vanished people=Hieros

Jeff Wilson · 11 Nov 2011, 04:47 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:47:53 -0600
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W50982F3930B5208CA64561CFDD0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W50982F3930B5208CA64561CFDD0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EBCA8F9.30206 at clueland.com>

On 11/10/2011 8:59 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
> I'm not arguing (at this time) that Kayaam meant the sun in his stanza. I'm
>
> arguing that WOlfe interprets it as the sun and that's why Severian/Apu Punchau
>
> gets that passage sung to him at this crucial time. He needs to be reminded
>
> he is the sun (which is the source of his power and his salvation from the
>
> depths of human history).
>
>
>
> Anyway, Wolfe has specifically chastised his readers to not fall into the
>
> pop culture trap of calling Venus a goddess of love. "She was a sex goddess".

I wonder if this is also a hint about bowdlerized translations from the 
Victorian era. Some here are apparently unaware of the degree that 
Khayam's verses were admittedly transmogrified by Edward FitzGerald. The 
quote Wolfe chose is drawn from the first edition of 1859, but the same 
translator had in his fifth edition of 1889,

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes
The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

To compare:

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Of course, Apollo is a hunter and was god of the sun along with arts and 
lyres and pythons, and probably more prominent in the mind of a 
classically educated Englishman than a muslim Afganistani.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at clueland.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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