"Piramus and Thisbe" by Lucas van Leiden (1514)
We need a word for a moderate or even hesitant form of video bingeing, snacking perhaps, or grazing. Anyway, I was doing it over the past couple of weeks, the object of my leisurely consumption being a series called “Troy: The Fall of a City,” a sort of spaghetti epic treatment of the Iliad. It actually has some fine moments. There is a black Achilles, and the female lead, the German Bela Dayne, is gorgeous, weighing in at nine hundred and seventy millihelens, at the least, the millihelen being of course the scientific term for the amount of beauty needed to launch one ship. There was some highbrow fallout from this experience, as it reminded me of the magnificence not merely of Helen of Troy, but of the body of Greco-Roman mythology thought of as a vast literary epic of its own, and the inspiration of so many of our own great English language writers and those of the European continent. Early in my graze I ordered a new second-hand copy of Bullfinch’s mythology—my old second hand copy, like far too many of my books, being unfindable—and have begun reading sequentially the long section on the Greco-Roman myths. I have been doing some more formal studying too, and will soon come to it. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, especially now that spring is arriving.
I have just returned from a glorious spring walk. Along the lake bank, which is only about a quarter of a mile due south from our house, and all the way through beautiful, incipiently greening woods, there is a well-established path flanked by budding daffodils, the ancestors of which I myself planted over the years in my former role as chair of the Grounds Committee of our neighborhood . Not quite ten thousand at a glance, but still enough to call Wordsworth to mind. I then walked west along the ridge path overlooking the lake. There is one discordant moment in this itinerary, when you have to cross a major county road that handles a fair amount of traffic, but it is only a moment or two until you have crossed it and left if out of sight. Then all you see is the lake, the greensward of nice houses up the rise, and the wonderful woods practically groaning to break free of winter.
Feasting on the spring beauty and drinking in the fresh spring air were not, however, all consuming. I was thinking great thoughts. For example, I was thinking that our armadillo likes to eat pineapples. Furthermore I marveled that the girls’ monkey wears gray gloves. These are not perhaps empirical facts, but as verbal icons they loom large in the on-line Portuguese language course I have started to follow. I read in a newspaper column that the Duolingo ap is the most widely used freebee in the world. I had never heard of Duolingo, but then I am used to learning, belatedly, about the world’s best, most important, most numerous, most rewarding and indeed most indispensable things; so I took it in stride. I am also my father’s son. Someday, perhaps, I shall be able to capture the essence of this great man in an extended essay. Until then, anecdotes must serve, and this anecdote is about fireplaces, but also about learning Portuguese. My father once built a beautiful fireplace for our house in Arkansas. I thought it was a terrific fireplace. When it was finished, he then got a book about how to build fireplaces and read it with great interest. I actually published a book a few years ago about a great poem by Portugal’s greatest poet, Luis de Camões. But his language is to contemporary Portuguese as Spenser’s is to contemporary English. It is not all that helpful at a Starbucks, or in other contemporary colloquial situations. From the orthographic point of view (that is, the way the language is written) a good knowledge of Spanish gets you at least halfway there. And some ability in Latin—Camões was a great Latinist, and especially a student of Virgil, rather like Milton—gets you most of the rest of the way. But from the oral point of view (that is, the way the language is pronounced in colloquial exchange) things are very different. I discovered that some years ago when I visited Lisbon with my son Luke, who was fortunately fluent in (Brazilian) Portuguese after years of field work in the Amazon.
If you are still looking for pandemic pastimes, halting conversation with your computer in strange tongues is not a bad one. This Portuguese course doesn’t move very fast. In fact it is maddeningly slow. The Duolingo ap is free in many senses, including its license to spend a quarter of the time encouraging you to move faster, learn more, and be cooler—all of which apparently can be achieved by moving up from the free lessons to the ridiculously inexpensive paid ones. I know I ought to do that, but it is not only my miserliness that is stopping me. The slow pace, with its leisurely reinforcements and its ruthless attitude to mistakes, really drums the stuff into you. My certainty that the Portuguese word for armadillo is tatu (masculine) is now absolute. My grandchildren’s names will surrender to Alzheimer’s before the Portuguese appellation of the armor-plated pride of the family Dasypodidae does. Will we ever be able to travel again? How I long to find myself in some Lusitanian hotspot where, in the normal flow of conversation, I shall be able to inquire of my hosts, quite casually of course, Teu tatu é tatuado? (Is your armadillo tatooed?).
