Help needed: German bookstores

Posted on Thursday: November 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Can anyone recommend bookstores for new and used Greek and Latin texts and commentaries in Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, or Vienna? I will be visiting all four cities over the next month. Zentralantiquariat Leipzig is already on my list: it turns up quite often in my ABE search results. Will university bookstores have a good variety of new texts? Or only those assigned for specific classes?

By the way, I am now tweeting as @Curculiunculus and have asked the same questions there, if it’s easier to answer there.

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Curculio 6: Two Adjectives in Seneca’s Agamemnon

Posted on Thursday: October 31, 2013 by Michael Hendry

How’s that for a boring title?

As a continuation of my experiment with publishing original scholarship on this site, I have just uploaded an eight-page PDF containing two conjectures on the text of Seneca’s Agamemnon, titled as above (link). (I thought of calling it ‘Ino the Answer’, but that only applies to the first half.) Feedback on the substance or expression of any of these notes, listed in the right-hand column, may be left as blog comments. Your first will be moderated, but once you’ve had one approved, others will be approved automatically, unless you behave so badly that I am forced to blacklist you. I don’t expect that to happen often. My reasons for and against publishing ‘Microscholarship’ in this way will be published soon – on this site, of course. So far I’ve thought of 8 pros and 3 cons.

Here’s a question: should I format all the papers for HTML as well as PDF? Those with numerous footnotes take a lot of time to convert: is it worth it, from the reader’s point of view? So far, that’s the two that contain emendations, this and Curculio 2, on Cymbeline, but that may be coincidental. Textual criticism often lends itself to succinctness.

Posted in Culture: Plays, Curculio: Classics, Curculio: Latin, Latin Literature | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Curculio 5: Worst. Endearment. Ever.

Posted on Thursday: October 31, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Peter Davidson’s Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 (Oxford, 1998) includes a rather dull love-poem (number 36) by “T.C.”, most likely Thomas Cary, “Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I” (516). The untitled poetic dialogue begins:

Tell me, Eutresia, since my fate
And thy more powerfull Forme decrees
My heart an Immolation at thy Shrine,
. . .

In the ‘Notes on the Text’ in the back of the book (516), Davidson records that some manuscripts call the addressee ‘Eutresia’, at least one ‘Utrechia’. The note below the text reads: “1 Eutresia ‘Utrechia’ MS (Greek) ‘beautiful hair’”, which is a bit confusing: which name is supposed to mean ‘beautiful hair’? Could ‘Utrechia’ be meant for ‘Eutrichia’ or something similar? (I see nothing in the poem to justify an allusion to the Dutch city of Utrecht.) The Greek adjective meaning ‘with beautiful hair’ is normally ‘euthrix’ in the nominative, sometimes feminine ‘eutriche’ or possibly ‘eutricha’. ‘Utrichia’ may be close enough to the last, if U- can stand for Eu- and we can attribute the -i- to euphony rather than nounness.

But what of Eutresia, the name Davidson prints in his text? I see no way to make that mean anything to do with hair. It would be a properly-formed Greek noun meaning ‘well-holedness’, the quality of being equipped with one or more excellent holes or orifices: not a name anyone this side of Lord Rochester, or Martial in one of his darker moods, would give to an enemy, much less a mistress. Neither ‘eutresia’ nor for that matter ‘dystresia’ is included in the OED, but ‘atresia’, “from Greek ἄτρητος not perforated”, is attested with the meaning “occlusion or closure of a natural channel of the body” since 1807. Biliary atresia is a common birth defect.

A mountainous region near the center of the Peloponnese, north and east of Megalopolis, was called Eutresia in ancient times. I do not know whether it was named that for an abundance of springs, or caves, or both, and an Internet search for caves in Greece does not indicate any disproportionate number of them in Eutresia. The Greek adjective ‘eutretos’ (εὔτρητος), meaning literally “well-holed”, is found in a wide range of authors, describing (for instance) Hera’s pierced earlobes (Iliad 14.182), wind instruments, the soil of a well-worked garden, and a sponge. I suppose Cary’s mistress, if not imaginary, could console herself with the thought that at least he didn’t call her Dystresia.

