"And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens," EXILES' LETTER
-Rihaku/EP

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>From: Richard Seddon <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Canto 93
>Date: Mon, Sep 1, 2003, 11:15 PM
>

> 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