Monday, September 24, 2012

POEMA ARANEAE

According to those invaluable blogstats,
someone just found this site by a search on the following Boolean string:

        french poem about spider

Vous êtes le bienvenu(e), monsieurdame !  Et pourtant  To our great confoundment, we are forced to confess, that hitherto  we have had no such offering.  This yawning gap we now hasten to amend, as follows:

Que not’ frère l’araigne
ce tribut ne dédaigne
car il comble un vide:
ce poème arachnoïde

Philological note:
Spiders speak a more classical, even old-fashioned, variety of French, than what you and I learned in class.   Their word for ‘spider’ is the chastely Latinate araigne, from Latin ARANEA (cf. Spanish araña).  The modern bastardization is araignée, which by rights should mean “spiderweb” or maybe “spider-clowder” (though I personally have never witnessed  a clowder of spiders;  they tend to be rather standoffish).
I would also love to report that dédaigne was the subjunctive of an archaic *dédaindre;  but alas, ‘tis not so, it’s dédaigner (from DIGNARI) all the way down.  (Immediately related to our English verb deign, btw, and more distantly to the noun dignity, from the Latin source.)


*
Pour d’autres friandises
de la confiserie 
du docteur Justice,
consultez:

*

No comments:

Post a Comment