Thursday, September 03, 2020
The Ridiculous
John Smart, Tarantula's Web: John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and Their Circle (Wilby: Michael Russell, 2013), p. 101 (endnotes omitted):
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Eliot and Hayward shared a highly-developed sense of the ridiculous and a love of parody. Eliot suggested a modern version of common errors based on Sir Thomas Browne's seventeenth-century Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Modern errors might include: 'All Policemen have big feet,' or 'A fart, strained through bath water, loses both odour and inflammability,' or 'A cigarette, smoked before breakfast, is sovereign against costiveness.' He told Hayward how disappointed he was in the French translation of Murder in the Cathedral, and included his own pastiche and a footnote to appeal to the scholarly editor:
That bird wych in the dark time of the yeerë
Sitteth in dudgeon (1) on the aspen bouwë
And cryeth arsehole arsehole lhoude and cleerë ...
1. The word does not appear in this sense till 1573.
Labels: noctes scatologicae
