Dilly's Pentelopes

I first discovered Dilly and his 'pentelopes' while reading The Knox Brothers by Penelope Fitzgerald (first published by Macmillan in 1977). Alfred Dillwyn ('Dilly') Knox was one of the four brothers featured in her biography of her father and three uncles. He was a classics scholar at King's College Cambridge and later a cryptographer in the First and Second World Wars. Amongst his wide range of interests were word-puzzles, poetry and... the 'pentelope'.

The rules for writing a pentelope are simple to understand but devilishly difficult to translate into practice. There must be five lines; each line must end with a word of the same kind but with a different vowel in the last syllable. The vowels, moreover, must be in alphabetical order: ie, a e i o u (or their phonetic equivalent). The word 'pentelope' may be based on three Greek roots meaning 'five', 'end' and 'voiced'.

Here is an example from Dilly's own pen:

Just look at my father
And mother together!
I fancy that neither
Would very much bother
If rid of the other.

Here is another, written as an epitaph on the very morning of AE Housman's death in 1936.

Sad though the news, how sad
Of thee, the poet, dead!
But still thy poems abide - 
There Death, the unsparing god
Himself dare not intrude.

The third example represents the feverish, flurrying fruit of my own effort:

He'd really be blind as a bat
Who was ready to aid and abet
Those who laud each liturgical split
So assisting thereby Satan's plot
To poison the Church at her root.

All submissions from readers will be carefully considered for publication. This is not a  f a c e t i o u s  offer!

Pentelope Psychiatrique

Ma petite âme, mais qu'est-ce qu'il y a?
«Hélas! J'essaie de prier
Pour tous ceux dont le sort ici
Prévoit un destin idiot
Qui ne vaut pas un demi-sou»

PB 7 May 2018

The previous post on 'Dilly's Pentelopes' sowed a teasing question in my mind: could the fivefold, 'aeiou' rhyming scheme work in French? The verse above confirms, 'Of course`! I was, admittedly, having a lot of difficulty with the last line until... er ... the penny dropped, or rather the demi-sou, to coin a phrase. Why is the pentelope 'psychiatrique'? Well, psyche means âme or soul, and iatros means médecin or doctor. 

Free translation:

Oh what's the matter, little soul?
'Full sadly I petition
For prisoners in their foolish hole
Who risk their soul's perdition.'

More literally: My little soul, what's the matter? 'Alas! I'm trying to pray for all those whose fate here (on earth) will lead to a foolish outcome that's not worth a farthing.'

Dental Appointment

Fresh from the vasty fields of France, I have just received the following pentelope:

Today was the date, the die was cast.
Strong on his feet to match the test,
He rang the bell and clenched his fist.
To hell the price new teeth would cost
The truth was: when we muft, we muft.

GH 2018

I think this must be a favourite to carry away the 2018 Pentelope Award.
The triple d-alliteration in line one presages the sense of impen-ding, dreadful doom. A galloping metre carries us relentlessly forward but then changes pace when iambic tetrameter strides doggedly towards its destined climax and then... an irresistible bathos.

In the background, barely noticeable, is the pentelopic DNA, faithfully reproducing its own kind: tradidi quod et accepi.

A masterpiece from an artist whose working motto seems to be: ars est celare artem.

Pentelope in French alexandrines

Me levant ce matin

This is another pentelope offered by my super-talented French connection, GH. He remarked that those who have been through pre-seventies classical studies in France, find that 'alexandrines' come rather easily. An alexandrine is a syllabic metre of twelve syllables divided into two half-lines of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line in France from the 17th to the 19th centuries.

He noted that you can even find alexandrines in the public space, such as the following information on metro doors:

<<Le train ne peut partir que les portes fermees>> 

The train cannot depart unless the doors are closed. 

Our  equivalent might well be:

Stand clear of the closing doors, this train is about to depart.

Me levant ce matin, Dieu que j'avais la dalle!
Je n'avais sous la main qu'un peu de mortadelle;
Il fallait se résoudre à faire un tour en ville
Pour acheter bien vite une brioche molle
Et au bout d'une paille aspirer quelque bulle.
GH 2018

When rising this morning, God I was starving! All I had to hand was a bit of sausage. I resolved to walk into town to buy a soft brioche and to blow a bubble out of the end of a straw.

Any suggestions from my readers about the best translation of the last line?

