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