Saturday, September 05, 2020

 

A Flourish of Trumpets

Barbara C. Bowen, "Rabelais's Unreadable Books," Renaissance Quarterly 48.4 (Winter, 1995) 742-758 (at 754, discussing Teofilo Folengo's mock-epic Baldus):
Less often than Rabelais, but quite strikingly, he plays with onomatopoeia ("tichi tich et tichi toch" for a donkey's hoofbeats, "tararan tantara tara" for a flourish of trumpets) and fantaisie verbale: an enraged Charon bellows "Cra cra: tiftrafnot: sgneflet: canatauta: riogna" (217).
This onomatopoetic representation of a flourish of trumpets isn't the invention of Folengo. It goes all the way back to Ennius, Annals 451 Skutsch (tr. E.H. Warmington):
And the trumpet in terrible tones taratantara blared.

at tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit.
Related post: The Elizabethan James Joyce.



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