things people might actually read, I was either done with writing for the day, or had gone on to other things.[3]

After months of “I will return to the Faerie Queene tomorrow,” that day has come. I’m easing myself in gently, since each book starts off with just a few stanzas in prologue.[4]

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Esperanto in Bad Verse

Roy K. Moulton,
funny man

Roy K. Mouton clearly didn't think much of Esperanto, so much that he was moved to mock the language in a fairly long poem, printed in at the Daily Missoulian of Missoula, Montana on July 10, 1912. It wasn't just Esperanto; his column was fairly tongue-in-cheek. The first item in "On the Spur of the Moment" was on how to make money. Well, you can either counterfeit coin, or you can counterfeit bills. He does suggest that this be done in "a nice dark cellar, which has no windows in it."

Mr. Moulton was an American humorist who lived from 1874 (or perhaps 1876) to 1928. The only book-length works I can find attributed to him are The Blue Jeans of Hoppertown, A Good Friend of Mine, and I Held Her Hand, which were written between 1908 and 1911. After that, he seems to have stuck to the newspapers. He was born Michigan and was living there in 1910. By 1920, he had moved to New York (specifically Queens). He listed his profession as a writer.

But maybe not a poet. Here's the poem.

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Beowulf: A Long-Expected Translation

It’s been known for years that J.R.R. Tolkien had prepared a prose translation of Beowulf, but this was not among his published works until now. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is calling this a “new” translation, though considering that the author has been dead for forty-one years, and bulk of the translation dates from 1926, this would seem to stretch the meaning of the word “new.” Many of the earlier published translations of Beowulf were begun significantly later.

Beowulf is, of course, a much-translated work. Fourteen years ago, when Seamus Heany’s verse translation of Beowulf was published, I called my local Barnes & Noble to see if they had it in stock. The clerk asked me for the book title. “The book is Beowulf, but you’ll want to look under the translator’s name, Seamus Heaney.” He insisted on looking it up by title.

There was a long pause. “There are a lot of books with that title.”

“Yes there are. You’ll want to look under Heaney. That’s H-E-A-N-E-Y.”

“I don’t see anything by a ‘Shay-muss’ Heaney, but we do have a ‘See-Am-Us’ Heaney. Is that the same guy.” Happily, they had the book.

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I’ll See Your Catullus and Raise You a Priapeia

This wasn't shocking
in 79 AD

Yesterday, my neighbor dropped by with a mid–19th-century Latin textbook. While she was in my study, she made note of my copy of the Carmina Burana. Had she kept looking, she would have seen various other Latin texts in the room, including a 1999 edition and translation of the Priapeia.

Later that night, I was looking at the blog io9 and saw the article “A Latin Poem So Filthy, It Wasn’t Translated Until The 20th Century.” Now, the twentieth century is a span of time that saw a hell of a lot of changes. Technological and social change has only accelerated through human history, and what was unprintable in 1904, is legal to publish in 1994, (and showing up on blogs in 2014, but that’s another century).

So, yes, the poem by Catullus that starts “Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” (for a translation, I’m offering “I’ll ass-rape and face-fuck you”) didn’t get translated in nineteenth-century editions. Lots of things didn’t, especially since many of the editions were printed with the thought that they’d be going into the hands of sixteen-year-olds (let’s be serious: this poem is not going into a poetry anthology intended for high school juniors).

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Despair! But the Lady Rescues - Faerie Queene, Book 1, Canto 9

In a way, canto 9 was somewhat appropriate for me today. I was feeling a depressed. Various things aren't going well in my life. My hopes of an increasing blog readership are being met with really sorry blog stats. In this canto, we meet Despair, who furnishes the means to kill yourself and then convinces you to do so.

Before we do so, Arthur (not yet king) tells his background, as much as he knows it, since Merlin would only tell him that he "was sonne and heire unto a king." What Una wants to know is

what adventure. or what high intent,
Hath brought you hither into Faery land,

We've been told a few times that the Redcrosse Knight is an elf, but despite the sorcerers, monsters, and allegorical personages that have been wandering about, I think this is our first confirmation that we are not in the everyday world. Moreover, it's clear that Arthur belongs to our world, not to Faery land, as comfortable as he may be in the world of the poem.

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