Palace Gate Research Articles

Marcos, martial law and memory: The past in our future in the Philippines

I was a martial law baby. My generation grew up watching the unending spectacle of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Remember this was the 20th Century, long before YouTube and Netflix. I would have preferred to watch Zombie Apocalypse but that wasn’t an option. There were only five TV channels and three newspapers, all owned by Marcos cronies. We didn’t call it 'fake news' then but it was vintage 1970s propaganda—obvious and crude. I was in first grade when Marcos was first elected president. I studied across the street from Malacañang, in a school for girls run by the Sisters of the Holy Ghost. I remember that in the 1960s, the streets around the presidential mansion were busy, filled with traffic and commerce. On Thursdays, hundreds flocked to the church nearby to pray to St. Jude, patron of hopeless causes. I was barely in my teens when martial law was declared. Suddenly the streets were silenced. The palace gates were shuttered. Barbed wire barricades kept people away. The neighborhood—the entire country—was hushed. Marcos was still president when I finished high school. He continued to issue decrees from his barricaded palace while I went off to college, graduated, and got my first job. My generation had reached adulthood with no memory of any other president.

Mağrib ve Endülüs’te Hz. Peygamber (sas)’e Muhabbetin Simgeleri -Mevlidiyyât, Sahîh-i Buhârî Hatimleri ve Mescid-i Nebevî’ye Gönderilen Mektuplar-

İslâm’ın Afrika ve Endülüs topraklarına intişarıyla birlikte hayatın, dinin iki temel kaynağı olan Kur’ân-ı Kerîm ve Hz. Peygamber’in sünneti üzerine inşa edilmesi için her kesim büyük çaba harcamıştır. Hz. Peygamber’e olan muhabbet çeşitli şekillerde tezahür etmiş; zihinlerde, yüreklerde ve dillerde canlı tutulmasına dair gelenekler ihdâs edilmîştir. Doğu’dan etkilenmeler olsa da Mağrib ve Endülüs’e has merasimler de yapılmıştır. Bu merasimler saraylarda, mescidlerde, konaklarda, ribât ve zâviyelerde zengin katılımla gerçekleştirilmiştir. Bugüne kadar birçok iz kalmış olsa da bu çalışmada daha çok Endülüs ve Mağrib’deki bazı devletlerde yapılan merasimlerle devlet ricâlinin ve halkın Hz. Peygamber’e muhabbetinin simgeleri olarak seçilen mevlid-i nebîde okunan mevlidiyyât; Sahîh-i Buhârî hatimleri ve Mescid-i Nebevî’ye gönderilen mektuplar üzerinde durulacaktır. Mevlidiyyât denilen kasideler sultanların da ilgisi dolayısıyla şairlerin kıymetinin artmasına, edebî meclislerin yaygınlaşmasına, okunan şiirlerin saray duvarlarına inşa edilerek Hz. Peygamber’in hatırasını ölümsüzleştirmeye kadar geliştirilmiştir. Kur’ân-ı Kerîm’den sonraki kaynağımız olan hadis-i şerîflerin yazıldığı eserler arasında Mağrib ve Endülüs’te de oldukça kıymet bulan Sahîh-i Buhârî hem okunmuş, hem ezberlenilmiş hem de hatmesi için merasim gerçekleştirilmiştir. Kutsal topraklara uzak bölgeler olan bu bölgelerin sultanları ve uleması Hz. Peygamber’e olan özlem ve hasretlerini mektuplara aktarmış ve hacı kafileleriyle birlikte orada okunması amacıyla gönderilmişlerdir. Bu çalışmanın bölgenin siyer anlayışına, Peygamber tasavvuruna katkı sağlayacak çalışmalar için faydalı olacağı düşünülmektedir.

