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Bezig met laden... Love Poetry and Songs from the Ancient Egyptians (editie 2015)door Gilbert Moore (Auteur)
Informatie over het werkLove Poetry and Songs from the Ancient Egyptians door Gilbert Stuart Moore
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During the reigns of Ramses II and his successors, from about 1300 BC to 1150 BC, a social class of well-educated secular royal scribes and temple craftsmen appeared in Ancient Egypt rivaling the traditional priesthood in cultural influence, if not power. In their hands a new genre of literature took shape: Secular love poetry depicting in hieratic script real flesh-and-blood men and women, expressing real emotions and speaking to one another with real, often erotic and tender human feelings for the first time. Unfortunately, this state of affairs was to last only as long as the reigns of Ramses II and his immediate successors. Roughly 100 years.The translations edited and presented in this third edition represent the collective effort of at least three generations of Egyptologists, dating back to the late 19th century and reaching a highpoint in the translations of Miriam Lichtheim in the 1970s and the recent efforts of Bernard Mathieu and others. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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“My beloved is unrivaled,
There is none to equal her,
She is beautiful beyond all women.
Behold, she is like the star which appears
At the onset of a prosperous year.
Exquisite is her splendor,
Gleaning is her complexion,
Brilliant are her gazing eyes.
Sweet are her lips when they speak,
For she is not given to excessive speech.
High is her neck,
Resplendent are her breasts,
Of pure lapis lazuli is her hair.
Her arms surpass (even) gold,
Like lotus flowers are her fingers.
Her buttocks are soft, her waist is slender,
And her thighs extend her beauty.
In some cases, these metaphors arouse surprise, or is it because of the difficult translation? Look at the fragments below: they are two translations of the same poem. The first, by Vincent A. Tobin, is quite literal, with the mandrakes, snares, or willow and goose rather strange for us; the second by George A. Barton is much freer. But in both cases the tenor is clear: the writer is clearly under the spell of his lover.
“(How) intoxicating are the plants of my garden!
[The lips] of my beloved are the bud of a lotus,
Her breasts are mandrakes,
And her arms are ornate [...].
Behold, her forehead is a snare of willow,
And I am a goose.
My [hands are in] her hair as a lure,
Held fast in the snare of willow.”
Disturbed is the condition of my pool.
The mouth of my sister is a rosebud.
Her breast is a perfume.
Her arm is a ''uncertain'' bough
Which offers a delusive seat.
Her forehead is a snare of meryu-wood.
I am a wild goose, a hunted one,
My gaze is at your hair,
At a bait under the trap
That is to catch me.”
Anyway, there are gems among those earliest love poems that we know. We will find echoes of it in the Biblical Song of Salomo, in the Greek Sappho, and in Arabic and Persian literature. But these are vintage Ancient Egypt. They indicate that in that New Kingdom a kind of middle class had emerged, outside the pharaonic court, who fully expressed the pleasures of life.