#Simonides of Keos

[sarafangirlart]

🥺😭 Danae needs a hug.

[dreamcrossed]

the delicate ark the hardbreathing gale the sea stirred up by terror Danaë hurled down Danaë's cheeks not unwet Danaë's arms loving (o child, she says, I have such pain) the slumbering childtender heart in the joyless bark bronze-bolted in the nightgleam in the deepdusk darkness the briny wave smoothing over his hair the wind's noise piercing the mantle beneath him dark too, but his face lovely upon it— (if you knew the danger were danger, child, my words would stand your little ears on end) among all this, Danaë prays to Zeus, father that he is, for sleep—not for herself: but sleep child, sleep sea, sleep measureless pain. even to ask this much she trembles at her own boldness, begs forgiveness— translated from the Ancient Greek by Ana Maria Guay

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/simonides-of-keos-fragment-543/

[snoozingbear]

anne carson, economy of the unlost (reading simonides of keos with paul celan), 1999

[kitchen-light]

Homer said we ride into the future facing the past. Maybe the simplest prophecy is that we have made it this far. (“Trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” writes Galway Kinnell.) In Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson’s meditation on two other lyric poets, Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos, she puts it this way: “a poet is someone who traffics in survival.”

Anna Badkhen, from her essay “How to Read the Air”, published in The Paris Review, November 3, 2020

[deathlessathanasia]

„In a famous passage (1.10), Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bc), accurately predicted that if Sparta were ever deserted, future generations would hardly believe that her power had been equal to her fame given the lack of expensive temples and buildings, whereas if Athens should suffer the same fate, on the basis of the visible remains they would conjecture the city’s power to have been twice as great as it actually was. The most stunning temple on the Athenian acropolis, the Parthenon, hardly needs to be described, since it has become an icon of Greek culture. In sharp contrast the most famous temple on the Spartan acropolis, the temple of Athena Chalkioikos (‘Athena of the Bronze House’), built in the sixth century bc and so named because of the engraved bronze panels that lined its inner walls, was constructed of limestone and its foundations reveal a structure of paltry dimensions. The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, situated on the west bank of the river Eurotas, was hardly more impressive.

As Thucydides warned, however, we should not equate material grandeur with power. Even if never physically impressive by Greek standards, sacred space was enhanced and enlarged as Sparta grew in power and prosperity. Moreover, the city was guarded on all sides by her gods. Two colossal archaic statues of an armed Apollo, each holding a spear in one hand and a bow in the other, protected the five villages that constituted the polisof Sparta. One statue was at the village of Amyklai, about five kilometres to the southwest of the other four villages (which were much closer to the Spartan acropolis). Being some 45 feet high (Paus. 3.19.2–3), it was visible for a considerable distance; it stood upon a magnificently decorated throne and its base was an altar containing the tomb of Hyakinthos. The other statue, its twin, was at Thornax just to the north of the city (Paus. 3.10.8). A few kilometres to the southeast of Sparta, situated on a hilly ridge overlooking the Eurotas valley, stood the most impressive ancient monument that is still to be seen in Laconia, the Menelaion, the shrine to Menelaos and Helen who were worshipped as gods. It is located at Therapne, where the Dioskouroi (Kastor and Polydeukes), Helen’s brothers, were said to live under the earth.

The sixth century bc was the most important period of construction for the archaic and classical city: all of the sanctuaries mentioned above (except the Menelaion) were then rebuilt on a much grander scale. This investment in religious infrastructure surely reflects the success of the political and social changes that were taking place at the same time. Although the details are controversial, the period from 650–550 bc witnessed the emergence of Sparta as a militarized society with a distinctive way of life and form of government. The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, in particular, which acquired its first all-stone temple in the first half of the sixth century, became a chief locus for the rites of passage and initiation that were connected with the public upbringing (the agōgē) of the young, both male and female. Males, in particular, between the ages of seven and twenty were distributed for educational purposes into age-categories and annual age-classes (Ducat 2006, 69–117).

As for the Menelaion, at the beginning of the fifth century it was significantly enhanced by the incorporation of a rectangular terrace (at least five metres high). This is probably to be connected with the victory under Spartan leadership over the Persians at Plataia in 479 bc, the decisive victory in the Persian Wars. Menelaos was the King of Sparta at the time of the Trojan War, and that war almost immediately came to be seen as the mythical analogue of the Persian Wars. Indeed, Simonides of Keos, in the recently published fragments of his elegy on the battle of Plataia (fr. 11, lines 29–32 Flower/Marincola), writes that the Spartan army ‘leaving behind the [Eurotas and the city of [Sparta], [set out] with the horse-taming sons of Zeus [the Tyndarid] heroes and mighty Menelaos … leaders of their ancestral city’.”

