From the foot of a mite
a fart hung himself,
the better to hide
behind a goblin;
whereupon all were astounded,
for there, to carry off his soul,
came the head of a pumpkin...
D'un pet de suiron,
Uns pez ce fist pendre
Pour l'i miex deffendre
Derier un luiton;
La s'en esmervilla on,
Que tantost vint l'ame prendre
La teste d'un porion...
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, November 05, 2023
All Were Astounded
From an Old French fatrasie, number 28, lines 3-9, in Lambert C. Porter, La fatrasie et le fatras: essai sur la poésie irrationnelle en France au Moyen Age (Genève: Librairie E. Droz, 1960), p. 128 (tr. Kathryn Gravdal):