Years Flow by Like Water

Years Flow by Like Water Wo Chan (bio) flowers do yoga in the sun in ways i cannot.stretching comes difficult because it is too simple and i believe i am complex, more than i actually am.light, cool water, to be touched with intention, the permission to root and spill into a lust for plain air.when will you let somebody love you, wo chan? “I love flowers. I know that is not a radical statementbut I love loving them,” john says after i send a snapshot of the colonial garden. pine mulch, romance,the crying voluptuous bees: the world that ekes a strange, barn owl tenderness for my friend.i gasp like a new page in a calendar. july 3rd, 2018.there is much i don’t say. you can have an unimpressive sense of self:iphone 6 kissing the mouths of dayglow lilies, the punk rock daisies that wear a choker of spiked white leaves,swollen yellow heads dusty and free of the mind . . . in my childhood i knew a myth. ten brothers born to a motherwho swallowed a string of ten pearls. each child could do one incredible thing. the oldest see miles away;the third lift boulders; the fifth could fly; the sixth impenetrable. [End Page 160] seven could grow tall as a palace gate; nine could shout the walls down.the youngest brother, though, the tenth, was powerless throughout, a nuisance who wept from fear at each encounter with the villain.though who antagonized us? the bureaucrat who named us high on his sinecure? the children in sheets tapping at our gate?my brothers and i projected on this drama a schematic for boyhood where we could be mythic, incredible, and chinesein virginia’s townhouses set across from the chuck e. cheese. i was the youngest—my brothers strong, of clear sight,protected me from what i couldn’t see then, and then tormented me for my uselessness.i cried for help until i learned to stop crying. i drew blood.we opened a restaurant. we became something. my oldest brother, hot-tempered in silver hatchbackslingshotting noodles from city to suburb; the second, glamorous in peanut sheen, shifting a wok one-handedlylike a black chariot across fire; the third, lead oarman, draped in steam, all smiles near the behemoth haier. He was a child, really.I showered with him, shared a room until I was sixteen. I love them. I know that is not a radical statement,but I love loving them. I hate how we were raised, though it is done now.I think it is over. The restaurant sold to our neighbor who makes very bad food. Our parents:they are in bed and resting diabetic, sewn in varicose veins. [End Page 161] We lived through these decisions.The air is heavier than when we first arrived in the San Francisco airport, my mother staring down the wall of terminalglass that shines a vision of my brothers hauling duffels, dragging luggage and my babyish hand,already sweaty and floating through the shift home that wills to move us and will remove us from each other. [End Page 162] Wo Chan Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and elsewhere. Their poems appear in Poetry, Wussy, the Massachusetts Review, No Tokens, and the Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and elsewhere. Follow their work at@theillustriouspearl. Copyright © 2022 Middlebury College

A Distinctly Rhetorical Space;Eusynoptosand the Greek Council-House

A Distinctly Rhetorical Space;<i>Eusynoptos</i>and the Greek Council-House

Gate of the Treasury of Istanbul Dolmabahçe Palace in the Context of Palace Architecture in Westernization Period

Gate of the Treasury of Istanbul Dolmabahçe Palace in the Context of Palace Architecture in Westernization Period

Super High Integral Lifting Force Supporting System Design of Yuzhen Palace Gate

To Wudang Yuzhen palace gate lifting project as an example, it introduces a new type of lifting counterforce supporting system design. This lifting counterforce supporting system is designed in this paper in three aspects: the selection of lifting counterforce supporting system, steel pad, section steel reinforced concrete structure, and it puts forward the relevant suggestions: It is better to use H-steel reinforced concrete support system in building large high jacking works; In the design process of the steel cross section, it is need to focus on the bending strength and stability factors in the case of considering the eccentric force; In the design process of steel reinforced concrete walls, it is need to focus on resistance to overturning stability factor.

