Rick,
I didn't say that Egyptian "PET" and English "paradise" were synonyms.
English 'paradise' and English 'heaven' (not 'the heavens') are synonyms to
99.34% of modern native speakers of English.

The primary question for readers of Pound (qua readers of Pound) is what
Kati meant to Pound, not what Kati meant.  If we are trying to understand
what Pound saw in Kati via the Italian translation made by Boris, it
doesn't really matter whether if PET denoted 'apex' or 'sky' in the
original Egyptian.   Kati's statement --as understood by Pound or as
misunderstood by Pound-- fits into the 'paradiso terrestre' ideogram. It
would matter if Pound had been consciously and deliberately mistranslating,
but I don't think he was ("In love with Kati....").

On the subject of word order, where you're making centaurs out of ants, I
wrote that when the COPULA verb is involved, meaning does not hinge on the
order of the predication -- on what nouns appear before or after the
verb.  Just ask Lennon-McCartney: "Love is all you need. All you need is
love." The copula functions like an 'equals' sign. That is not at all like
saying  "inflection doesn't really count in Latin."  Word order can be very
important stylistically and rhetorically -- Boris's starting the sentence
with "Il paradiso" does draw our attention to the word 'paradiso'. But the
core assertion is the same, either way.  "Paradise for a man is his own
good nature"  is  *essentially* the same assertion as "His own good nature
is a man's paradise".

Regards
Tim Romano



At 11:15 PM 9/1/03, Richard Seddon wrote:
>Tim
>
>I do not understand your insistence that heaven and paradise are synonyms.
>They are partial synonyms only in English but not in Egyptian.  "Pet" means
>the sky, *the* heavens, the highest point.  It doesn't mean heaven or
>paradise.  Again, paradise as a unified concept did not exist in Egyptian to
>my knowledge.  If you have firm knowledge of paradise as a unified concept
>much like the western "paradise" please direct me in the right direction.
>
>Gardiner may have been concerned because the sentence apparently lacks an
>"iw", the particle that begins all Egyptian sentences.  The hieroglyph for
>"pet" begins what remains of the "Instruction".  Several characters (words)
>are missing from the beginning.  An "iw" might have been defaced from the
>instruction just to the left of "pet".  In this case nothing is amiss and
>"pet" means loftiest point.  However, if other characters that were part of
>the sentence were defaced then the meaning, significance and sentence part
>of "pet" might be changed.
>
>The hieroglyph as reproduced by Pound has another curiosity.  There should
>be a stroke, a vertical line, just beside the character of the man.  This
>indicates that the intended reading is "man".  The "s" above the man
>character is adequate for reading it as "Man" but the hieroglyph is
>technically incomplete.   I do not know precisely where Pound got the
>hieroglyphs.  I would presume from Boris, however,  Boris did not reproduce
>them in "Massime Degli Antichi Egizini".   Boris's original translation was
>to Italian, "Il paradiso per un uomo e la sua buona natura," (page 19,
>Massime).   Pound presumably translated the Italian to English.  The
>original papyri is in St. Petersburg, Russia and I have been as yet unable
>to check it for the missing stroke and the "iw".
>
>Word order certainly counts.  Your dismissal is like saying that inflection
>really doesn't count in Latin.   Word order determines the subject, the
>principal reason for the sentence's existence.  In Boris's translation the
>reader's attention is directed towards "Paradise".  In the Egyptian the
>reader's attention is directed towards "Good nature".   There is a major
>difference in emphasis.  As I said before, Pound was ecstatic about this
>discovery of "paradise" by Boris.  Pound probably thought that paradise
>meant much the same thing to an Egyptian as it does to modern man.  It
>didn't.  The Egyptian did not have the concept.
>
>If you want to continue to insist that the Egyptian "heaven/sky" and English
>"paradise" are synonyms and that the word order in a non-inflected language
>doesn't count,  so be it.
>
>Rick Seddon
>McIntosh, NM
>
>
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