Entente pentelopicale

The rules for writing a pentelope are simple to understand but devilishly difficult to translate into practice. There must be five lines; each line must end with a word of the same kind but with a different vowel in the last syllable. The vowels, moreover, must be in alphabetical order: ie, a e i o u (or their phonetic equivalent). The word 'pentelope' may be based on three Greek roots meaning 'five', 'end' and 'voiced'. For more, see here, et seq.

Here are three pentelopes produced as a result of recent exchanges between your author and a French friend and contributor to this site ('GH'). I've included a fairly simple translation of each French verse.

Sans teeth, sans everything

Ce qui me reste dans la mémoire?
Les fous-rires de ma grand-mère,
Mon petit cochon-tirelire,
Queqlues vieux contes du folklore,
Débris vivants d'une aventure.
GH 2019

[What remains in my memory? 
My grandmother's giggles,
My little piggy bank,
A few fairy tales...
Living remains of an adventure]

Intimations of immortality from early childhood

Me promenant tout seul dans l'allée des ha ! ha !
cette grande invention par Le Nôtre créée,
J'avançais là pensif encore tout ébahi
De tout ce que la vie recèle de cahots
Depuis les jours heureux au sortir du bahut.
GH 2019


"Le bahut"  (= the dining-room furniture suite) is the affectionate nickname of the secondary school one belongs to.

[Walking on my own along a ha-ha,
That wonderful creation of Le Nôtre,
I moved forwards thoughtfully and in amazement
At all the surprises life presents
From the happy days of infancy to the end of school days]


Here is a small offering to console all those masters and pupils we have known over the years,  with their  slightly differing tales of woe...

Bringing up the rires

or

'Must try harder'


Come in and won't you please sit down, Gérard?
Your French report, by my esteem'd confrère,
Reveals from 'First' you now 'bring up the rear'.
Your conjugations cause a fine furore:
The latest gaffe was writing crûrent for crurent!

PB 2019

The Botanist

Wandering along Lake Baikal
Methought I saw flowering kale
And wolfsbane aplenty, enough to kill.
A thrush somewhere began to call,
The breeze around was rather cool.

Of course it wasn’t Pina del Mar
Acapulco, Cancun, Biarritz or Cambremer,
But the place somehow reminded of Grasmere
Less the daffs, with kale more,
Bleaker, with all the aspect of a moor.

Thanks once again to my French correspondent GH for this haunting pentelope. For those unfamiliar with the term 'pentelope', please search the site for a definition and lots of examples.

When two pentelopes elope

I decided to experiment further in this genre by writing a 'double' pentelope: presumably a Decalope?

Have a look at the results below.

This verse, as some of you will quickly gather,
Reflects a son, a husband and a father
Who three-wise all exist in one together;
This entity, predestined thus to bear
The links ‘twixt hither and we know not whither,
Apparently is heir and aye bequeather;
Now (though it seems an awful lot of bother),
Does Woman too not call for us to clothe her
In queenly robes of daughter, wife and mother,
Her euphony felicitously smoother?

Oaks Park PB 2018

Here are two pentelopes intimately intertwined, fortuitously in keeping with the masculine/feminine, male/female subtext!

From a technical viewpoint, instead of five 'rhymes' following the order of vowel-sounds, there are five pairs of rhymes. The couplets are semi-rhymes with short followed by long vowel sounds. I am reminded of the chromatic scale in music, where both tones and semitones are played.

Please forgive the sleight of hand between lines 4 and 5.

Hinc lucem et pocula sacra

My experiments continue with the verse form invented by the famous codebreaker 'Dilly' Knox: the pentelope. Here is one in Latin followed by my translation. In some ways, it's simpler in Latin because the letter forms of the vowels almost always have one particular sound, unlike 'bird' and 'word', for instance, in English.

Pocula sacra laudate
Omnes pueri gaudete
Verbum domini plaudite
Verumtamen scitote:
Bibendum non est dilute!

PB 2018

From this place (come) light and sacred draughts
(Motto of Cambridge University)

Praise ye the sacred draughts,
Come all ye boys rejoice;
Applaud the word of the master (don)
But know ye all this much:
Take it undiluted!

Venesection 18 May 2018

I've been somewhat hors de combat recently. Here's the story.