Colonel Tandja’s Country

Colonel Tandja’s Country Peter Chilson (bio) Not long ago, a man I used to know lost his job and went to prison in the space of a few hours. Months later and just as abruptly he returned home, charges dropped, with little explanation. His name is Mamadou Tandja. He was once a colonel in the army of Niger, a West African country more than twice the size of France and covered mostly by the Sahara. He became, years after I met him, the twice democratically elected civilian leader of an African nation state—an anomaly on a continent of dictators. Tandja’s ten-year reign over Niger ended February 18, 2010, during a cabinet meeting at the gleaming white presidential palace overlooking the Niger River in Niamey, the capital city, when shortly after noon mutinous soldiers blew open the palace gate. This began, The New York Times reported, “a day of gunfire, explosions and nonstop military music on the radio” during which a few soldiers and civilians died. Mutineers burst in on the cabinet and hustled Tandja to a car, unharmed. They kept him a few days at an army base before moving him to house arrest in the servants’ quarters of a palace villa, and accused him of taking more than $100 million in foreign aid and other funds. A year later, in March 2011, Niger’s military rulers demoted Tandja again, this time to Kollo civilian prison outside the capital. There, among thieves, at the age of 73 he awaited trial, complaining of poor health and harsh quarters—until May, when he left Kollo a free man, all sins forgiven for lack of evidence. Yet the criminal stain, the notion that he took the money, haunts me. I feel betrayed by a man I had hoped stood for something. For two years I was a teacher in Niger’s Tahoua region, which Tandja ruled through drought in the 1980s. Governor Tandja owned a spot in the mind of every civil servant, [End Page 89] tangling us in fear, desire, and guilt—fear of being noticed and punished as if we all deserved a stint behind bars; desire to be blessed by his power; and guilt for not working to his standards. Tandja jailed a clerk for losing track of rice stores, an act that made him a man of the people, protector of the food. He locked up others for keeping unclean offices. He jailed a farmer jaywalking on a rural road as his motorcade approached. One man I knew was imprisoned for having a broken water faucet when Tandja visited his home. To my knowledge, no one he sent to prison died, but to this day I cannot decide whether to despise or admire Tandja. He has wandered a Shakespearian path, sometimes Richard III, ruthless and vindictive, or Prince Hal, triumphing over personal vice to lead a country. Tandja-the-devil drank hard and pilfered food aid as his people went without. Tandja-the-last-honest-man tried to be everywhere at once for his people. Under Tandja, half of Niger’s 14 million people starved in a famine he claimed the international press invented. Yet I cannot condemn him. It’s easy to damn a leader for negligence in a land for centuries mired in drought and ethnic conflict. Niger ranks 186, second from last (above the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on the 2011 United Nations Human Development Index—a measure of life expectancy, education, literacy, and standard of living. After a half-century of independence and billions of dollars in aid, Nigeriens barely scratch a living in Saharan heat. They die young in a nation, the borders of which were drawn in 1904 by Frenchmen so frustrated by persistent poverty that they later dubbed Niger a “phantom colony.” Colonel Tandja’s country. I first met Tandja one bright morning in March 1986, when a desert-brown light tank rolled to a stop and cut its engine outside a concrete school building in Bouza, the village where I was a Peace Corps English teacher working with fifth-graders. My students and I watched through the French windows we’d opened to cool the room...

Studies on the notes of 'Bianque's Diagnosis and Treatment in Guo'

Errors could be found in the annotations about person, event and place in the chapter of "Bianque's Diagnosis and Treatment in Guo State" in some editions of Classical Literature of Traditional Chinese Medicine. 'Zhong shu zi' meant officials in charge of security of the palace, not the education officer for aristocratic children. In Bianque's dialogue with Zhong shu zi, "Shou" means wearing clothes after death, not encoffined or buried. 'Zhong que', where the King of Guo met Bianque was the palace gate mentioned above, not another place. 'Que' refers to the watchtower on each side of the palace gate (single one or a couple), and it was called 'Zhong que' (middle watchtower) because it was between the outside door and interior door, not the path between the two watchtowers.

