I had auto-generated captions on, which, oddly, corrected the pun “Ruby Yacht” to Rubaiyat but couldn’t deal with the poet’s name. Here’s a screenshot of the scene where they discover the identity of Bullwinkle’s dhow:
Here’s what they’re actually saying;
R: It says Omar—
B: Goodness?
R: Khayyam. Omar Khayyam.
The captions, though, rendered the name as “Oh mark I am.”
This got my attention because of a recent comment by Wandering Gondola here. She quoted a line from House of Leaves: “Known some call is air am.” Like the caption, this is apparent word salad ending with the word am, and for the same reason: It’s an attempt to render phonetically as English what is actually another language, in this case Latin. Non sum qualis eram — “I am not what I was.” This is a line from Horace, famously used by Ernest Dowson as the title of his poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” (“I am not what I was under the reign of good Cynara.”)
Since my Latin is pretty spotty, limited to what I’ve been able to absorb by osmosis, I decided to confirm my understanding of the title with Google Translate — kind of a stupid thing to do, since Google’s Latin is even worse than my own! As I was typing it in, I misremembered the word order (Latin word order will never make sense to me; who puts a preposition in the middle of the prepositional phrase?) and got this: “I am not what I am under the kingdom of goodness.”
That word “goodness” also appears in the “Oh mark I am” caption.
1 comment:
I finally watched this Rocky and Bullwinkle episode. That was wild.
My mind obviously went to the red Sawtooth Stone being perhaps represented by the Ruby Yacht. The fact that it was "rust encrusted" when they found it initially, and so consequently dark, was a fun detail, since in my story the Stone was also encrusted when they retrieved it and had to be cleaned to expose the Stone underneath. The fact that it was a ship was great.
Your mention of goodness stood out in that I used the phrase "my goodness" in reaction to a picture I posted of the red-clad Sammy Hagar (as the Red Rock-er) in yesterday's post.
https://coatofskins.blogspot.com/2024/07/sammy-hagar-red-rocker.html
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