(PDF Version)

Posted in Curculio: English, English Literature, Etymology, Orbilius | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“Bacon and Eggs”

Posted on Tuesday: October 29, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Laudator Temporis Acti quotes an amusing poem from 1931 by A. P. Herbert on the British fondness for bacon and eggs. There is an equally-amusing country song by the Lovett Sisters saying much the same about Americans in 1954. Here are the lyrics, transcribed and punctuated by me:

You can walk into a rest’rant, at breakfast-time you’ll see
a bunch of people comin’ in as hungry as can be.
They sit and read the menu like it was the morning news,
and all the time the waitress knows just what they’re gonna choose:

Chorus:
       “Bacon and eggs”, “bacon and eggs” -
       that’s what they’ll always say.
       “Oh, gimme bacon and eggs”, “bacon and eggs” -
       she hears it a hundred times a day.

They get a glass of water and a menu from the rack.
They read it on the front and then they’ll read it on the back
About the time you think they oughta have it memorized,
they lay it down and order every waitress a surprise:

(Chorus)

I wonder what they’d do if all the pigs and chickens died.
Breakfast wouldn’t be the same, no matter what they tried.
But pigs will still make little pigs and hens are gonna lay,
and waitresses will wait and wait, and always hear them say:

(Chorus)

If you want to hear the song actually sung, it’s on an album entitled “Gals of the ‘Big D’ Jamboree”.

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Walter Scott Anagrammatized

Posted on Thursday: October 10, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Laudator Temporis Acti has an interesting post on Sir Walter Scott’s library. If you haven’t already read it, go and do so before continuing.

Done? OK, let’s continue.

I was naturally curious about the anagram, wondering how Scott’s library motto, clausus tutus ero, worked as “an anagram of his name in Latin”. It took a little while, but I eventually figured out how to equate the two. Quite a few adjustments are necessary, not least because Latin has no W:

  1. As “his name in Latin” implies, we must add -US to the end of both names. With four Us in the motto and none in the name, that’s an obvious first step. (Should we treat U and V as equivalent and make that -VS rather than -US? Yes: more on this below.)
  2. With only two Ts in the motto and three in the name, we have to omit the second T in Scott, making the Latin ‘Scotus’, as in Duns Scotus, not ‘Scottus’. Whether ‘Scotus’ would have been pronounced with a long or short O, I do not know.
  3. We cannot make Walter ‘Gualterius’, the usual Latin equivalent, because there’s no G in the motto, and we need two more Us. Instead, we must make the W – not allowed in Latin – into two Vs, as often seen in early texts of Shakespeare. This is where the V-U equivalence comes in: W may be called ‘double U’, but I’ve always seen it spelled double V when divided.

To sum up, the only way I can see to make ‘Walter Scott’ and ‘clausus tutus ero’ anagrammatically equivalent is to spell them VVALTERVS SCOTVS and CLAVSVS TVTVS ERO.

Posted in English Literature | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Announcement: Juvenal Reformatted

Posted on Friday: October 4, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Some time between 1998 and 2000 – I really should have kept better records – I uploaded a complete on-line text of Juvenal’s Satires, with brief apparatus criticus and some original conjectures. Though it has not been updated since (I think) 2004, it has won some praise: the new Blackwell’s Companion to Persius and Juvenal (Braund and Osgood, 2012) calls it “excellent” (464), and six of my conjectures are printed in the text of Braund’s Loeb Juvenal (2004), one more in the apparatus.