Oikos and Logos : Chesterton's Vision of Distributism

Oikos and Logos:Chesterton's Vision of Distributism Richard Gill (bio) Although he was appalled by the social consequences of industrial capitalism, the English Catholic novelist, poet, and journalist G. K. Chesterton (1875–1936) rejected the idea that socialism was the solution to such an economic malaise. In fact, he believed that socialism represented a continuation and not a curtailment of the process of property expropriation inaugurated by the advent of a capitalist economy, which could only be challenged by promoting the widespread ownership of limited private property. In Chesterton's Christian-Aristotelian vision of distributism, limits are placed on the life processes of nature—the acquisition of goods and human sexuality—as both aspects of economy are transfigured in accordance with the will of the Creator and the needs for sustaining a human community. The institutions Chesterton offers to this end of transcending the market relations of self-interest in these spheres are Christian marriage and a modern form of medieval guild regulation of industry to preserve independent household economies. Leaving London in 1919 on a journey to the Holy Land, Chesterton remarked on the political confusion that he believed was the hallmark of the industrial West: [End Page 64] The employers talk about "private enterprise," as if there was anything private about modern enterprise. Its combines are as big as many commonwealths; and things advertised in large letters on the sky cannot plead the shy privileges of privacy. Meanwhile the Labour men talk about the need to "nationalise" the mines or the land, as if it were not the great difficulty in a plutocracy to nationalise the government, or even to nationalise the nation.1 Chesterton's own sympathies lay on the side of Labour, but he believed that the proposed statist solution—together with its rejection by the plutocracy—was an absurdity: "The mob howls before the palace gates, 'Hateful tyrant, we demand that you assume more despotic powers'; and the tyrant thunders from the balcony, 'Vile rebels, do you dare to suggest that my powers should be extended?' There seems to be a little misunderstanding somewhere."2 To fathom out this misunderstanding, says Chesterton, we need to get to the root of the problem faced by modern Western civilization: "We must begin at the beginning; we must return to our first origins in history, as we must return to our first principles in philosophy. We must consider how we came to be doing what we do, and even saying what we say."3 What is the ideal that modern Western societies are supposed to be achieving? According to Chesterton, it is democracy: "It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the modern world; but it is still the ideal of the modern world."4 Chesterton maintains that the source of this classical republican ideal was Rome. Yet the Republic of ancient Rome was built upon slavery, and here is the crux of the dilemma of labor and liberty in the modern world: The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris without the slavery of Rome. Between the Roman [End Page 65] Republic and the French Republic something had happened. Whatever else it was, it was the abandonment of the ancient and fundamental habit of slavery; the numbering of men for necessary labour as the normal foundation of society, even a society in which citizens were free and equal. When the idea of equal citizenship returned to the world, it found the world changed by a more mysterious version of equality. . . . We have now to assume not only that all citizens are equal, but that all men are citizens.5 The "something" that had happened—which had transformed the desire for an equality of citizens into the equality of men—was Christendom. Recalling that his destination was Jerusalem, Chesterton declared, "I know the name of the magic which had made all those peasants out of pagan slaves, and has presented to the modern world a new problem of labour and liberty."6 Thus for Chesterton...

Medieval oak chronology from the Vilnius Lower Castle

The paper describes the results of a dendrochronological investigation on historical oak (Q uercus robur L.) timbers from the Vilnius Lower Castle excavations. In Lithuania, oak was used only in specific cases during the Middle Ages. Therefore, historical material for tree ring chronology building is lacking. However, the construction of a local oak chronology is of great importance as it can help to determine the provenance of many imported timbers that are part of wooden cultural heritage in Western Europe. Oak samples make 9.2% of the analysed timbers excavated in the Vilnius Lower Castle territory – the largest present-day collection of historical timbers in Lithuania. The main material for Vilnius oak chronology was obtained from the ‘bridge foundation (BF)’ construction found close to the Royal Palace gate at a depth of 4–5 m. Ring-width series of the oak beams of the ‘BF’, together with other excavated oak logs were cross-dated and a mean chronology of 217-year length was constructed. The chronology was dated to AD 1202–1418 against the Baltic reference chronologies BALTIC1 ( t = 7.57 ), BALTIC2 ( t = 4.52 ) and WINCHCOL ( t = 5.74 ) (authors J. Hilliam, I. Tyers, D. Mills). The average date of the hardwood – sapwood boundary on the ‘bridge’ samples that have partially preserved sapwood is between 1406 and 1407. As the average number of oak sapwood rings is considered to be 16, the most probable felling date of trees used for the ‘BF’ is situated around 1423.