Joking aside, even the most elementary language study can encourage advanced aspirations. I don’t think I had even heard of Portugal’s greatest novelist—José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900)--until a few years ago. Now I find myself caught up in his novel called The Relic, at once a comedy of manners, rich in familiar picaresque devices and situations, but also very urgent in its free thinking anticlericalism that must have seemed quite shocking to Lisbon’s conservative bourgeois citizenry of its day. No armadillos so far, but of course he was not writing from Brazil.
The great preservers of Greco-Roman mythology were the poets, beginning with Homer and Virgil themselves. European epic poetry of the Renaissance naturally regarded mythological elements as an essential part of the form. The prominent presence of pagan religious myths frequently surprises readers of such overtly Christian works as Paradise Lost, but it is in fact very common feature of humanistic poetry. Think of the extraordinary classical apparatus in the Divine Comedy of Dante, most religious of poets. The great Portuguese poet of the Renaissance, Luis de Camões, wrote a historical epic (The Lusiads) about the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India in 1498; but the history is almost overwhelmed by supernatural elements taken from pagan poetry. We would expect that Neptune (Poseidon) would have an important role in a seafaring epic, as he does, but the real arch-enemy of the Portuguese mariners is Bacchus—an extraordinary invention of the poet’s fertile brain.
Meanwhile, throughout The Lusiads, there are literally hundreds of allusions to classical myth, doubtless many more than I have noted. One just popped off the page at me while I was studying a Duolingo lesson on fruits and vegetables, where I learned that my armadillo had eaten thirteen abacaxis (pineapples). Few myths are more tragically poignant than the story of two young Babylonians, Piramus and Thisbe, most ancient of star-crossed lovers. Forbidden by their parents to be together, they carried on a secret conversation through a chink in the wall that separated them, and thus planned to run away for a nocturnal tryst beneath a mulberry tree at a secluded local historical site, the Mausoleum of Ninus. Thisbe arrived first, but she fled when a marauding lion appeared. The lion was gone by the time Piramus got there, but it had left signs that misled the young man to believe that Thisbe was dead. So he killed himself. By then Thisbe was cautiously returning to the designated mulberry tree, where her discovery of the gory corpse of Piramus led her to—kill herself. The most beautiful rendition of this story is in Ovid, who explains that it was in response to this tragic event that mulberries, which had until then been a white fruit, turned red from the spurting blood of Piramus. The most popular version of this sad tale perhaps is the burlesque presented by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Late in the Lusiads, in the ninth of its ten books, Venus decides that the triumphant Portuguese, now on their homeward journey, deserve a little reward: some rest and relaxation on the Isle of Love. This is, of course, an Earthly Paradise and Garden of Delights of which the Club Med is the palest of modern imitations. Everything is perfect in this place. Without going into the sex part, the goddess Pomona, in charge of fruit orchards of every kind, has been particularly lavish. All sorts of fruits flourish here, and without the need of laborious cultivation. The two specific fruits the poet names are the cherry and the mulberry, which share a vermilion coloration. In a line I had not noticed before, Camões speaks of mulberries as the fruit “that takes its name from love”. It happens that the Portuguese word for mulberry, as I now know well, is amora. The Portuguese word for love is amor, unchanged from the Latin word from which it derived. But Portuguese amor and amora have no real kinship. One Latin word for mulberry was a Greek borrowing, morum, and this is the word from which the Portuguese derives. Camões was a wizard classicist, and he would have known this. But just as he could make the actual history of Portuguese navigation bend to his poetic fancy, so also could he use imaginary etymology for the same purpose. For a Renaissance humanist love and mulberries go together just as Piramus and Thisbe did: tragically, and in dark red. But no wonder I didn’t get it the first time!
Portuguese merchants: pineapples in search of armadillos
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