Unfortunately, the format in particular is showing its age: it was never very attractive, and looks quite repulsive on today’s wider screens. I have therefore reformatted text and commentary in the style of my later texts of Martial IV and Ovid, Heroides I. Just click on ‘Juvenal (1st edition 2000)’ in the right margin. Anyone who wishes to see it in its original ugly format (perhaps as a warning) will find a further link on that page. I call it the “1st edition” because I will very soon begin reediting Juvenal for a second, much improved on-line edition. It will have a fuller apparatus which includes many new conjectures (some mine, some not) and omits or demotes to the apparatus a few older readings that no longer please. It will be done as part of my textual database QLTP, for easy selection and reformatting. Most important, the construction of the text will, I hope, be to some extent interactive. As each satire is uploaded, it will be accompanied by a public on-line textual-interpretative seminar (not a MOOC but a POTIS), in which I will present my Adversaria in blog form, one post per passage or problem discussed, and invite comments and suggestions for the improvement of the text and interpretation of Juvenal. Some of the conjectures I have already published have never been explained in print, some need to be reargued, and I have many questions about passages that I hope others will be able to help me answer. Over the next few years, I plan to do the same work – text plus POTIS – for Persius and the rest of Martial and the Heroides. Watch this space to see what comes first.

By the way, this blog is currently set up so the first comment from any user is held for moderation, so please don’t repost your first comment. However, once the first comment is approved further comments will appear immediately, unless someone is foolish enough to post a comment that earns a place on the blacklist.

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Curculio 4: A Sly Joke in The Alchemist?

Posted on Monday: September 30, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Kastril or Kestrel, the ‘angry boy’ of Ben Jonson’s Alchemist, calls his sister his ‘suster’ and says ‘kuss’ for ‘kiss’.1 It is not clear whether this is meant to represent a particular regional dialect, a generalized country accent, or his own personal idiolect: commentators are mostly content to gloss both words for the unwary.2 In IV.iv.91, he reveals his sister’s formal name, Dame Pliant, and in V.iii.38 her first name or (more likely) nickname, when he refers to her as ‘Puss, my suster’. I wonder whether that name contains a sly joke. If he says that his ‘suster’ is named ‘Puss’, does that imply that, in the usual pronunciations of the day, his ‘sister’ would be named ‘Piss’?

Of course, just because Kastril turns I into U does not mean that every U he speaks would be an I in other dialects and idiolects. Still, I doubt that it is entirely coincidental that Jonson gives Dame Pliant a name that is so amusingly obscene if we assume the same vowel-change as in ‘suster’ and ‘kuss’ and translate it back into standard English. I certainly laughed out loud when I first saw the play at the Blackfriars in Staunton in January of 2010 and heard Tyler Moss as Kastril say the line. Then again, Kastril also calls his suster a ‘punk device’ a few lines further on (V.iii.50), and taking ‘punk’ as a mispronunciation of ‘pink’ doesn’t seem to add anything, even with at least four different Early Modern English meanings of ‘pink’ and ‘pinked’ to work with.3 So perhaps the joke I thought I heard was the product of coincidence, not a morsel of Jonsonian wit.4

Notes:

  1. Eleven times and twice, respectively, if I have counted right. Specific line references follow the numeration of Martin Butler’s edition: Selected Plays of Ben Jonson, Volume 2, Cambridge 1989. I will update them if and when I acquire Herford and Simpson’s collected edition.
  2. Probably not the first: if anyone has tried to identify a region in Jonson’s England in which everyone spoke that way, I have not seen it.
  3. Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary gives “a nonpareil; a nonesuch” and the flower for the noun, “winking, half-shut” (but not the color) for the adjective, and “pierced in small holes, reticulated” for the participle ‘pinked’.
  4. Actors and directors have to decide whether to make the U sound in ‘kuss’ and ‘suster’ resemble that in ‘put’, ‘push’, and ‘Puss’, or that in ‘putt’, ‘gut’, and ‘cut’. My joke works better with the former, and that is the one Moss used in the Blackfriars production.

