Friends Martine and Jean-Yves cane to stay with us last week and – knowing my fondness for a previous book of French Nursery Rhymes ; Mots D’Heures: Gousses, Rames – The D’Antin Manuscripts by Luis D. Antin Van Rooten.
-they brought for me another book by (I presume ) the same author called by the above title.
This contains not only many of that poet’s works like ;
Tout pille or, note, toute pille, date hisse de caisse tiens !
but also some specially selected works by others.
I particularly enjoyed the protest poem by the well known puritanical poet A. d’Enisonne against the modern obsession with writing about sex;
Art phallique, art phallique, art phallique en ouate
NB. To enjoy the full resonance of these extracts it may be necessary to quote the verses aloud and with a French accent.
Comments
Peter
on August 29, 2011Do you know this lipogrammatic variation, from “A Void” by G. Adair – translating or following “La Disparition” by G*org*s P*r*c?
Living, or not living: that is what I ask:
If ’tis a stamp of honour to submit
To slings and arrows waft’d us by ill winds,
Or brandish arms aginst a flood of afflictions,
Which by our opposition is subdu’d? Dying, drowsing;
Waking not? And by drowsing thus to thwart
An aching soul all th’ natural shocks
Humanity sustains. ‘T is a consummation
So piously wish’d for. Dying, drowsing;
Drowsing; and, what say, conjuring visions: ay, that’s th’ rub;
For in that drowsy faint what visions may disturb
Our shuffling off of mortal coil,
Do prompt us think again. Of that calcmity, to wit,
That is our living for so long;
For who would brook duration’s whips and scorns,
A tyrant’s wrong, a haughty man’s disdain,
Pangs of dispriz’d ardour and sloth of law,
Th’ incivility of rank and all th’ insults
That goodly worth from its contrary draws,
If such a man might his own last affirm
With a bald bodkin? Who would such ballast carry,
To grunt and wilt along his stooping path,
But that his horror of th’ unknown,
That vast and unmapp’d land to which
No living man pays visit, is puzzling to his will,
Making him shrug off what now assails him
And shrink from posthumous ills?
Compunction thus turns all of us to cowards;
And thus our natural trait of fixity
Is sickli’d through with ashy rumiantion,
And missions of much pith and import
With this in mind soon turn awry,
And from all thoughts of action go astray.
WILLIAM SHAKSPAR
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