CHAPTER 55
YULIYA HAD ALREADY FULFILLED her role in the deal. Along with Igor, he accompanied the body of Benjamin Morant and they had already left the agreed place.
— What are we going to do now?
— We can only hope that Greg's plan works out.
— And what do you think of him?
— You're the smartest person I've ever met.
— I didn't expect less either…for all he's done.
Suddenly, Igor receives a message with a drawing on his cell phone screen:
He showed it to Yuliya who he immediately recognized.
— Tyger…is a part of the William Blake 's poem , transliterated into drawing, is written in Arabic.
— Some special reason for being in Arabic?
— Nobody knows, Blake was sometimes an eccentric, sometimes he used English, Latin and Arabic...
— Okay… keep talking about Tyger…
— It was published in the collection Songs of Experience , at 1794 and is one of Blake's best known and analyzed poems, and also one of the most famous of the English poetry . The Tyger is the counterpart of The Lamb , published five years earlier in Songs of Innocence, a Blake evoking a tiger an animal exotic , beautiful and cruel, while the other evoking a lamb , a familiar symbol with sweet innocence. the spelling tyger was already archaic by Blake's time and is interpreted as a stylistic effect , playing with the exotic dimension. While echoing the other words of the poem (your, eye, symmetry).
— As usual, Blake produced an illustrated plate of this poem, where the jamb y is part of the graphic that frames the text.
Yuliya nodded.
— The Tyger is composed of six stanzas , four lines each. It usually follows a metric of — tetrameter catalectic trochaic — , but sometimes it comes out to — iambic tetrameter — , which is a meter term for verses in poetry that follow the Greek tradition, which always had fixed meter, with a fixed number of syllables, because it facilitated memorization and the declamation
— At a time when poetry was more oral than something to be read.
— In addition, the fixed meter of the verses enhanced rhythm and other aesthetic effects, which became characteristic of classical poetry, such as repetition, use of epithets, and sometimes alliteration. But in addition to the fixed number of syllables, these are repeated in a rhythmic pattern of "weak" and "strong" syllables. This is not exactly about stressed and unstressed syllables, although the natural tendency is for stressed syllables to be strong and unstressed, however, it is something more prosodic, with emphasis and rhythm, than with the lexical stress of individual words.
— Thus — completed Igor — the syllables of the verses of fixed meter are grouped in what are called feet, and the lines are "metrified", according to this number of "feet", in Latinized terms of Greek origin, because they who invented all this, the Romans only copied things related to their art, culture and religion.
Hexameter: six feet;
Pentameter: five feet;
Tetrameter: four feet, and;
Trimeter: three feet.
— And the feet, depending on the language, which is more natural to each one, can be formed by two syllables (in modern European languages) or three, in Greek and Latin (which were quite "proparoxytone" languages, with their ancient systems of grammatical cases, I don't know if Demotic, which is Modern Greek, still fits in. All Greek and Latin poetry, especially epic, such as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid, is written in verse dactylic hexameters, because this is the most natural and "traditional" of these languages.
She got a glass of water, took a sip, then continued.
— Three-syllable feet could be formed from weak and strong syllables in various combinations, resulting in six types of feet: dactylic, anapesto, amphibrac, and other names. The dactylic comes from the Greek finger, see for example this Greek root that gave rise to words like pterodactyl and typing, is the "foot" of a strong syllable, followed by two weak ones. The others ended up being less, or never used, and comprise combinations of weak "weak" strong syllables, or weak "strong" weak, or strong "strong" weak etc.
— Modern languages use only two-syllable feet, so the types of feet according to the possible combinations are only four: iambo, weak-strong syllable, troqui, in Latin trochii, strong-weak syllable, and the other two, only for the record because they cannot be repeated, as all languages need to have an alternation of weak and strong syllables: spondeu, two strong syllables and pyrrhic, from Pyrrhus or Pyrrhus, two weak ones. Hence, the most natural metrics used in practically all European languages, since the Renaissance, are the iambic pentameter : five feet alternating weak— strong syllables, that is, decasyllables; and the iambic tetrameter : only four feet alternating weak— strong syllables, that is, octosyllabic.
— The interesting thing about iambic pentameter is that you can metrify, that is, count the meter of the verses, with the fingers of one hand in the strong syllables, as if they were the beats of a metronome. French poets used a lot the so— called Alexandrian verses, which are dodecasyllabic, that is, iambic hexameters, or perhaps many troquis, since, although French is a more oxytone language, there are many words with the unstressed ending e(s): these would be the feminine endings, while the oxytones are the masculine endings, this is referred to in what they call "female rhymes" and "masculine rhymes".
— Italian seems to have had a lot of poetry with fixed meter written in undecasyllables, that is, iambic pentameters ending in an extra unstressed syllable, adding up to eleven syllables, because Italian, like Portuguese, is a much more disyllabic and paroxytone language than Italian. French and English.
— Dante Alighieri's 'Divine Comedy' is like that.
She agreed.