Palace Gates

Journal Article Palace Gates Get access Nick Dunn, MBCS Nick Dunn, MBCS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ITNOW, Volume 47, Issue 3, May 2005, Page 34, https://doi.org/10.1093/itnow/bwi062 Published: 01 May 2005

The Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan) at the height of its splendour: Translated from Wang Wei (2002)) [The Yuanmingyuan Ruins

Entering the Garden of Perfect Brightness (figure 1) from the Grand Palace Gate, which faces south, the first scene you came across was the Golden Water Bridge. All together there were three Golden Water bridges over the crescentshaped river. Through the Second Palace Gate was the Hall of Uprightness and Brightness, which was the hall where the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty [1644–1911]1 held court meetings and handled state affairs. Along the east and west side of the hall were the court waiting apartments [places for the officials to take rest before or after court meetings] of the civil and military officials. The architectural style of these buildings was quite similar to those in the Forbidden City.

Charles Dickens: a neglected diagnosis

The novelist Charles Dickens died of a stroke on June 9, 1870, aged 58 years. He was ill for the last 5 years of his life, although no diagnosis has yet accounted for his varied symptoms. Here, I propose that Dickens had a right parietal or parietal-temporal disorder.

Last Hope

Ad Libitum20 November 2001Last HopeH J. Van Peenen, MDH J. Van Peenen, MDPonca City, OK 74604Search for more papers by this authorAuthor, Article, and Disclosure Informationhttps://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-135-10-200111200-00015 SectionsAboutFull TextPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail Heart, the capital city, when informedthat death was at the palace gates,hauled his standard down.He could no longer count on his defenders,those lounging bodyguards, lungs, kidneys, eyes,already conniving to remain alive.Go! May young ... Author, Article, and Disclosure InformationAffiliations: Ponca City, OK 74604Corresponding Author: H.J. Van Peenen, MD, 1414 East Hartford, Unit #9, Ponca City, OK 74604. PreviousarticleNextarticle Advertisement FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Metrics 20 November 2001Volume 135, Issue 10Page: 926KeywordsBrainCardiovascular therapyCorneaHeartHeart diseasesKidneysLungsOxygenSleep ePublished: 20 November 2001 Issue Published: 20 November 2001 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 2001 by American College of Physicians. All Rights Reserved.PDF downloadLoading ...

Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (review)

Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, by Edward AlexanderNear end of Edward Alexander's study of Irving Howe, he comments on two works Howe published in second half of 1970s. World of Our Fathers [1976], Howe embraced what he had once rejected; in Leon Trotsky, published in 1978, he repudiated much (if not quite all) of what he had once embraced. While this observation might seem touch off-hand, it hits upon several crucial elements in work of Irving Howe.Not least of these elements is wide array of intellectual areas in which Howe made significant contributions to American intellectual life, beginning in immediate postwar years and continuing until his death in 1993. As Alexander's subtitle suggests, Howe wrote provocatively and importantly as socialist thinker, as literary critic, and as historian and archivist of Eastern European Jews and their literary traditions. He was, in phrase of John Simon, man triumvirate.Yet Alexander's cryptic comment also suggests that careful reading of Howe's work shows not only inconsistencies, but sense in which his arguments often seem pegged to moment. Always intellectually engage, one can still feel heat of Howe's words, years after they appeared. What we may not feel, after reading about it all, is sense of total person.Edward Alexander has set about task of assessing this enormous literary outpouring. He has chosen, or felt obligated, to write a biography of Howe's telling us that he was unable to interview Howe's wives and children and prohibited from quoting from Howe's letters. A professor of English at University of Washington, Alexander moves through Howe's books and articles chronologically, tying them to issues and events of each era. This tends to create an awkward sense in which books and articles come to be equated with decades, crucial events only creating context for works.Alexander's approach does offer reader glimpse of multifaceted interests of this New York intellectual. But it ultimately leaves impression that sum of parts is different from whole. In 1970s, Howe catapulted out of more narrow world of intellectuals and critics and climbed to top of bestseller lists with his evocative portrait of world of his father. He had already taught at Brandeis, Stanford, and City University, had been published in all important intellectual journals of era, and was widely respected socialist and literary critic. Yet today, just five years after his death, Howe seems, if not forgotten, something of tangential personality of era.Perhaps this is because of his wide-ranging interests, perhaps because of his street-fighter's style. We read Alexander's summaries and analysis of Howe's works and come away with sense of brilliant and restless mind, but of no real coherence to his oeuvre. Some modern students may read Howe socialist theorist, once hardboiled Trotskyist who moved away from Marx but never abandoned what he called democratic socialism. Others may encounter literary critic, often attuned to modern temper but ultimately caught between champions of multiculturalism and frequently reactionary traditionalists who guard their notion of the canon like palace gates. Still others may turn to his anthologies of Yiddish writing, as well as his magisterial history. Yet, one does not get sense of an intellectual figure like that of his contemporaries Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, or Daniel Bell. While widely different, what these intellectuals seem to possess is an overall intellectual coherence within their works.To explain why this is not case with Howe requires more than Alexander sets out to do. …

