Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Atom heart snark



This picture of a giant bee chasing an English bride through Tom Quad is a classic example of what we like to call the world's first and only GN version of Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark.

If you wish to read a lengthy and quite interesting essay upon the relationship of this rather unsettling drawing with the Czech Snark translation of Václav Pinkava, click here. I promise that it will intrigue anyone with a penchant for languages.

Anyone who has ever taken a crack at translating poetry will appreciate Veaclav's comments upon the intractability of anapestic bathing machines and the many prosodic uses of soap in Czech.

The rest of you can mill about uselessly and ask each other if this is all there is to hunting Snark … a thousand blobs of ink and the white noise of the papery anti-ink to keep everything from lapsing into liminal grey.

Or you can decode the wedding scene above. Weddings! Along with courtroom histrionics, they are the staple of both Bollywood films and Snark poems alike.

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