Tag: music

senryu – a little boy = un petit garçon = un ragazzino


senryu – a little boy = un petit garçon = un ragazzino




a little boy
playing the piano...
all thumbs

un petit garçon
joue au piano ...
voilà deux mains gauches 

un ragazzino
suona il piano ...
tutti i pollici

Richard Vallance
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senryu – yes you are = oui, c’est toi


senryu – yes you are = oui, c’est toi

yes you are
my special angel –
your voice my music! 




oui c’est toi
mon ange spécial -
ta voix ma musique !

Richard Vallance

The actor is Tommy Knight. He is so astonishingly cute I think, no, I know I have a crush on him! What stunning blue eyes! If you do not think this actor is gorgeous, you have to be nuts!  I think I am going to fain...

For the lyrics and song, You are my special angel, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiVYvdKjzYA

haiku d’été – chirping in the grass = elle stridule dans l’herbe


haiku d’été - chirping in the grass = elle stridule dans l’herbe

chirping in the grass
the iridescent grasshopper -
a warm day’s rondeau




elle stridule dans l’herbe,
la sauterelles iridescente  -
rondeau d’un jour chaud

Richard Vallance

summer haiku d’été – the rebec player = la joueuse de rebec


summer haiku d’été – the rebec player = la joueuse de rebec

the rebec player
dancing to the rosette –
the dove of peace

the rebec player 620

la joueuse de rebec
qui danse à la rosace –
colombe de la paix

Richard Vallance

This magnificent painting is "The Rebec Player", by Esther Geller (1915-2015), in the Danforth Museum, Massachusetts. 

Cette peinture magnifique titrée, "The Rebec Player", par Esther Geller (1915-2015 ), se trouve dans le Musée Danforth, au Massachusetts.

Credits with thanks to her nephew,  Mitchell Geller
Gràce à la permission octroyée par son neveu, Mitchell Geller

spring haiku de printemps – fiddleheads = têtes de violon


spring haiku de printemps – fiddleheads = têtes de violon

fiddleheads
in the forested hills –
andante breeze

fiddleheads 620

têtes de violon
sur les collines forestières –
brise andante

Richard Vallance

Fiddleheads are native to Canada. They taste like spinach. They thrive in the Gatineau Hills just outside Ottawa and the Outaouais.

Les têtes de violon sont endémiques au Canada. Elles ont le goût des épinards. Elles prospèrent sur les collines de la région du Gatineau proches d’Ottawa et de l’Outaouais.

summer haiku d’été – your Water Music = ta Musique de l’eau


summer haiku d’été – your Water Music = ta Musique de l’eau  

your Water Music,
our fireworks over the Thames
starrier than stars

Water Music 620

ta Musique de l’eau ,
feux d’artifice à la Tamise
plus qu’étoilés

Richard Vallance

By Many Roundelays, a sonnet


By Many Roundelays, a sonnet

by many roundelays 620

for Ludwig van Beethoven, and his Symphony no. 6
in F major, “La Pastorale”, III, Allegro, “Sturm” 

Our Earth, from space, goes spinning, Queen of Spheres,
composing clouds in rounds of roundelays,
so thrilling them they rain allegro tears
all over greening fields by stormed-in bays.
As stallions madly wing on lightning hooves,
they beat the Seven Seas, and break the calm.
They race to hem the hale moon in, that moves
their fears to tear us from our smug aplomb.
Our prayers are vain! They’ll never acquiesce
in any urge to quell our fears of gales,
our foibles sins to them, the stallionesque!
For who can take to heart their stunning tales?
   If they run mad, though I may be God’s fool,
   would poets foam for them where full moons rule?


Richard Vallance, © 2013

7 more photos from Vienna (2 in both colour & B&W), from our vocation in Europe, June 2015: Click on each photo to ENLARGE:


7 more photos from Vienna (2 in both colour & B&W), from our vocation in Europe, June 2015: Click on each photo to ENLARGE: 

caryatids

caryatidsb&w

coat of arms

Doric

Doric B&W

Museum district a

triumphandjustice

Schoenbrunn Palace Eagles on Guard

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart star

New article on academia.edu. My translation of Sappho’s Ode, “The Moon has set, and the Pleiades…” from Aeolic Greek to Mycenaean Linear B, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, English and French


New article on academia.edu. My translation of Sappho’s Ode, “The Moon has set, and the Pleiades...” from Aeolic Greek to Mycenaean Linear B, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, English and French, here: Click to OPEN

academiaedusublimesappho
This article with my translation of Sappho’s Ode, “The Moon has set, and the Pleiades...” into two archaic Greek dialects (Linear B & Linear C), as well as into English and French, is the first of its kind ever to appear on the Internet.

Osbert sapho ou  la poésie lyrique
It will eventually be followed by my translations of several other splendid lyrics by Sappho, as well as by serial installments of my translation of the entire Catalogue of Ships in Book II of the Iliad by Homer, and several haiku which I have already  composed in parallel Mycenaean Linear B, English & French (I kid you not!)

If you would like to keep up with my ongoing research on academia.edu, you should probably sign yourself up with them, and follow me. Additionally, you can follow anyone else you like, especially those researchers, scholars and authors who are of particular interest to you (not me). And of course, once you have signed up with academia.edu, which is free, you can upload your own research papers, documents, articles, book reviews etc. to your heart’s content.

Oh and by the way, we have a surprise coming up for you all, a research paper by none other than my co-administrator, Rita Roberts of Crete. 