Last Wednesday I saw the haematologist who put me forward for another venesection on Friday morning. My first was fine, my second was also no problem. I was half looking forward to this, my third. I don't mind needles. I'm not particularly squeamish about blood. Easy peasy, I thought. What could possibly go wrong..?

After about 25 minutes, they finished taking the last few mils of the 500 ml total and detached the bag. I felt ever-so slightly light-headed... then, with alarming swiftness, a very unpleasant dark sludge seemed to flow over my mind and I fell forwards in my chair, just managing a quick:

'Nurse!'

I don't remember all the details of what happened next. There was an oxygen mask. There were lots of people. A discussion about 'pushing' something called 'atropine'. I was taken to A & E. A saline drip was inserted. My wife had been contacted and arrived at the hospital. She acted as my interpreter because I was mentally confused, apparently, and had lost some of my power of speech. She explained this to me later, somewhat bemused, as you can imagine.

To cut a long story short, I was kept in hospital until the evening and then driven home by my wife. DG.

*****************************************

Well, I've survived. I'm still a bit groggy, but that's probably having to look up too many new Greek/Latin-based words such as bradycardia, vasovagal syncope, and atropa belladonna (what a quaint name for Deadly Nightshade, Atropos of the Three Fates, styled as a beautiful lady). Atropine has some unpleasant side effects such as hallucinations, mental confusion, dehydration, migraine headaches... but is just what the doctor ordered for a slow heart. My rate had apparently gone down to 32 per minute. I later set the metronome on our piano to 32 pm - it was quite scary; I think I prefer allegro non troppo.


My pentelope production unit has slowed down in a sort of 'parasympathetic response'*. Here is a pentecoda for my war story:

Reports from Front of bloody action

Heavy fire at venesection

Reinforcing dereliction

Belladonna's dread decoction

Centre saved from fell effluxion...

*I learned that blood-letting lowers blood-pressure. This would normally provoke a 'sympathetic response' leading (naturally enough) to a higher pulse rate. My doctors said that for some reason a 'parasympathetic response' was provoked, slowing the pulse-rate.

A French poet contacts this blog

A French poet, going under the nom de plume of Anne Honnimusse, has contacted me via a mutual acquaintance in order to present to our readers the following finely crafted pentelope.

Quand Mélenchon entre en débat
Toutes les bouches restent bées;
On est scotché par le débit
Et par les abois du cabot
Qui déblatère, honte bue.

Anne Honnimusse 2018

When Mélenchon starts arguing,
All the mouths come a-gaping;
One is struck (literally stuck, as if with scotch tape) by the effluence
And by the barkings of the cur
Who yaps away shamelessly (literally, having drunk all his shame).

To convey my appreciation, and that of the readers of this blog, I drew a deep draught from my alma mater and replied with:

Hinc lucem et pocula sacra

Pocula sacra laudate
Omnes pueri gaudete
Verbum domini plaudite
Verumtamen scitote:
Bibendum non est dilute!

PB 2018

Blablacar

A new pentelope from the prolific pen of GH in France...

Blablacar is a fabulous system of car-sharing which is conquering France because of the rail strike. People hesitate at first to use it, then discover that it’s a means to meet other people totally outside their own circles and are converted. It’s viral. I’m a zealot myself. The name comes from the fact that you are bound to chat once inside the car.

You know a kir, invented by Chanoine Kir, then Mayor of Dijon.

Un milouf is mild slang for a military. The one in the poem needs to join his unit after a leave.

The curé in the last line is coming back to his presbytery.

Here goes :

Blablacar

Suite au manque de trains, à nous donc Blablacar !
Bien sûr on n’irait pas au bout du monde, au Caire…
Mais, ma foi, à Dijon pour siroter un kir
Ou bien si le milouf doit rejoindre son corps
Voire pour le curé retourner à sa cure…

Cheers !
GH 2018

[Translation: As a result of the shortage of trains, we're car-sharing; obviously, we don't go to the ends of the earth, to Cairo; but, my word, to Dijon to sip a kir, or if the serviceman needs to return to barracks; or the parish priest to his presbytery]

Exchange of Pentelopes

Here is a letter I received from my super-erudite French colleague, GH, followed by my response. They both feature "pentelopes", an invention of Alfred (Dilly) Knox, a Cambridge classics scholar and a cryptographer in both World Wars. I first introduced them on this blog in May 2018: see Dilly's Pentelopes.

