Historiae još jedan su biser pored Apulejevog sitelinkZlatnog magarca iz II veka naše ere, Kod Lukijana, nema one Apulejeve blagoglagoljive deskripcije koja, poput tutkala, spaja segmente između putovanja glavnog junaka, pa tekst deluje nekako nabacno nabrojan, ali ima psihodeličnih elemenata i opisa za tri Apulejeva Zlatna magarca“.
Maltene u svakom segmentu prepoznajem inspiracije za neka druga književna dela iz potonjih vekova,
Najupečatljivije, još na samom početku, jeste putovanje na Mesec, koje sam, pre Lukijana, u sličnoj formi našao kod Ariosta u njegovom sitelinkBijesnom Orlandu kada njegov Astolfo priveže hipogrifa i otputuje kočijama do meseca.
Kod Lukijana, bića sa Meseca mnogobrojna su, imena im onomastična Hipopigi, Hipomirmi, Lahanopteri, Psilotoksoti itd, a habitus u skladu sa imenima, Međusobno vode bitke, koje Lukijan opisuje dečijom naivnošću, kao da se neka šumska bića iz bajki međusobno koškaju.
Neizbežan je i pedicator/cinaedus“ momenat, kao i kod Petronija u sitelinkSatirikonu, te je za stanovnike Meseca karakteristično da ih ne začinju žene, nego muškarci, jer oni ne poznaju drugačije venčanje nego muško: kod njih je samo ime žena potpuno nepoznato.
Sve dok ne napune dvadeset pet godina, daju ih u brak s drugim muškarcima, a posle tog vremena, uzimaju druge za svoj brak, jer čim je dete začeto noga se naduje, a posle, kad dođe vreme porođaja, probadaju je kopljem i vade ga mrtvo, pa ga polažu s otvorenim ustima prema onom delu na koji mi puštamo vetrove, i tako dojenče prima život.
A sad o još čudnijoj stvari, Među njima ima ljudi koji se zovu Dendriti, a koji se začinju na sledeći način.
Odseku desno jaje od čovekovih testisa i pokopaju ga u zemlju, a iz njega iznikne veliko drvo od mesa, s granama i lišćem, i donosi neku vrstu ploda koji uveliko podseća na stidni ud, samo što u dužinu meri ceo lakat: kad su zreli beru ih i od njih prave ljude: stidni udovi stavljaju im se i skidaju po prilici.
Bogat svet pravi ih od slonovače, siromašan od drveta, pri čemu se uz njihovu pomoć između supružnika odvijaju snošaj i oplodnja.
“ Ovakav efekat inverzije polova nalazio sam kod Ursule Le Guin u sitelinkLevoj ruci tame gde je ona, doduše, sa mnogo više pažnje i umešnosti kreirala taj hermafroditni obrt kod njenih likova.
Nakon putovanja po Mesecu, Lukijan završava i u utrobi kita motiv koji se sreće i u Bibliji u predanju o Joni i brojnih pisaca, između ostalih i Karla Kolodija u njegovom sitelinkPinokiju.
Poseban mitološki prizvuk daje i putovanje u Zemlju blaženstva antički Raj, gde će Lukijan da razgovara sa dušama preminulih pesnika i filozofa što će i Dante da iskusivekova kasnije u svojoj sitelink Komediji.
Taj motiv zemlje večne mladosti, poznat je i u legendama iz keltske mitologije, posebno iz sitelinkThe Voyage of Bran, gde on dospeva u Tír na nÓg Zemlju večne mladosti, slično kao što Lukijan zabasa u Zemlju blaženih.
Osim sjajne piščeve mašte, Istinita priča“ je prepuna referenci koje upućuju na različita dela iz doba u kome je nastajalo ili ranijeg, što je dodatna motivacija za dalju čitalačku akciju.
If I have to point out of the most influential books I've ever encountered, it was a book I got as a gift when I wasorcalled the Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
It was there that I found out about Jarry, Calvino, Eco, Karinthy, Bruno Schulz, and countless other literary oddballs, as well as Lucian and his odd fictional journeys, and whose DNA is integral to those aforementioned oddballs' work.
Here was this completely bizarre picaresque that travels around our world and others, getting stuck inside whales and what not, using that travel as a framework to satirize the pressing issues of his day most of which are lost on the modern reader, written on the Syrian fringe of Greek civilization by an outspoken cynic.
This is some outthere shit, and for that alone is worth the hour or so it'll take you to read.
Very witty, very wellwritten, and very true, It's amazing how advanced in thinking these ancient civilizations were and then how utterly and completely backwards society was within a few thousand years.
Crazy how we're just now beginning to think the same things within the last few centuries, . . imagine how much progress the human race could have made if there hadn't been such destruction of knowledge by rival empires.