(PDF Version)

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La Rochefoucauld at 400

Posted on Monday: September 16, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Yesterday, in honor of La Rochefoucauld’s 400th birthday, I uploaded a page in his honor. Here is the blurb displayed in the left-hand margin, if you’re not sure yet whether you want to click on the link:

“This site displays a random Maxime from the 5th edition of Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes morales, 1678, the last one overseen by the author: 505 in all, counting the unnumbered épigraphe. Press the button to see another.

“I will eventually add the other 130+ omitted from the 5th edition, as well as a cross-referencer that will allow readers to see any maxime with all of its textual variants, and in all of the different contexts in which it is found in the early editions and manuscripts.

“In the mean time, this should suffice to celebrate La Rochefoucauld’s 400th birthday: today, September 15, 2013.”

I hope all of my readers will have the self-control to resist pushing the button over and over and over for hours, like a monkey, in one of those dismal experiments, that receives a jolt of cocaine or direct stimulation of the pleasure centers of his brain every time he presses the button in his cage.

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Best Match of Editor’s Name and Subject?

Posted on Thursday: September 5, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I’m torn between the Kiss Catullus – the online Catullus edited by Daniel Kiss (link) – and the Hankey Othello (link). Can anyone think of a third?

Possibly the worst match between performer and subject (onomastically, I mean – he does a fine job) is the audiobook of Luther’s translation of the Psalms (link link), read by Reiner Unglaub. (He’s done most or all of the Bible, but those are the only volumes I’ve actually seen.) My German is rusty, but I believe that with one more unaccented letter (‘Reiner Unglaube’) his name would mean ‘pure lack of faith’.

Posted in English Literature, German, Jokes, Latin Literature | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

“There’s Gonna Be Some Changes Made”

Posted on Sunday: September 1, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I will be announcing some major additions to this site over the next few days. At the same time, I will be drastically reducing the number of categories, using them only for the broadest classifications, and using Tags for more granularity. Subject categories that will be kept are a general Classics category, one for each ancient and modern language (Greek, Latin, English, Spanish, French, etc.), ‘Early Modern English Drama’ for those less interested in the whole history of English, and a few more for broad subject categories (Textual Criticism, Etymology, etc.). Also one for Announcements. Particular authors and works will be Tagged instead, as in my last few posts.

I will also be putting my blogroll back in, with some additions, and links to my web-texts and other features that have been unavailable while I’ve been remodeling.

If you wish to be kept informed of developments, I am now Tweeting as @Curculiunculus, since @Curculio was already taken.

More soon . . . .

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Curculio 3: “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice . . .”

Posted on Sunday: September 1, 2013 by Michael Hendry

. . . and there are definitely worse possibilities. When one language adopts words from another, it sometimes happens that standard spelling changes create a new pair of homonyms, making two words that were quite different in the source language indistinguishable. Everyone who has studied even a little Spanish knows that a ‘llama’ is not only a wooly Andean beast, as in English, but also a ‘flame’, as well as a verb meaning ‘calls’. We all learned ‘¿cómo se llama?’ on the first day. The beast’s name comes from Quechua, but the other two both come straight from Latin: in the transition to Castilian, initial FL and CL both became LL, the noun lost its double consonant, the verb its final T and the length of the first A, all of which combined to make the very different flamma and clāmat indistinguishable as llama.

Years ago I ran across a second, more Classical, example in Castilian Spanish: it does not distinguish Thetis, sea-nymph and mother of Achilles, from her aunt Tethys, wife of Oceanus. The standard change of TH to T and of Y to I has turned both into Tetis. (1) Since both are sea goddesses, it can be difficult to tell whether a particular Tetis in a Spanish text is Thetis or Tethys, unless Achilles is mentioned in the context. (2)

I recently ran across a third, even more amusing, example, again in Spanish. In both Castilian and Catalan, (3) ‘Escatología’ means Eschatology, the branch of theology dealing with the Four Last Things, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell, but it also means Scatology, the science of excrement. Do Spanish-speakers giggle when they hear a theologian described as a distinguished ‘Profesor de Escatología’? Can we (or they) be quite sure there are no professors of Scatology? In Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, Professor Ozias Froats works in the Department of Biology, though his particular field of study is certainly Scatology. I suppose some Humanities professors might also qualify for the title, at least informally, if they spend their time in the literal or metaphorical sewers of Literature, Art, and History.