- Michael A. Flower, Spartan Religion, in A Companion to Sparta

[celania]

The word Geschwätz is a common German term for everyday chitchat. But Felstiner suggests it may have for Celan “hints of Babel and the loss of original language.” He explains:

For in Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language in General and on the Language of Man,” Geschwätz designates empty speech after the Fall, speech without Adam’s power of naming... The babbling of Celan’s Jews is a comedown—via the cataclysm that ruined Benjamin—from God-given speech.

— Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)

[glaucussubmerged]

"Swift is the dragon-fly's darting; swifter is fortune's change."

The Praise Singer, Mary Renault

[mecthology]

Talos from Greek mythology.

There are three theories about its origins:

●Talos may have been a survivor from the Age of Bronze, a descendant of the brazen race (χαλκοῦ γένους) that sprang from meliae "ash-tree nymphs" according to Argonautica (The conception that Hesiod’s men of the Age of Bronze were actually made of bronze is extended to men of the age of gold by Lucian for humorous effect).

●Talos was a brazen man who was forged by the god Hephaestus and was given to Minos.

●Talos was a brazen bull who was forged by the god Hephaestus and was given to Minos.

Talos is described by Greeks in two versions. In one version, Talos is a gift from Hephaestus to Minos, forged with the aid of the Cyclopes in the form of a bull. In the other version, Talos is a gift from Zeus to Europa. Or he may have been the son of Kres, the personification of Crete; in Argonautica, Talos threw rocks at any approaching ship to protect his island. In the Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda, it is said that according to the Simonides of Keos when the Sardinians did not wish to release Talos to Minos, he heated himself – by jumping into a fire – and clasped them in his embrace.

Talos had one vein, which went from his neck to his ankle, bound shut by only one bronze nail. The Argo, transporting Jason and the Argonauts, approached Crete after obtaining the Golden Fleece. As guardian of the island, Talos kept the Argo at bay by hurling great boulders at it. According to pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke, Talos was slain when Medea the sorceress either drove him mad with drugs, or deceived him into believing that she would make him immortal by removing the nail. In Argonautica, Medea hypnotized him from the Argo, driving him mad with the keres that she raised, so that he dislodged the nail, and “the ichor ran out of him like molten lead”, exsanguinating and killing him. Peter Green, translator of Argonautica, notes that the story is somewhat reminiscent of the story regarding the heel of Achilles.

Follow @mecthology for mythology and urban legends.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CRtBD8OL_IN/?utm_medium=tumblr

[figurationoftheinvisible]

What is the Figuration of the Invisible?

Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens (Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry.) — Simonides of Keos (c. 556 – 468 BC) 

Ut pictura poesis is a Latin phrase meaning "as is painting, so is poetry." The statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's "Ars Poetica." “Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over.”

- What is the etymological meaning of poesía? - In Greek, "poiesis" refers to a making, a creation, a bringing into existence. Plato writes about this in the Symposium: that mortals strive for immortality in relation to poiesis. “In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making/creating (poiesis).” In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay.

According to Plato, such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: 

Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, 

Poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame, 

Poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge. Hence the Greeks valued arts like poetry, oratory and theatre so highly: to create is godlike, divine. In contrast, Aristotle says that creation is a product of physis, of individual biology. It’s that original divide in Western thinking—what is the original, highest source? Is it material or immaterial?

This was an ongoing debate, something philosophers liked to argue about that has no real correct answer. The Greeks (and later the Romans) considered oratory the highest form, because it was part of statecraft (poiesis in the city)—it was the duty of a citizen and it shaped minds and destinies. In this context, theatre emerged as another form of oratory.

This debate was revived during the Renaissance; in Italian it's just referred to as the paragone, the argument over which is the highest and greatest of the arts and why—i.e. the paragon of the arts. For example, Leonardo da Vinci considered music as secondary only to painting, but some argued that music was supreme because it transcends time and has no fixed form—it is immaterial, and thus partakes of the divine.

Obviously Leonardo was totally biased,

and the debate was never really settled. During the Baroque period it became the fashion to paint ut pictura poesis, which is an allegorical style that fused painting, theatre and poetical subjects and sentiments. Artists asked what should be the purpose of the arts, and what is the essential nature of representation? Is it to create? Is it to copy, to mimic nature? Both? Horace (a Roman poet and scholar from the time of the Emperor Augustus) defined the purpose of the arts: “The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together...both pleasure and applicability to life,” during the Renaissance this tenet became central. But music does shape minds and move the soul, it affects the emotions most directly, and it is unbound from time and space; all strong arguments.