A curious morsel. Written in thes CE by Lucian of Samosata, a Syrianborn scholar amp historian living amp writing in Athens, it
takes the form of a satire on unreliable historians and travel writers Herodotus is a particular peeve with Lucian, but he also takes aim at Homer.
This has the reputation of being the first science fiction, as Lycians eponymous hero travels to the moon amp witnesses a war between the moon amp the sun for possession of the morning star.
Elsewhere, he meets many extraordinary creatures and experiences extremely strange lands this text apparently inspired Gullivers Travels.
I loved that Lucian meets and interrogates Homer he also meets Homers hero Ulysses and delivers a letter from Ulysses to Calypso.
Lucian has quite a sexual imagination as theres an emphasis on sexual peculiarities at one point I wondered if he was satirising bits of Platos Symposium he certainly has a jibe at Platos sexuality later in the text.
All of this is sadly rendered difficult in this stiff amp starchy, almost Victorian English translation first publishedMint Editionsedition does not credit the translator.
A modern, savvy translation would definitely make reading this more accessible to a contemporary reader, but its nevertheless still fun and diverting.
The title 'True History' is is used very much in the sense of Barney Stinson's catch phrase 'true story'.
The reading experience is something like tall tales of Baron Munchausen the temptation to do a parody review was too strong there is same humor caused by the obvious nature of the lies.
Except unlike Baron Munchausen, our narrator doesn't do great things, great things keep happening to him,
A lot of the things in here are now sciencefiction elements flying ships, aliens, liquid air etc.
In that way, it is quite ahead of its age, FOr example, sun and moon are treated as bodies having aliens which is probably not true but far better than most writers of his time who treated them as individual gods.
That is why I read it, I thought it was oldest science fiction, Most of world is reading 'The Martin' I'm onlyyears behind,
However I'm not sure if it is science fiction, The expressed aim is satirizing famous Greek talltale tellers like Homer, Narrator's journey is a beckbenchor's parody of all that was ancient Greek including of famous Greek personalities like Socrates who is constantly playing fool, Aristotle, Homer, Ulysses, Helen she runs away again etc.
It is good to see that ancient Greeks weren't without sense of humor, Making allowances for this being a nearlyyear old text and an old translation of that also, this was a worthwhile read.
“True History” is pointed out as one of the first examples of sciencefiction, although it's sometimes hard to maintain enough context to see it as such.
Apparently the author had it in mind to poke fun at superstition and “true” accounts, and he pretty much admits the absence of truth in here from the start.
The ocean voyage that takes up the story includes voyages to numerous mysterious islands, the afterlife, countries inside a whale, the moon,, etc.
A lot of this happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with, since some kingdoms and seas and races are encountered for the space of a sentence or less.
The part in the afterworld makes extension mention of those famous dead people who are there and those who aren't.
This feel a little like an early test run of Dante's Inferno, Our narrator author meets Homer and some of his characters and conducts an interview to clear up debate over authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
The whole thing is quite a ways away from what is considered literature or even genre writing from more recent centuries.
I haven't done a lot of reading of material from beforeyears ago, so I might be out of my depth on making a proper assessment.
The edition I read was from “Forgotten Books”, a dutiful reproduction of an older printing with a lengthy introduction.
No footnotes or anything though, that left it puzzling sometimes,
There's a lot of really random stuff in here, though, and for me that usually makes it worth the trip.
The part about the people of the moon and their irregular anatomy is pretty sweet scifi craziness,
Oh! There are also illustrations from a lot of guys, including Aubrey Beardsley! Хто я такий, щоб ставити Лукіану оцінку, тому поставлю її цьому конкретному виданню п'ять зірок за коментарі, передмову і за оформлення книжки, Now, this is what I call a tall story, . .
Lucian of Samosata c,c.was born in the Roman province of Syria, His mother tongue was probably some form of Aramaic, but he wrote his works in a Greek influenced by the Attic classics.
He was a rhetorician, a philosopher of sorts and, after the age of approximately, a man of letters, writing in a form of his own making a kind of comedic dialogue meant to be read instead of performed, though he did travel around reading his dialogues to audiences after all, a man must eat.
Lucian had a real interest in philosophy, but the Hermotimos was his farewell to philosophy,
sitelink goodreads. com/review/show
Thereafter, he developed his comedic dialogues and viewed himself as a writer, though many of these dialogues do involve philosophy one way or another.
However, he also wrote this story A True Story whose truth he flatly denies,
Some fifteen hundred years before Swift, Lucian has his heroes fly to islands in the sky, participate in a war between the inhabitants of the moon and those of the sun, and then get swallowed by a whale who wouldn't even have noticed Jonah's miniscule fishywishy.