(PDF Version)

Notes

  1. Viquipèdia and Wikipédia tell me that the same is true for Catalan Tetis and Portugese Tétis.
  2. As A. A. Parker notes in his edition of Calderón’s No Hay Mas Fortuna de Dios (70), “Tetis is the Spanish form of Thetis (the chief of the Nereids and mother of Achilles) and of Tethys (the wife of Oceanus). Both represent the sea; but since the name here is being used to describe the sunset, the latter, or specifically Atlantic goddess, is intended.” A classicist might quibble with some of this – is Thetis the chief Nereid or just the most notorious of the sisters? – but the point is clear.
  3. I confirmed the Catalan use at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans’ Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, which I found in LanguageHat‘s very useful list of language resources (right margin). If Wikipédia is to be trusted, Portuguese sensibly prefers ‘Coprologia’ for the study of excrement, which avoids ambiguity.
Posted in Curculio: Misc, Etymology, Spanish | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Curculio 2: ‘Pervert the Present Wrath’: a Conjecture on Cymbeline

Posted on Monday: August 26, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I am experimenting with publishing original scholarly notes on this site. My first attempt, a week ago, was a single page on the structure of Silius Italicus’ Punica. I have just uploaded a PDF file of my second paper, two pages on the text of Shakespeare, Cymbeline 2.4.151, titled as above (link).

Feedback on the substance of either paper will be much appreciated. Comments are set up so that your first will be moderated, but once you’ve had one approved, others will be approved automatically, unless you behave so badly that I am forced to blacklist you. If you have anything to say about my note on Silius, please leave your comments on that post, and leave comments on my note on Cymbeline here. My next post will tell more about what I’m up to in general, so general comments should wait for that.

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Curculio 1: Silius Italicus: Why Seventeen Books?

Posted on Monday: August 19, 2013 by Michael Hendry

The unusual length of Silius Italicus’ Punica has often caused puzzlement. Antony Augoustakis discusses the point in the first chapter of the recent Brill companion to Silius. He credits Michael von Albrecht with noting that the number of books “corresponds to the number of years of the war”. (1) Although Silius did not cover the war annalistically, that is certainly plausible, as far as it goes. However, I think we can go one step further.

It seems to me that the number seventeen would have had another significance for Silius, at least as important as the length of the Second Punic War. We know from the Younger Pliny’s obituary (Epistulae 3.7) that Silius was a passionate admirer of Vergil, celebrating his birthday with more solemnity than his own, and venerating his portrait above all others, and his tomb as if it were a temple (3.7.8). I do not think it is coincidental that Vergil’s canonical works – the single book of Bucolica, four books of Georgics, and twelve of the Aeneid – also add up to seventeen. Silius could not hope to compete with Vergil in quality, and wisely chose not to compete directly in subject, or variety of subjects, but he could at least write an equal number of books. (2)

I would like to imagine that Silius mixed twelve parts epic, four parts didactic, and one part pastoral to make his poetic stew. However, I’d have to sit down and read the epic with some care to find out, and I won’t be doing that any time soon. I am fairly certain that the answer is no, and that didactic and pastoral elements are much smaller than that. Silius seems to have confined himself to putting Livian substance into Vergilian form, at Vergilian length. (3)

Notes

  1. A. Augoustakis, Brill’s Companion to Silius Italicus (Leiden, 2010), 8-10, quoting (9 n22) M. von Albrecht, Silius Italicus. Freiheit und Gebundenheit römischer Epik (Amsterdam, 1964), 133 n 35. The idea that the epic is unfinished, and that Silius intended to match Ennius’ eighteen books, is now out of style (Augoustakis, op. cit., 9).
  2. But not an equal number of lines. Lacunae and interpolations in both authors (some of each possibly quite large) make an exact count impossible. However, as transmitted, Silius’ epic is something like 800 lines or 6% shorter than the three canonical works of Vergil taken together. I take it that Silius did not agree with Martial’s apparent assumption (14.185) that Vergil wrote the Culex.
  3. Much more than Vergilian length, if we just compare Punica and Aeneid.

