Naaapa-napa-nap they call me the napper

[flemmings]

Which I'm not usually, but drifting off for a few hours swathed in flannel is much more pleasant than sitting and listening my lungs creak like a wooden gate in the wind. Have redoped me against tomorrow's 6:30 alarm and hope to sleep again.

Meanwhile assembling the last of the paperwork for the accountant, and washing the dishes, mitigates more against croupy wanhope than trying to read Emma Newton or The Gangs of New York or Rituals and Spells of Santeria. My interests when ill evaporate.

However an amusing event. After having been wrestled to the mat by a quotation by John Stuart Mill last night, I began another British crossword: got three clues and wrote them in. First word starts My plus four more letters, second word ends in n preceded by three letters, and alas, I knew the whole passage then and there:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.

Good old Omar Khayyam in Fitzgerald's compulsively memorizable translation. Have often wondered if Fitzy's aaba rhyme scheme is at all reminiscent of the Chinese same.

Comments

[incandescens]

Sometimes the body just needs to nap. Hope you're feeling better soon.

(I remember that quote, too...)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I think everyone remembers that quote, and the 'book of verses' one. But the rest...?

[incandescens]

Well, I can more or less manage the, "Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night," stanza, but as for the rest of it...

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I don't know the last two lines of that one.

[incandescens]

"And lo! The Hunter in the East has caught / The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light."

(Capital letters uncertain.)

(And in retrospect, I only remember that because of reading a couple of very tacky Arabian-Nights-themed fantasy novels over twenty years ago, one of which used "A Noose of Light" as the title. IIRC.)

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Omar Khayyam is Chinese?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

No no no. He's Persian IIRC. But he writes in an aaba rhyme scheme, as do some Chinese poets. It's hard for me to think how aaba works , just because English verse prefers abab or abcb in its four line stanzas, and Fitzgerald's translation is the only English example I know. So I wonder if seven-character four-line aaba Chinese poetry sounds like that.