Juicy bits

[larryhammer]

A sampler of erotic passages of The Faerie Queene:

I.1.45 to 2.8:	Archemago tricks the Redcrosse Knight into believing his Una is unfaithful.
II.5.27-37:	A preview of the delights of the Bower of Bliss.
II.12.42-81:	A tour of the Bower of Bliss; I'm especially fond of the two maidens sporting in a fountain.
III.1.40-63:	A lady attempts to seduce Britomart, not knowing that under the armor is a woman; complete with a bed scene.
III.7.37-52:	A giantess abducts a squire for sexual purposes.
III.10.36-52:	Hellenore, having run away from her miser husband, falls in with a band of satyrs and refuses to return.
V.4.4-20:	Two brothers swap brides along with their inheritances; wacky legal hijinks ensue. Okay, it's not really erotic. But it could have been.
V.4.21 to 7.45:	The Amazon episode entire, with digressions and cross-dressing, concluding with a girl-fight.
VI.8.35-51:	Cannibals sacrifice a naked maiden on an altar. And you thought that cliche was invented in the pulps.
VI.10.10-18:	A chorus line of a hundred naked maidens dance around three naked Graces as they dance with another, also naked, maiden/mother/muse, until a knight stumbles among them and they vanish into thin air. Paging Dr. Freud.

The juicy bits of book IV are, given it's the book of friendship, psychosexual rather than erotic, and not susceptible to easy extraction. Though there is a lovely bit where the narrator admits unselfconsciously that Britomart, when she's pretending to be a male knight, will flirt with the ladies. And she then wonders why the ladies' knights take her for a rival.

If you read only one book, make it III; if you want more, read IV, which is the other half of the story.

---L.

Comments

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of Victorian editors of Vergil who would take out all the juicy bits and put them in an Appendix. Young (usually male) scholars were ever so grateful to have them all together in one convenient place.

[larryhammer]

And then there's editions of Catullus with the racier parts left untranslated, or translated into French, making them easier to find.

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

And there is a Whole Lot of racy Catullus.

Catullus is my hands-down favorite Latin poet.

Ameana, puella defututa...

No, not going to translate that in a public forum.

[larryhammer]

Aw, you're no fun. :-)

And he's not easy to translate, either. Horace is easier. To me, anyway. And I, of course, am a descendent of Ovid.

---L.

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Catullus works more easily for me than Horace does. Horace has that convoluted syntax.

Ovid was a lovely, wicked man. Poor thing, the way he ended up on the Black Sea. The wages of wickedness and all that.

[larryhammer]

Syntax of the pretzel, yes, but urbanity is easier for me to catch than sharp rage.

Ovid was a master. You can make a career out of rewriting Ovid. Oh, wait, that's what I'm trying to do.

---L.

[galeni.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Will go look in the library across the way for a copy. (I love working at a university, within 100 yeads of a multi-story library.)

My reading has been insufficiently varied. Time to fill in the gaps.

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

I really need to get around to reading the entire book one of these days.
Amongst a great many other things, now that I think about it....Lord Dunsany would be an excellent example of "I'll get around to that one of these days".

[larryhammer]

The King of Elfland's Daughter should be a higher priority than this. Trust me.

---L.

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

Charles Vess is a big Dunsany fan, too. The Dunsany estate had wanted him to illustrate some reprints.

[larryhammer]

Kewl. That ought to work well.

---L.

[jankenstein.livejournal.com]

Not really, he doesn't have the time to do it now.

[larryhammer]

A classics illustrated FQ? Oh my. I wanna see this.

I once translated the fountain maids' passage into modern English, as a finger exercise. When I was done, I almost posted it to rec.arts.erotica, but chickened out.

---L.

[larryhammer]

Red Crosse is a twit — no "bit of" about it. One illusionist's bed-trick and he's toasted.

Have you read Orlando Furioso? It's Spenser's model, fifteen^* times more fun, and Britomartis is swiped wholesale from Ariosto's Bradamante. There's an older translation online, but the modern Penguin Classics edition is very much worth the effort.

^* Well, it's really 14.5 x — I round up for euphony.

---L.

[larryhammer]

I'll have to look up the Sturgeon.

---L.