Over the next few weeks, I will be tweeting Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s 1914 translation of Batrachomyomachia, of The Battle of Frogs and Mice, a comic epic sometimes attributed to Homer. If the idea of reading a fairly short text over a few weeks seems insanely stupid to you but you want to read this parody, read it here.
Before he retired to his room, “not to sleep, but to howl to myself in the silence of horror,” he said: “How everything has crumbled, how everything has dissolved, how all the reference points have shifted, how all fixity has moved, how nothing exists anymore, how nothing exists, you see, how all the religions and all the irreligions and the protracted absurdities of all forms of worship have turned into nothing, nothing at all, you see, how belief and unbelief no longer exist, how science, modern science, how the stumbling blocks, the millennial courts, have all been thrown out and ushered out and blown out into the air, how all of it is now just so much air … Listen, it’s all air, all concepts are air, all points of reference are air, everything is just air …” And he said: “Frozen air, everything just so much frozen air …”
From Thomas Bernhard’s novel Frost.
THERE WAS A FALCONER AND HUNTER, named Sonjô, who lived in the district called Tamura-no-Gô, of the province of Mutsu. One day he went out hunting, and could not find any game. But on his way home, at a place called Akanuma, he perceived a pair of oshidori (mandarin-ducks), swimming together in a river that he was about to cross. To kill oshidori is not good; but Sonjô happened to be very hungry, and he shot at the pair. His arrow pierced the male: the female escaped into the rushes of the farther shore, and disappeared. Sonjô took the dead bird home, and cooked it.
That night he dreamed a dreary dream. It seemed to him that a beautiful woman came into his room, and stood by his pillow, and began to weep. So bitterly did she weep that Sonjô felt as if his heart were being torn out while he listened. And the woman cried to him: “Why–oh! why did you kill him?–of what wrong was he guilty?. . . At Akanuma we were so happy together–and you killed him! What harm did he ever do you? Do you even know what you have done?–oh! do you know what a cruel, what a wicked thing you have done?. . . Me too you have killed–for I will not live without my husband! . . . Only to tell you this I came”. . . . Then again she wept aloud–so bitterly that the voice of her crying pierced into the marrow of the listener’s bones;–and she sobbed out the words of this poem:
Hi kururéba
Sasoëshi mono wo–
Akanuma no
Makomo no kuré no
Hitori-né zo uki!
At the coming of twilight I invited him to return with me–! Now to sleep alone in the shadow of the rushes of Akanuma– ah! what misery unspeakable!
And after having uttered these verses she exclaimed: “Ah, you do not know–you cannot know what you have done! But to-morrow, when you go to Akanuma, you will see–you will see. . . .” So saying, and weeping very piteously, she went away.
When Sonjô awoke in the morning, this dream remained so vivid in his mind that he was greatly troubled. He remembered the words: “But to-morrow, when you go to Akanuma, you will see–you will see.” And he resolved to go there at once, that he might learn whether his dream was anything more than dream.
So he went to Akanuma; and there, when he came to the river bank, he saw the female oshidori swimming alone. In the same moment the bird perceived Sonjô; but, instead of trying to escape, she swam straight toward him, looking at him the while in a strange fixed way. Then, with her beak, she suddenly tore open her own body, and died before the hunter’s eyes. . . .
Sonjô shaved his head, and became a priest.
Biblioklept 