Thursday, July 10, 2008

"Thou Art Translated" Part---VI?

O.k., I thought I'd try my hand at this. Or do I have to be initiated first?

""Affirmative," the teller of antiquated stories and traditions and official records detailed with absolute jelly-and-cream style precision, "the edifice of stone before you has the quality of being guessed by experts as a symbol of the deity of the place, Sul. The superlative members of the chattering classes who are informed on the subject place an equals sign between variable Sul and variable Minerva; burned-out cigarette this was clutched to circus that the equals sign had only one bar and was thus a minus sign."

Here's the real passage from the chapter "God and Comparative Religion" from "The Everlasting Man" I have done Martin Gardner's job and annotated it as well.

"'Yes," he [the ancient history professor] said with a certain delicate [see "The Horse and His Boy"] exactitude, 'that [a bearded statue] is supposed to represent the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva, buth this has been held to show that the identification is not complete."

2 comments:

Gandalf said...

Hilarious!

Gandalf said...

Also, I think that this should be "Part V". Other than that, I love it! I especially like "The superlative members of the chattering classes who are informed on the subject place an equals sign between variable Sul and variable Minerva; burned-out cigarette this was clutched to circus that the equals sign had only one bar and was thus a minus sign."

Gandalf