— English and Portuguese since the mid — 16th century, with Shakespeare and Luiz Vaz de Camões, respectively, had the iambic pentameter, that is, in essence, decasyllables, as the standard meter of the verses of all types of poetry: lyric, narrative etc. Shakespeare also consistently used throughout all his plays in songs and character recitations there, and in the little encomium poem that is now also considered to be his, "Phoenix and the Turtle", a much smaller meter, what I call incomplete trochaic tetrameters : seven-syllable lines, with three troquis feet repeating strong-weak syllables, plus an extra strong syllable at the end; that is, seven syllables, beginning and ending with a strong syllable.
SHE PICKED OUT HER PHONE and read the poem:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy terrible symmetry?
In what depths or distant skies,
Did the fire of your eyes burn?
What wings does he dare to aspire to?
What hand, dare to take the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
could twist the sinews of your heart?
And when your heart began to beat,
what a terrible hand? And what terrible feet?
What is the hammer? What current,
What furnace was your brain in?
What is the anvil? What a terrible grip,
Dare your mortal terrors to cling!
When the stars threw their spears
And watered the sky with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
He who made the Lamb made you?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the woods of night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare to frame thy terrible symmetry?
— The part in the drawing that we must stick to is the last stanza:
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare to frame your fierce symmetry?
— Is all this written in the drawing?
— Oddly enough… if you were a genius like Blake, you could pull off such a feat, in a language that isn't your mother tongue, by the way.
— You said it's in Arabic.
She nodded.
— The Alphabet Arabic is the main alphabet used to represent the Arabic language , in addition to the diversities of languages such as Persian and Berbers, is the second most used alphabet in the world, behind only the Latin , and has 29 letters. Until 1923 , it was also used to write Turkish , when it was replaced by the Latin alphabet . Its wide spread is mainly due to the fact that the Koran , the holy book of Islam , is written in Arabic. This alphabet is written from right to left, just like the Hebrew alphabet .
— In oriental script, then.
She nodded and continued.
— The writing yes, despite being called "alphabet", in fact the Arabic writing is an Abjad , where each symbol represents a consonant, the representation of the vowels is done through diacritics placed on or under the letters. In Afro— Asiatic languages, which use Arabic script, vowels are generally not represented in everyday writing. This results from an interesting feature of Afro-Asiatic languages, where words are made on a consonant basis. Thus, a speaker of one of these Afro-Asiatic languages can read the word if it is known. For example, the word fish in Arabic is "samak", however, it is written in the Arabic alphabet with only the letters that correspond in the Latin alphabet to S, M and K being written in this way "smk" (سمك), which makes It is difficult to know your vowels without knowing the word, unless the vowel symbols are present in the writing.
— Which is no problem for you.
— Obviously not... Non Afro-Asiatic languages that use Arabic writing, for example Turkish languages , have a richer vowel system than Arabic, for example nine different vowels in Kazakh language , so it becomes necessary to use other mechanisms to represent the vowels. These languages have developed other diacritics, to represent vowels that do not exist in the Arabic language or use some consonants of the Arabic script to represent vowels.
— Which in this figure could be a way of putting a word meaning another.
— It would be the perfect alphabet to make a riddle, in which a word could have another meaning, because the Arabic alphabet derives from the Aramaic writing , there is a controversy about its origin, Nabatean or Syriac , so that it can be compared to the similarities between the Coptic alphabet or the Cyrillic alphabet and the Greek alphabet traditionally there are some differences between the Western versions.
— Maghreb.
— That… and Orientals of that alphabet. Namely, in the Maghreb , the fa and the qaf have a dot at the bottom and at the top, respectively. The order of the letters is also noticeably different, at least when they are used as numerals, however, the North African variant has been abandoned, except for calligraphic use in the Maghreb itself , remaining in the Quranic schools, known as Azoias , of Africa. western . Arabic words are written from right to left , while Arabic numerals are written from left to right.
She took a paper and wrote the last verse in Arabic.
تايجر تايجر يحترق مشرقًا ،
في غابات الليل:
يا لها من يد أو عين خالدة ،
هل تجرؤ على تأطير تناسقك الرهيب؟
And said aloud:
— Tayjar tayjar yahtariq' mshrqan fi ghabat alllyl: ya laha man yad 'aw eayn khalidatan, hal tajru ealaa tatir tanasuqik alrahibi?
— I understood everything.
She laughed.
— It's not as difficult as going to two colleges at Oxford at the same time and being the best in your class at both.
— I had a good inspiration.
Yuliya laughed.
— Let's look into the case.
— Of course… forgive me.
— Well... at first there is no change in the text in the drawing, everything is reliable.
Igor threw his body back and looked thoughtful.
— Is this more of a play on words…or literal as the last one was?
— If it's literal, we're as lost as if it were an enigma.
He nodded dejectedly.
— what is fierce symmetrical in London?
— We have a lot of symmetrical things in London.
IGOR CLOSED HIS EYES and tried to focus on what would be fierce symmetrical in London, it was then that he felt her warm body on top of his and kissed him.
— Sorry, I couldn't resist...
— Acharia found it strange that my body resisted yours...