I hope that you and your family are fine and freer now that the lockdown has ended.

We are well and have been staying in the Lot since June, but it's a bit sad and we were glad that we could have our daughter's family with us for a while for nothing is happening. All the festivities among neighbours and music festivals have been (wisely) cancelled and we barely leave our garden, but for food shopping. We're lucky to have a swimming pool in the present heat. What deters us is the carefree attitude of holiday makers who need to be reminded to keep distances and wear a mask inside shops. Being "persons at risk", we tend to become wary, regular stay-at-homes.

Partly because of that, I have practically finished assembling the dictionary of English-speaking Catholic writers, although if it were done when it is done, it would be well : evey other day someone in the team unearths somebody that we had overlooked. As a sub-title, I have suggested the French phrase humorously used when unexpected things keep cropping up : "C'est comme les cheveux d'Éléonore, Quand y'en a plus, y'en a encore !".

I have come up with a slangish pentalope in French, inspired by that quintessential summer activity, the barbecue ("barbok" in present day young people's lingo :

Basta le véganisme et vive la barbaque !

Mais la cuire parfois fait tomber sur un bec.

Agneau, porc et poulet ou bien cuissot de bique

(Attention, cependant, surtout jamais de bouc !),

Rien ne vaut entre amis un succulent barboque.

Translation :

Enough of veganism, hail meat (barbaque is slang for meat)

But cooking it sometimes presents a snag (tomber sur un bec = hit a problem, Not slang)

Lamb, pork, chicken or a goat's leg (une bique/ une biquette : affectionate child's speech for goat. My grandfather had a sister called Blanche like M. Seguin's goat and her brothers called her "Biquette").

Beware, though: never ever a billy-goat !

There's nothing like a succulent barbecue among friends.

Here is my response:

It was a pleasant surprise to receive your message from out of the blue. I'm delighted to hear you are keeping well and that you are making good progress with your dictionary. I can only begin to imagine how tricky it might be to determine and to apply criteria for eligibility; how important it might (or might not) be to pay due regard to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum; to have a filter that works for CINO (Catholics in name only), heretics, apostates, schismatics, cafeteria Catholics and so on, and so on: : - )

I'm making slow but steady progress on a number of fronts, the current major operation is to complete a page turn of l'Abbé Fouard's splendid (two volume) Life of the Christ the Son of God.

A week or so back, I completed an English translation of the last poem written by Sainte Thérèse a few months before her death: Pourquoi je t’aime, ô Marie! It was quite a challenge as I aimed not only to stay fairly close to the French original but to retain the alexandrines and the same rhyming scheme of the 25 stanzas.

I enjoyed reading the Pentelope, your first since they locked us down into our new normality. I have just written in fairly quick time the following:

Lèse-majesté

"All hail to us!" "We've got it in the bag!"

We clever men God's help no more did beg;

But for our boots we boasting were too big

And swamped with pride we sank into a bog

Of viral madness crowned "Corona Bug"...

I suspect we may have divergent views on the global "virus" and the draconian measures enforced worldwide (for our health and safety). I find it inconceivable that the massive destruction of economies, jobs and small/medium enterprises, the incoherence, self-contradictions, data-manipulation and mainstream censorship, accompanied by the relentless maintenance and progression of fear-mongering, do not all point to very dark days ahead.

Let us pray on this, the Vigil of the Assumption, that Our Blessed Mother will watch over her children and grant us her protection.

[9] Quae est ista quae progreditur quasi aurora consurgens, pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata?

Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?

Kindest regards. etc.

HIC HAEC HOC

GH emailed me recently with his latest news, including a second hacking of his computer system. This corresponded to a weird email purporting to be from him which I received some weeks ago. Fortunately, my son AHB spotted a tell-tale error in the address line and we spammed and deleted the email.

To commemorate the dastardly cyber attacks, I composed a new pentelope for GH, inspired by 30 little demonstrative pronouns/adjectives he and I once learned by heart as small boys [for newcomers who are unfamiliar with pentelopes, see here or type the term in the blog's search field].