Richard

Ode to the Archangel Michael = Ode à l’Archange Michel (translated from Mycenaean Linear B = traduit du grec mycénien )


Ode to the Archangel Michael = Ode à l’Archange Michel: Click to ENLARGE = Cliquer pour ÉLARGIR :

Ode to the Archangel Michael a l-archange Michel

As far as I am concerned, the French version of the original Ode in Mycenaean Greek is more successful and more convincing than the English.

Franchement et à mon avis, la traduction du texte intégral de l’Ode en grec mycénien est plus réussi, donc plus convaincant que celle en anglais.     

Richard

A Lovely Ode to the Archangel Michael in Mycenaean Linear B: Click to ENLARGE


A Lovely Ode to the Archangel Michael in Mycenaean Linear B: Click to ENLARGE

Ode to the Archangel Michael Akero Mikero in Mycenaean Linear B

NOTE that the English & French translations of my Ode to the Archangel Michael appear in the next post. Have you ever wondered what Mycenaean Linear B poetry would have sounded like? I know I have, many times over. I invite you to simply read aloud the Latinized version of the Ode in Mycenaean Linear B, even if you do not understand it. The point is to enjoy the music of the poetry, not to worry about your pronunciation or your accent. Nobody really knows how any ancient Greek dialect sounded anyway.

Here a few hints on how to bring out the music in the Mycenaean Greek.

1. Whenever you see the ending, oyo (genitive singular), pronounce it like “oiyo”, but in a single breath. It will sing that way.
2. If you put a little stress on the second-last syllable (penultimate) of words such as “peDIra ”“euZOno” “doSOmo” & “paraDEso”, this will also assist the melody of the poem.
3. Be sure to pronounce all “u”s & “eu”s (euzono) as you would “u” in French, if you can.
4. The disposition of the phrase “para paradeso para meso”  is very peculiar for Greek poetry... “meso ” should be on the same line as the previous words. But I did this deliberately, again for melodic reason. If you read this phrase like this, “PAra paraDEso PAra MEso”, it should sound very nice.
5. The word “mana” (“manna” in English) is obviously not Mycenaean, and not even Greek. It is Hebrew. But I could take liberties introducing this word into a Christian poem. So I did.
6. Recite “pamako atanatoyo” (medicine of the immortal...) like this “PAmako aTAnaTOyo”...

So long as you are consistent and satisfied with how it sounds to you, that is all you need. Yes, and do read it aloud. Otherwise, you will not benefit from hearing the music and the harmony of the Mycenaean Greek, which is after all the earliest of the ancient East Greek dialects, the great-great-grandfather of dialects such as the Ionic & Attic. Besides, you can always allow yourself the pleasure of admiring the pretty Linear B script, however weird it may look to you at first. Just give it a chance.

Being a poet of sorts myself, I decided to write this lyric ode, somewhat along the lines of Sappho (although I cannot even remotely claim a foothold on her astonishing lyrical powers!) It is by no means inconceivable that poetry may very well have been composed in the Mycenaean era, ca. 1450 – 1200 BCE. Simply because we do not have any evidence at all of such activity does not mean that the Minoan/Mycenaean scribes never wrote any poetry at all. The problem lies not with the non-survival of any Mycenaean poetry, but with the impossibility of conserving anything written on papyrus in a humid environment, such as that of Minoan Crete and of Mycenae.

It is indeed fortunate, fortuitous and a great asset to us today that so many Egyptian papyri have been preserved intact since a distant period equal to that of the Mycenaean civilization at its apogee. Call it what you like, the extremely arid sand of Egypt was far far more favourable to the survival of ancient papyrus than the moist climate of Mycenaean Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. That is the real reason why we have no extant literature from their great civilization. But given the astonishing levels their civilization reached in so many areas, in art, architecture, fresco painting, the textile industry, crafts of all kinds, international commerce and even science, it strikes me as passingly strange that no literature of any kind survives, apart from the thousands of Linear B inventory, accounting and ritual tablets, which can hardly be called literature in any sense of the word.

There are those who contend that in fact the Catalogue of Ships in Book II of the Iliad was derived from an earlier Mycenaean epic poem, no doubt in a much simpler and more earthy guise, stripped of much of the telling Homeric metaphorical language which is his hallmark even in the Catalogue of Ships. You can count me among these. For this reason, it strikes me as a distinct possibility that, if the Mycenaeans were able to tackle even a mini-epic poem, even if it were a much shorter, stripped down version of its descendant (if ever there was) of the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad, they surely would have been up to the task of composing considerably shorter poems along the lines of this one you see posted here. Of course, they would never have written about angels and archangels. But that is beside the point. Simply by successfully composing this lyric poem, I believe I have demonstrated that such poetry was, at least conceivably, within the grasp of soi-disant Mycenaean bards. We shall never know, but it is well worth the speculation.

A comment on the phrase epi pedira euzona. As a preposition, epi should take the dative. But here I have used the accusative plural. My reason is this: in archaic Greek, prepositions were less common than adverbs, and in many cases, what we would recognize as a preposition in classical, say, Attic Greek, could very well have been an adverb in Mycenaean Greek. This is how it should be read in this context... pedira euzona is thus to be seen as accusative of aspect or aspectual accusative, reading literally something like this:

with his feet on them...    

I welcome comments on any aspect, as suggested above or otherwise, of my stab at composing a lyric poem in Mycenaean Linear B, Christian though it be.

English and French versions to follow in the next post.


Richard