Horace also said that some types of music are better than others, to form and inspire the spirit, for example, of the warriors. But in order to be a true artist, one must create. Thus the Renaissance artists used conceptual, imaginative strategies of disegno (design). They created composite images in their minds (e.g. the best features of the five most beautiful women to create the Universal Ideal of the Beautiful); they used their creative ingenuity to plan on paper and canvas with sketches; they read the ancient poets and scholars and tried to apply their teachings.

Thus the same principle: the arts should instruct and edify the audience, and in turn they can do that best by being beautiful, for in the Platonic conception the beautiful is inspiring of moral Beauty/Goodness. And the figuratione dell'invisible, is to create something out of nothing; the figuration of the invisible.

Leonardo calls the painter the lord and creator (padrone, signore, creatore) of all things which occur in human thought. To bring into existence something that did not exist before—surely music is free to do that, just as painting is. Precisely because music too is not bound to copy nature, but with an unparalleled degree of freedom creates forms (figure) out of a material neither tangible nor visible. 

Images:  Simon Vouet, St. Cecilia, c. 1626 Leonardo da Vinci, Annunciation, details, c. 1472

[neolithicsheep]

An assortment of ancient calligraphy. 1) a translation of @tkingfisher 's motto "I'm going to die in a ditch next to Walmart" (I translated Walmart as 'the shop that sells many things and has evil practices')

2) A friend's first name in Old Turkic because why not.

3) Some Xenophon that didn't go well followed by a translation of "WHO KILLED THE WORLD" because I was watching Fury Road

4) Bookmark size papyrus, quote from Simonides of Keos: "Go, tell the Spartans"

5) Two more bookmarks. Herodotos: "Call no man fortunate before he is dead." and Sappho: "Someone in some future time will think of us."

[letstalkaboutartandyouandme]

Poema loquens pictura est, pictura tacitum poema debet esse.

(Ein Gedicht ist ein sprechendes Gemälde, ein Gemälde soll ein stummes Gedicht sein.)

Dem griechischen Lyriker Simonides von Keos (um 556 v. Chr. – um 468 v. Chr.) zugeschriebene und beim Auctor ad Herennium sowie von Plutarch überlieferte Wendung.

[aschenblumen]

Proyecto de traducción de Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) de Anne Carson, realizado por Nicolás López Pérez. La entrada corresponde –la única hasta el momento publicada por el traductor– a «Notas sobre el método».

[ownerzero]

Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics

Susan Howe, Concordance, 2020 (image courtesy New Directions) When the Latin poet Horace, in his Ars Poetica, coined the now-famous tag ut pictura poesis — “as in painting, so in poetry” — the close kinship of poetry and visual art was already something of a cliché: hundreds of years before, Simonides of Keos had called […]

The post Susan Howe’s Feminist Poetics appeared first on AWorkstation.com.

source https://aworkstation.com/susan-howes-feminist-poetics/

[kitchen-light]

In "Economy of the Unlost" Anne Carson offers a careful and surprising comparison between two bodies of work (by Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos), and maintains that it is on the burial mound, where there is only a stranger's death, a stone and the need for a clarifying text, that poetry emerges from its shell of sound and comes into its own as a written text, aimed at the one looking at the tomb, and his ability to do what the words cut into the stone ask of him: to use his memory and its 'sense of order'.

Maria Stepanova, from her book, “In Memory of Memory” (translated by Sasha Dugdale) (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021)

[blesscdones-blog]

Economy of the Unlost by Anne Carson

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.

In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

[celania]

Gratitude and memory go together, morally and philologically. Paul Celan locates memory, in his Bremen speech, in an etymological link between thinking and thanking:

Denken und Danken sind in unserer Sprache Worte ein und desselben Ursprungs. Wer ihrem Sinn folgt, begibt sich in den Bedeutungsbereich von: “gedenken,” “engedenk sein,” “Andenken,” “Andacht.”

[To Think and to Thank are in our language words of one and the same origin. Whoever follows their sense comes to the semantic field of “to remember,” “to be mindful,” “memory,” “devotion.”]

For the Greeks, memory is rooted in utterance, if we may judge from the etymology of the noun μνήμη (“memory”), which is cognate with the verb μιμνήσκομαι (“I remember,” “I make mention,” “I name”), and from the genealogy of the goddess Mnemosyne, who is called “mother of the Muses” by Homer and Hesiod. Memorable naming is the function of poetry, within a society like that of the Greeks, for the poet uses memory to transform our human relationship to time. Had Simonides not named their names, the Skopads would have vanished into the past. 

— Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan)