EARLY VISUAL/CONCRETE POETRY

I immediately thought of Foucault who abandoned archeology (delving into information like layers of ink on a palmesett) for genealogy.

Splendid.

Any clue as to what it says, though?

No idea. I'm trying to find a translation from the Greek. I hope some of our more scholarly friends might help, which is in part why I'd posted it.

Sometimes just wondering what it really means is enough. Gorgeous. Thank you, W.

If the image were larger (the letters rather blur together at that size) I might hazard a guess, but even then my education is mostly in homeric greek (prevalent a good millenium or so earlier) and that is rusty at best. However, I can proclaim with fair certainty that it begins with "O" (as in "O, sweet mystery of life!") ;) .

Would this be later transitional Greek, then? Perhaps Atticist? I'm not as well-versed in these things as I'd like to be.

Oh, I'm going to bluff my way through an answer to your question, though I studied this so long ago! Attic Greek was a form used during Classical times ca. 500 BCE - the form used by Herodotus, Plato, etc. Homeric Greek is an older dialect (named after you know who). Attic and Homeric are different enough that I have separate dictionaries for each, though the general principles of the language are true for both. If the example you have posted here was written in the 1500s CE (when it was printed) it may very well be a more contemporary version of Greek (was the author from Greece?) or it could be purposefully archaic and using Attic Greek - I don't have the depth of scholarship required to tell you what form was in use during medieval times. It's very possibly a form of Attic Greek, but if so I would think that it would have been used as Latin would have been used. By the 1500s CE Attic Greek was a dead language and probably used to evoke an aura of antiquity, scholarship, and/or romance.

Anyone willing to poke holes in my theory? I'm sure it is quite puncturable.

Further research reveals that Simias of Rhodes (Rhodius) lived during Hellenistic times ca 300 BCE. His poem is likely written in a late form of Attic Greek. Further research also reminds me that Attic and Homeric Greek coexisted - separated more by geography and literary usage than time.

This seemingly scholarly link talks about it all, including Atticist (which I had not heard of before you mentioned it) which occurred after the time period of my studies (which were purely BCE). I hope I'm not being graded on any of this. :)

http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/003Signed/JBGreek.html

while I have your ear...

Am I wrong to think that Attic Greek was spoken by the Athenians? I'd read somewhere that Atticism experienced a revival during the 16C among poets, but that's all I know. I'm curious as to how different these dialects were from one another.

Isn't there a Ptolemaic Greek dialect as well?

Re: while I have your ear...

I have not encountered Ptolemaic Greek. Doric, Ionic, Attic, Homeric, Koine (imagine an acute accent above that e) and Atticism, yes. Attic Greek was spoken during Classical times (ca 500 - 300 bce) in Attica which included Athens (its namesake). Koine was the common form of Greek spoken around the time of Christ (when Rome was the center of power, not Athens). Koine was greatly simplified compared to Attic Greek and is closer to the modern greek language. The Atticist movement started as a scholarly reaction to Koine, which Atticists felt was an inferior, devolved dialect.

One of the differences between Attic and Homeric, for example, was that Attic, for the most part, lacked a Dual (in addition to Singular and Plural). A difference between Attic and Koine was that Koine replaced the Attic "tt" with "ss". Compared to Doric, Attic frequently changes long ā to ē.

One of the interesting things I have learned is that modern Greek really has two different languages for spoken and written. The written is evolved from Atticism and the spoken from Koine.

Boy, if you want to learn - try and teach. Prompted by your questions, I now have a stack of my old Greek dictionaries and primers in front of me. It makes me want to go translate something. :) I've always been enchanted by ancient Greek as a puzzle to be decrypted, though I have to admit I had no great talent for it in school. The combination of a whole other alphabet and the completely foreign syntax and all those declensions! Still, I showed up every semester for two years - to my professor's chagrin.

Again, I invite anyone to correct anything I claim. This is all the product of decade old recollections and impromptu net research.

I'm sure someone from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review is probably lurking on LiveJournal somewhere...

http://tinyurl.com/curkd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attic_Greek
http://www.answers.com/topic/attic-dialect

Hello there...

