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Eclogues. Eight Stories by Guy Davenport. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
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Eclogues
Eclogues. Eight Stories by Guy Davenport. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
Contents:
The Trees at Lystra
The Death of Picasso The Daimon of Sokrates Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta Mesoropostonippidon Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna Idyll On Some Lines of Virgil Acknowledgements:
Four of these stories have been published before in magazines and are reprinted here with the kind permission of their editors,
- 'The Death of Picasso' in The Kenyon Review,
- 'Christ Preaching at the Henley Regatta' in The North American Review,
- 'Lo Splendore della Luce a Bologna' in Glitch, and
- 'Idyll' in Sands.
'The Daimon of Sokrates' is a kind of translation of Plutarch's Perí toû Sokrátous Daimoníou; the flatness of its text is meant to imitate Plutarch's starkness and narrative simplicity. I have added embellishments from the fragments that survive of his lost life of Epameinondas, his life of Pelopidas, and from other sources, when I could add a detail of manners or an object which Plutarch took for granted.
'Idyll' derives from Theokritos' Carmen V. 'The Trees at Lystra' from Acts XIV:6--20. I am indebted also to Stanley Spencer's unfinished 'Christ Preaching at the Cookham Regatta', Montaigne's Sur des Vers de Vergile (Essais III:5), and Diogenes Laertius' Lives of the Philosophers.
Dedication: For Bonnie Jean
Dust jacket photograph of GD by Guy Mendes.
Note: 'The Death of Picasso: Het Erewhonisch Schetboek: Germinal, Floréal, Prairial 1973' is the long title of this story which was published first in The Kenyon Review (new series, 2:1, Winter 1980, pp. 40-58). It continues the Fourieriste escapades of Adriaan, Kaatje et al. that began in 'The Dawn in Erewhon' published first in Tatlin! (1974). The story is continued again by 'Joop Zoetemelk Gagne le Maillot Jaune: Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek: Messidor and Thermidor 1980' published first in Antaeus 40/41 (Spring-Winter 1981), pp. 69-85, and included in Apples and Pears (1984).
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