AWB Blog Special Blog Items ASTROPoetry Blog For Global Astronomy Month 2020 (185): Inertia of Inertia (31)For Global Astronomy Month 2020 (185): Inertia of Inertia (31)
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (text and photos) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)
- Published: Monday, August 10 2020 00:19
PARAPHRASING “MIORITA”
Astro-photo-essay-poem (cosmopoem) by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
“Miorita” (The Little Ewe) is the Romanian national myth-ballad.
With hundreds of variants, it starts from the antique Geto-Dacian ritual of the sacrifice of the best young man (a shepherd, in this case) to be a good herald to the supreme solar god Zamolxe. The most beautiful variant, in which death is compared with a cosmic wedding, belongs to Vasile Alecsandri (19th century).
On June 29, 2020, I toured the Youth Park in Bucharest to create a personal imagery for that poetic passage, and I caught the Sun, the Moon and only the star Vega (just because it is hard to take pictures of meteors and grouped stars in a European Capital City).
Here is the result (in my English translation from Romanian - without rhythm and rhyme, unfortunately):
“A star fell
At my wedding party,
The Sun and the Moon
Carried my coronet,
Pine trees and sycamores
Were my wedding guests,
Priests were the high mountains,
Birds were singers,
Thousands of little birds…
And the stars were my torches.”
Then I tried the following summer paraphrase of 2020, as for a current urban shepherd (without sheep and clean skies, but with internet access) who doesn’t want to be sacrificed:
An Earth-grazing fireball gushed
At my wedding party,
Saturn and Jupiter
Carried my coronet,
Nebulae and clusters of stars
Were my wedding guests,
Priests were the galaxies,
Radio pulsars were singers,
Thousands of comets…
And hypergiant stars were my torches.
-Andrei Dorian Gheorghe-
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