I added you to my friends list a few days ago, and just wanted to say hello.

The example looks a bit like the Easter Wings poem by George Herbert...

WOWZA!

That is a nifty find.

Another example

Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes: "La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau", 1918

Some islamic calligraphy might be related to concrete poetry. Or not.

Re: Another example

Can you read the French? The Arabic is particularly lovely.

Re: Another example

t pertains to his friends who perished in the Great War (Apollinaire died during the great flu epidemic of 1918). I'm no scholar, but the translation goes something like this:

THE STABBED DOVE AND THE FOUNTAIN

(Dove)

Soft stabbed figures, dear flowered lips
Mya Mareye
Yette and Lorie
Annie and you Marie
Where are you, oh young girls
But close to a fountain which cries and asks
This dove in ecstacy

(Fountain)

All the memories of a particular time
Oh my friends left in war
Spout out towards the firmament
And your glances in stagnant water
Die sadly
Where are Braque and Max Jacob
Derain with the gray eyes like the paddle (?)
Where are Raynal, Billy, Dalize
Whose names are melancholy
Like steps in a church
Where is Cremnitz who was engaged
Perhaps they died already
My heart is full of memories
The fountain cries over my sorrow.
Those left to the war
Now fight in the North
Gardens where the pink war-flower
Copiously bleeds
Evening now falls oh bloody sea.

The 'C' appears to be acting as a dagger impaling the dove, and the 'O' seems to be the mouth of the fountain. The base of the fountain seems to resemble an eye, perhaps alluding to tears and the line "Spout out towards the firmament"; that is to say, crying towards the heavens. The last lines suggest the fountain also being a fountain of the blood shed in war.

~W

With hanyi/kanji form has been such an integral part of writing I wonder what the earliest examples in China, Japan, etc. are. As I see it, characters in themselves are "concrete", so perhaps I've answered my own question.

Tree:
木

That bird is gorgeous! And quite verbose.

Not in any way an authority on Asian languages (the glyph for 'tree' is one of a handful of Japanese characters I can recognize).

Some notes I've amassed on the subject for my design course that might be of interest to some:

There are different forms of written communication (in approximate order of least to most abstract): pictograms, rebuses, ideographs, heiroglyphs, cuneiform, syllabaries and alphabets.

The oldest form of visual communication, a pictograph is an image which represents an object or a concept by illustration.

A REBUS represents the sound made by a word, or part of a word. The rebus is a picture of a word for another that sounds the same, like a nose for the word “knows.” This led to using symbols for their sounds as well as for their pictured meanings, giving birth to increasingly abstract language systems like heiroglyphs, syllabaries and eventually modern alphabets. Rebuses, like modern alphabets, work with PHONEMES, the basic, distinctive sounds of a language, like “k”, “b” or “s”. Phonemes provide a basis on which to build alphabets.

An IDEOGRAPH (or symbol) represents an idea, concept or thought. Ideographs use PICTOGRAMS (representative images) and sometimes even other ideographs (like below) to communicate an idea, or “story”. Ancient systems of writing like Egyptian heiroglyphics or early Chinese use pictograms and ideographs. Pictograms are stylized descendents of early pictures of actual objects (e.g. the ancient version of the Chinese character for moon 月 actually looked like a crescent moon). Ideographs are typically composed of pictograms arranged in a “story” to suggest something more abstract, like sun and moon combined to form a word like “bright” 明 or the character for “state” 国 which consists of a box-like border surrounding a pictogram representing a “population.” While it is often easier to remember or guess the sound of rebuses or words comprised of phoenemes (a,b,c), it is likewise often easier to remember or guess the meaning of ideographs or pictographs (sun, house).

Cuneiform is a syllabary (see below) with pictographic elements.

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words.

An alphabet (deriving from alpha and beta, the first two symbols of the Greek alphabet) is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language. An alphabet is different from other writing systems such as ideographs, in which symbols represent complete ideas, and syllabaries, in which each symbol represents a syllable.