Pilgrim in the Palace of Words. Glenn Dixon
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Название: Pilgrim in the Palace of Words
Автор: Glenn Dixon
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Путеводители
isbn: 9781770705784
isbn:
I chuckled. “Yes, Mussolini.”
“A very bad time. No food.” She looked me hard in the eye. “No food, so we eat ... anything. You understand?”
I saw where she was going. During the worst of the war, the people ate wild cats. There was no choice.
“I was little girl,” she said, “but I remember. I cried. And then we, all people of Rome, we made a ... what you call it ... a promise to the cats. We said, you helped us and we never forget, so we give the Colosseum to them. You understand? Forever, we go there and give them food.”
“That’s only fair.”
“Yes, only fair.”
Later I did go to the Colosseum. It’s impressive, though the area below it, the famous Roman Forum, seat of one of the greatest empires that ever existed, is a rather sad two blocks of dirt and rubble. Only with the expert knowledge of a guide can one understand what was once there, since there’s really not a lot to see. Somewhere in these ruins Julius Caesar was murdered. Somewhere here Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Somewhere here the last of the Roman emperors huddled in the dark with the barbarians at the gates.
On a fallen pediment, however, I saw a bit of chiselled writing, something I could read. The letters were familiar, all capitals perhaps, but the script was as plain as the text in front of you now. I was reading a word that was almost two thousand years old. And then, as if to break the spell, a skinny little kitten skittered onto the marble slab. It pawed the air where a bright blue butterfly fluttered by, and I had to smile. The empire had come to this, as all empires are destined to do. Then the kitten flicked a paw at the air and hopped into the shadows between the fallen stones.
I found once in an old book a fragment of a poem from Sappho:
That’s Greek, of course, but look at the passage when it’s put into Latin:
DEDUKE MEN A SELANNA
KAI PLEIADES. MESAI DE
NUKTES. PATA D’ERKHET’ ORA.
EGO DE MONA KATEUDO
If you heard the above spoken aloud in either language, you would never know they were related. The written text, though, especially in uppercase letters, shows an astonishing resemblance. Quite obviously the written Latin borrowed heavily from the Greek.
It’s a pattern. Some languages muscle their way across continents. They travel first on the feet of soldiers, pillaging and plundering. Then, if things go well, they float on the light winds of trade. After that they’re unstoppable.
Languages can be powerful things. The stronger ones quite simply bulldoze the weaker ones, assimilating whatever is useful and discarding the rest. It doesn’t take long. Even the speakers of the weaker language, or their children, anyway, soon start conversing in the more powerful tongue. People are quick to take up any language that will give them greater access to material advancement. It’s survival of the fittest.
Empires are as much about language as they are about conquest. Today the three largest language populations in the world — English, Spanish, and Mandarin — are that way because they’re the shells of past empires that inundated other languages, drowning them with power. Latin isn’t on that list only because it died in a dusty armchair as a happy old man. It had already given the world a host of powerful children that includes Spanish and English.
The above fragment by Sappho, by the way, translates as:
The Pleiads have left the sky, and
The moon has vanished. It’s midnight
The time for meeting is over
And me — I am lying, lonely.
The train to Florence passes through lovely rolling hills. Cypress trees, rising like solidified whirls of smoke, stand in long, solemn rows. This is the legendary landscape of Tuscany, heart of the Italian Renaissance.
In Florence I’d arranged to meet with Lesley, an old friend of mine. She’s a doctor from England and speaks three languages, Italian included. Funny enough, though, this was her first real trip to Italy. She had learned Italian in school and had never been to a place where she could actually use it.
The first thing to know about Florence is that the name is only our clumsy English approximation. Here they call it Firenze, a moniker with fire in its belly. And it’s true. Five hundred years ago Florence burned with a collection of geniuses the world will probably never see again — Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. This city was at the heart of an explosion, the shifting of gears between the old world and the new.
It was the Renaissance, of course, literally the rebirth, not so much of the Roman Empire but of the ideals of long-ago Greece. And it was the dialect spoken here in Florence that finally replaced ancient Latin to become the language we now know as Italian. Most of that was due to the work of Dante Alighieri, another Florentine genius.
Never mind that Dante was exiled from Florence. It was he who went on to write The Divine Comedy, one of the great books of history, in the Florentine dialect. He made it plain for all to see that here was a dialect of great delicacy. In the rush and sweep of his almost endless imagination he let loose a language that trips from the tongue like no other.
Walking down the ancient medieval streets, I made up a little game. Lesley and I were off to see Michelangelo’s David, and though I was as usual completely inept at the language, I so badly wanted to try it out that I started making stuff up.
“Fettuccine?” I asked her, pointing at some luxurious old building.
“What?”
“Botticelli,” I continued somewhat more insistently. “Paparazzi.”
“Don’t be such a tosser.”
“Right … sorry.”
Lesley, as I’ve said, really was fluent in Italian and managed to get me safely through numerous transgressions. Once, in fact, she literally opened a door for us with this most beautiful of languages. One afternoon in Florence we went to see the Medici Chapel. The tombs there were sculpted by Michelangelo. I set up my camera on a tripod, but as usual in places like this, people weren’t allowed to use flashes. So I diligently opened the f-stop for a long exposure.
A female security guard accosted me immediately. She waved her finger in my face and made it crystal-clear that I wasn’t allowed to use a tripod. Her hands flew through the air, circling and swooping as she chewed me out. The woman was as ferocious as a pit bull, so I meekly folded my tripod and limped off to lick my wounds. Lesley and I gazed at the marbles for a while, then I reminded her of something I’d read in my guidebook. There are sketches by Michelangelo here, it said. Ask to see them.
Well, this place wasn’t an art gallery. It was a chapel filled СКАЧАТЬ