But then it gets good,
The heroes land at the Isle of the Blessed, where Homer and Ulysses and Achilles live with Socrates and his crowd of beautiful boys.
Prominent among the missing: Plato in his own private Utopia, all of the Stoics still climbing the mountain of Virtue, all of the Academics unable to admit the truth of the Isle, etc.
Pythagoras and Empedocles are present, though in a rather unfortunate state, Lucian manages to interview Homer, who clears up all of the controversies about Homeric literature, . . Priceless.
But the heroes had to leave because they were still living, Lucian is not happy about leaving, of course, but he is assured that he will perish soon enough and that, as long as he "abstains from stirring fire with a knife, from lupines and from the society of boys over eighteen" he could expect to return to an honored seat at the banquets on the Isle of the Blessed.
In this inverted Divine Comedy our heroes return to the living but must first pass the isles where the evil are punished.
Naturally, they land on one of them, and we are treated to Lucian's version of Hell, Not unexpectedly, the worst torments are reserved for those who lie and who present false histories,
Continuing the long voyage back to Earth, they come to the Isle of Dreams, where Lucian puffs with pride that he can be the first to supplement Homer's vague description with details.
. . And so it goes, island after improbable island until a storm takes them and dashes them onto a real shore.
Ah, but not yet the right shore, . .
I don't know why the words "science fiction" are brought into play when discussing this text is Gulliver's Travels science fiction Not a bit of it.
Like Gulliver's Travels Lucian's text is a satirical fantasy, though of a more modest scope, And, like Gulliver's Travels, it is quite entertaining, I wonder if Swift had read Lucian's story,
Read in the translation by H, W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler from:
sitelink goodreads. com/book/show/
which is available gratis online,
Earlier in the text Herodotus and a number of the less famous fabulists historians have their legs thoroughly pulled.
Rating
sitelink booklikes. com/post/ Στην Ιστορία του ο Λουκιανός, αφού πρώτα παραδεχτεί πως όλα όσα θα μας διηγηθεί είναι ψέματα, θα καταφέρει εν τέλει να μας τα αφηγηθεί με θαυμαστή αληθοφάνεια. Θα γίνουμε συνοδοιπόροι στο ταξίδι του και θα μείνουμε άφωνοι από τις φανταστικές, αλλά ολοζώντανες περιπέτειές του.
Η συγγραφέας και αφηγήτρια Μαρία Παπανικολάου, προσεγγίζοντας με αγάπη και σεβασμό το αρχικό κείμενο και διατηρώντας το ιδιαίτερο ύφος του Λουκιανού, μας παραδίδει την ιστορία του, ώστε να τον γνωρίσουμε από την αρχή.
Το κείμενο, μάλιστα, εμπλουτίζεται και από την εικονογράφηση του Ηλία Κασσελά, που είναι απόλυτα ταιριαστή. Οι εικόνες του δε συνοδεύουν απλά την ιστορία, αλλά έχουν μια δική τους προσωπικότητα και δυναμική.
Ο Λουκιανός και οι σύντροφοί του θα φτάσουν σε ανεξερεύνητους τόπους, θα συναντήσουν αλλόκοτα όντα, θα επισκεφτούν ακόμα και πλανήτες, μέχρι που θα φιλοξενηθούν και στην κοιλιά ενός κήτους. Αν και θα κινδυνεύσουν πολλές φορές, θα δουν με τα μάτια τους πράγματα απίστευτα.
Απ όλες τις περιπέτειές τους, ξεχώρισα τη στάση τους στο νησί των Μακάρων, όχι μόνο γιατί το περιέγραψε ως ένα τόπο πανέμορφο, ονειρικά πλασμένο, αλλά και για όσους συνάντησε εκεί.
Κλείνοντας, θα ήθελα να σημειώσω πως μέσα από αυτές τις αξιόλογες προσπάθειες αντιλαμβανόμαστε πως, ακόμα κι αν μια ιστορία γράφτηκε πριν πολλά πολλά χρόνια, για όσο θα υπάρχουν άνθρωποι που θα τη θυμούνται και θα τη μοιράζονται, δε θα πάψει ποτέ να ψυχαγωγεί, να διδάσκει και να δίνει τροφή για σκέψη.
Μερικές φορές νομίζω πως οι ελπίδες μας μας συντροφεύουν σαν σιωπηλοί οδηγοί, που δεν αφήνουν την απελπισία να μας πλησιάσει, γι αυτό πρέπει να τις θρέφουμε με τα όνειρά μας για το μέλλον. σελ
Procure Storia Vera Constructed By Lucian Of Samosata Displayed In Manuscript
Lucian of Samosata