Beginning
To begin here
Or better there
Just Inside the front cover?
Or is there
Just as good as here
Inbetween somewhere?
Argument
Quixote
Tell me, Sancho,
Is this not a desolate landscape
Wrinkled with terrors?
Sancho
I have no wrinkles!
Quixote
Yes, so rounded you are.
This Village is sound...
Sancho
Friendly I'd say!
Quixote
No, sound I say,
I hear a great roaring
From that cave.
Sancho
A gypsy tavern only,
Some applause...
Quixote
A Dragon's lair...
Sancho
A lair yes
If music be so
And so reside inside.
Quixote
We dismount and go see
If a Dragon there be.
Sancho
No pistols No Swords
No Heralded Armor,
The doorway lintel says
Beneath Skull and Bones.
Quixote
A Dragon for certain...
We can meet head on,
Mano a Draco,
Unembellished.
Help me off with my
Metal shroud.
Tablao
And inside the flamenco guitarists
Rasqueadoed,
Old men drummed the floor
Keeping time with wooden staves,
And a high booted gypsy
Girl whirled and danced
Clacking the black deck tablao.
Thunder it seemed
To Quixote,
Seated kindly by the gypsies
At a small table;
Sancho and he bought drinks.
Lightning it seemed,
The guitar strings illuminating
The dancer dressed in
Black pantaloons
And maroon blouse
Reflecting back
The colored lanterns
On the room's walls,
Mirrored, with bullfights.
"Dulcinea!" said Quixote.
"We'll come here often, Sancho."
And Sancho was pleased
To share Quixote's Dragon Dreams.
DolphinWords
Notes: reference "argument', the introduction in epics before each book/chapter that summarized what was to follow...early novels did this too, as early novelists thought they were writing epics!...I went to the bookstore looking for a recommended book called "Naked"...found that, and while there thought to look for the Odyssey...a new translation was on the shelves, and looks okay, but pricey...authors did up the Illiad too...left the bookstore empty handed...as usual...they're all too pricey...but looked up Pope's translation of the Odyssey on the web...found that...and this good article about it...
quote
The thing that best distinguishes this from all other translations of Homer is that it alone equals the original in its ceaseless pour of verbal music. When Pope's contemporaries praised him for his ''numbers,'' they were referring not to the fairly obvious metrical system of the heroic couplet but to the euphony he achieved within its constraints. The relatively enclosed nature of the system concentrates attention on every syllable in the line, on continual shifts in the position and degree of pause marked by metrical breaks (caesuras), on sound effects used to emphasize the careful alterations in word order.
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