Forsooth I know not why tis him they hack [1],
It grieveth me full sore but, what the heck!
They seemingly consider him a hick [2]
And aim his ham to string[3] or him to hock[4],
Perchance his mail to black[5], or simply huck.[6]

Notes

[1] : hack has multiple pages in the complete OED, but here is their first recorded instance of the cyber sense: d. transitive. To gain unauthorized access to or control over (a computer system, network, a person's telephone communications, etc.), typically remotely. Also with the owner(s) of the system, network, etc., as object. 1983   N.Y. Times 28 Aug. 20   Hackers..wouldn't..think of calling up on the telephone and saying, ‘Hi, I'm a bright young guy and I'd like to hack your computer’.

[2] hick: a. An ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby. Now chiefly U.S.1699   B. E. New Dict. Canting Crew   Hick, any Person of whom any Prey can be made..; also a silly Country Fellow.

[3] hamstring v, transitive;  2. transferred and figurative. To disable as if by hamstringing; to cripple, destroy the activity or efficiency of. 1641   Milton Of Reformation 60   So have they hamstrung the valour of the Subject by seeking to effeminate us all at home.

[4] hock:  (a) intransitive. To observe Hocktide.  (b) transitive. To bind or otherwise beset (persons) in the way practised at Hocktide. v1727   Cowell's Interpreter sig. Gga   And in the Accounts of Magdalen College in Oxford there is yearly an Allowance pro Mulieribus Hockantibus, in some Manors of theirs in Hampshire, where the Men hock the Women on Monday, and econtra on Tuesday. 1825   T. D. Fosbroke Encycl. Antiq. II. xiii. 576   On Monday and Tuesday men and women reciprocally hocked each other, i.e. stopped the way with ropes, and pulled the passengers towards them, desiring a donation.

[5] blackmail: Post-classical Latin reditus nigri , redditus nigri (plural) appears to have been invented by Coke after redditus albi white rent (see quot. 1642). He seems to have interpreted white rent as all rent paid in money, and to have invented a contrasting category for rent paid in kind.  [1774   D. Hume Let. 4 June in Edinb. Mag. (1817) Aug. 10/1   I hope all his spleen is not exhausted. I should desire my compliments to him, were I not afraid that he would interpret the civility as paying black maill to him... [Note] This was a sort of tax paid to freebooters, to obtain exemption from their inroads.]

[6] huck: a. intransitive. To higgle in trading; to haggle over a bargain; to chaffer, bargain. Also figurative. To haggle over terms, to stickle. 14..   in T. Wright & R. P. Wülcker Anglo-Saxon & Old Eng. Vocab. (1884) I. 566/36   Auccionor, to hukke.1468   Medulla in Promptorium Parvulorum 252 (note)    Auccionor, to merchaunt, and huk. a1529   J. Skelton Poems   Now adayes as hucksters they hucke and they styck.

PS: [The Latin huc is an adverb: hūc: (adv.), to this place; hither, here, cf huc et illuc]

480 BC revisited - a unique double

My correspondence with GH, a French classicist, author and polymath has been continuing. I introduced him to pentelopes and we have been firing them back and forth of late.

Having grown up in leafy Warwickshire (think Arden), I started to look for something redolent of Shakespeare but my mind went blank; so, naturally enough, I turned to blank verse. Alack! Vaulting ambition leapt from this already tricky task to approach one still more vainglorious. To end and begin each line in accordance with the pentelope vowel rules. The result is set out below in 480 BC revisited..

Shambling iambic pentameter is held fast by doubled pentelopic punctuation, front and rear. It is of course a prototype, quite incapable of flight, or much else for that matter. I am wondering whether any of my readers will be able to take this ugly duckling and produce a swan, worthy of the Avon.

480 BC revisited

As Spartans form their lines, Leonidas
Espies afar the serried hosts of Xerxes;
Is foretold triumph soon at Salamis,
O Sybil, tribute to heroic loss?
You stand foredoomed, fell sons of Darius...

PB 2018

Battle of Thermopylae.By Cleber.knfire*

NOTE: At the head of a huge army, Xerxes continued his father Darius' war with the Greeks by defeating the Spartans under King Leonidas after a heroic last stand at the Battle of Thermopylae. The anxious Athenians consulted the Sibyl (the Oracle at Delphi), only to learn that Athens was doomed. A second part of the prophecy stated however that 'only the wooden wall will not fail'. The meaning of these mysterious words became clear when the Greek navy defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis. The Greek ships proved to be the wooden wall. The Persians withdraw. The war was over.
* [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Thermopilas_Batlle_art.jpg