(PDF Version)

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Anachronistic Joke

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

The hero of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, the only decent adult other than the title character, is her steward, Antonio Bologna. With a name like that, I can’t help wondering if his middle-school classmates called him ‘Tony Baloney’.

Posted in Culture: Plays, Jokes | Tagged , | Comments Off

Shakespeare Puzzle

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Legal Disclaimer: There is no prize, and if there were, employees and customers of the American Shakespeare Center would not be eligible for it, since anyone who has seen the production already knows the answer.

Can you identify the play being acted in this picture: smaller – larger? The number, costumes, and arrangements of the nine actors on stage should tell you which of Shakespeare’s plays it is. Don’t forget the props, which are few but important at the ASC.

By the way, for those who don’t already know me, I’m the guy in the best seat in the house.

I’ll add the link to where I got the picture as soon as someone solves the puzzle – a direct link would include the play’s abbreviation in the URL. No fair trolling the ASC website.

Posted in Blackfriars, Culture: Plays | Tagged | 2 Comments

Too Bad About the Gender

Posted on Wednesday: August 14, 2013 by Michael Hendry

I love puns, even (or especially) the unintentional and bilingual kind. Browsing Cicero’s Verrines recently, I was very glad to run across a ‘most experienced and hardworking ploughman’ (experientissimus ac diligentissimus arator) named ‘Nympho’ (2.3.53-54).

Posted in Jokes, Latin Literature | Tagged | 1 Comment

A Significant Anniversary

Posted on Saturday: May 18, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Today is the 100th birthday of Nicolás Gómez Dávila. If you don’t know his work, probably the best place to start is this page. If you don’t think you have time to take on a new author, you’re wrong: he wrote almost nothing except aphorisms – thousands of them, so you won’t run out any time soon, either. Here’s a personal favorite:

Sólo debemos leer para descubrir lo que debemos releer eternamente.

We ought to read only to discover what we ought to reread forever.

(Escolios a un Texto Implícito, 1.214)

Is Gómez Dávila worth rereading forever? You won’t know until you read some more, will you?

Posted in - Aphorisms, General | Comments Off

Where’s the Party?

Posted on Monday: April 29, 2013 by Michael Hendry

Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Constantine Cavafy, and the 80th anniversary of the death of . . . Constantine Cavafy. I can think of many better ways to celebrate one’s 70th birthday than dying on it, but it does make for a nice symmetry.

So where’s the party? I have not seen the doubly significant date mentioned on any of the many websites that I read, some of which are devoted to literature or culture in general. Even www.cavafy.com, “the official website of the Cavafy archive”, and The Cavafy Museum in Alexandria website have nothing posted for the day.

Posted in Culture: Poetry, Nachleben | Comments Off

Best Name for the Next Pope?

Posted on Wednesday: March 6, 2013 by Michael Hendry

As a Latinist inordinately fond of puns, I’m hoping whoever is elected will take the name Sixtus. Since the last Sixtus was Sixtus V, he would be Sixtus VI.

Posted in Jokes | 1 Comment

Typecasting Joke

Posted on Thursday: February 28, 2013 by Michael Hendry

In the last two years, Patrick Earl of the American Shakespeare Center‘s touring troupe has played Giovanni in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Ferdinand in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Each one is the brother of the title character, each is entirely too fond of his sister – Giovanni to the point of getting her pregnant – and each one (spoiler alert) ends up killing his sister, directly or indirectly. To avoid typecasting, perhaps next year Earl should expand his range a bit, and play the title role in Oedipus Rex.

Posted in Blackfriars, Culture: Plays, Jokes | Comments Off