"A Garden and a Twilight, and a Palace Gate": Plotting the Intersection of Europe and America in Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"

"A Garden and a Twilight, and a Palace Gate": Plotting the Intersection of Europe and America in Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"

A Note on "Abraham Banishing Hagar" by Giambattista Tiepolo

IN 1996 THE THREE-HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Giambattista Tiepolo was celebrated with a spate of exhibitions and conferences all over Europe and in the United States where the most noteworthy presentation took place at Metropolitan Museum of Art in NewYork. These events engendered a large number of catalogues, studies, archival investigations, new attributions, and reviews. They also led to the identification of some previously unknown works by the painter and much fresh insight into his oeuvre and working methods.' purpose of this note is to reconsider suggestions made regarding the subject matter and the titles ascribed to an enigmatic but powerful early painting by the artist. canvas, once in the Rasini collection in Milan, was first published by Antonio Morassi, who called it Abraham Banishing Hagar (Figure 1).2 Keith Christiansen accepts the title but adds a question mark,3 which indicates some doubt about the designation, and his uncertainty seems justified. He-rightly-also rejects two more recent suggestions that seem even less convincing than Morassi's reference to Genesis 16:6-8. In 1987 Bernard Aikema proffered The Sacrifice of Polyxena at the Tomb of Achilles as a title,4 while in 1993 Massimo Gemin and Filippo Pedrocco maintained that the scene depicts the banishment of Vashti, the wife of Ahasuerus, the Persian king who ordered her to appear before his guests. Vashti's refusal to do so led to her expulsion.5 Unhappy with these hypotheses, Christiansen assumes that Tiepolo's use of a recondite source inhibits the understanding of the paintings subject. latest contribution to the debate is George Knox's unconvincing alternative: Mordecai at the palace gate beseeching Esther to offer herself to Ahasuerus. This scenario, though not described in so many words in Esther, 2, covers all the main points: the magnificent palace gateway, the insistent gesture of Mordecai pointing indoors, and the emotional prostration of Esther.6

Sunday Afternoon at Fulham Palace

A Sunday afternoon in late September, one of the last good weekends before the long dark, old couples taking the air along the Thames, sunning themselves, their arms and legs so pale, exposed, while the young press forward, carry us along in the crowd to the fair at Fulham Palace where a few people have already spread blankets and tablecloths for the picnics they've brought, laughing and talking as they wait for the concert to begin at three o'clock. Inside the palace gate, a man inflates a room-size, brightly painted rubber castle, the children impatiently waiting for the walls and turrets to go up, the spongy floor they like to jump on. The palace is empty. The Bishop gone. Now overfed goldfish swim slowly round and round in the crumbling courtyard fountain, and farther on, a white peacock stands still as a statue, still as a stone, whether in pride or sorrow at being the last of its kind here I don't know. A low door opens into the Bishop's walled garden, but once inside nothing miraculous or forbidden tempts us, just a few flowers and herbs among weeds (unlike those illuminated scenes in books of hours), the past passing away too quickly to catch or recognize.

Spleen à la Grecque: Karyotakis and Baudelaire

Spleen à la Grecque: Karyotakis and Baudelaire Rachel Hadas What poet writing between, say, 1840 and 1930 combines a superb ear and a strict adherence to form with savage irony and a preoccupation with death and decay? What poet hymns his sickly muse, ponders escaping the frustrating urban world in which he finds himself immured, and travels in imagination over a shining sea to a land of tropical innocence and ease—only to meet with disillusionment, possibly even with the realization that such a haven never existed? What poet feels old at a young age and is haunted by nostalgia for a past happiness which, again, may never have existed; yet haunted also by the claustrophobic here and now? What poet writes extensively and evocatively of gardens and flowers—growing things that come to be tinged with the same bitterness and regret that flavor his lyricism? That many poets might conceivably fill the bill says, of course, a good deal about modern poetry or, if one wants a label, about Symbolism or Modernism. Americans might well think of Eliot. For me, however, and in the European context, the answer that first and overwhelmingly presents itself is Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Yet a very close runner-up is Konstantine Karyotakis (1896-1928). The question of Baudelaire's influence on the Greek poet is not in doubt; nor is it my purpose here to belabor the obvious. Moreover, Karyotakis, widely read in French poetry, was surely indebted to other French poets too. His oeuvre includes translations of Verlaine, Moréas, Toulet, and Corbière as well as of Baudelaire. Why single out the one relationship then? Because of affinities of temperament. When we read the poems of Baudelaire which Karyotakis chose to translate—"La Voix" and "Spleen (III)"—we have a catalog in parvo of Karyotakis' most crucial themes and tones. Here are Richard Howard's translations of these two poems of Baudelaire: 21 22 Rachel Hadas THE VOICE Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where Latin ashes and the dust of Greece mingled with novels, history, and verse in one dark Babel. I was folio-high when I first heard the voices. 'All the world,' said one, insidious but sure, 'is cake— let me make you an appetite to match, and then your happiness need have no end.' And the other: 'Come, O come with me in dreams beyond the possible, beyond the known!' that second voice sang like the wind in the reeds, a wandering phantom out of nowhere, sweet to hear yet somehow horrifying too. 'Now and forever!' I answered, whereupon my wound was with me—ever since, my Fate: behind the scenes, the frivolous decors of all existence, deep in the abyss, I see distinctly other, brighter worlds; yet victimized by what I know I see, I sense the serpent coiling at my heels; and therefore, like the prophets, from that hour I've loved the wilderness, I've loved the sea; no ordinary sadness touches me though I find savor in the bitterest wine; how many truths I trade away for lies, and musing on heaven, stumble over trash . . . Even so, the voice consoles me: 'Keep your dreams, the wise have none so lovely as the mad.' SPLEEN (III) I'm like the king of a rainy country, rich but helpless, decrepit though still a young man who scorns his fawning tutors, wastes his time on dogs and other animals, and has no fun; nothing distracts him, neither hawk nor hound nor subjects starving at the palace gate. His favorite fool's obscenities fall flat —the royal invalid is not amused— and ladies in waiting for a princely nod no longer dress indecently enough to win a smile from this young skeleton. The bed of state becomes a stately tomb. The alchemist who brews him gold has failed Karotakis and Baudelaire 23 to purge the impure substance from his soul, and baths of blood, Rome's legacy recalled by certain barons in their failing days, are useless to revive this sickly flesh through which no blood but brackish Lethe seeps.1 Taken together, the two Baudelaire poems can be read as a miniature autobiography: first, in "The Voice...

The "Palace Gate" of the Liver: A Study of Terminology and Methods in Babylonian Extispicy

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe "Palace Gate" of the Liver: A Study of Terminology and Methods in Babylonian ExtispicyUlla JeyesUlla Jeyes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Cuneiform Studies Volume 30, Number 4October 1978 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1359862 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 1978 American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.