Hey Caion + Archie + anyone here who knows shit and/or fuck about ancient … any possible help understanding this song we recently came across would be useful.
[attached are the lyrics to “Πότε ἐπελεύσεται τελείως?”]
The word “ΚΑΤΕΣΘΙΕ” repeats multiple times—it’s also embedded in the Rite-tone for [Curse]. Giving us that would be exceptionally helpful, I think. Anything else would be—well, I’d love a perfect translation of the entire thing, but that seems unlikely.
Oh. I think this contains all of the Rite-tones that deal statuses.
“ὁ θάνατος δι’ ἐμοῦ…” at the beginning of the third stanza is [Poison]
“τί εἰμι? τί γίνομαι?” at the end of the first stanza is [Exposure]
“εἰμὶ ὁ ἄωρος, ὁ ἡμιτελής, ὁ διεσπασμένος” in the second line of the second stanza is [Wound]
I think, from a brief moment of communion with the Mother of Monsters, whose song is “Πότε ἐπελεύσεται τελείως?” that the most apt translation is “WHEN WILL MY HOUR COME ‘ROUND AT LAST?”
Hallo, Salme!
I’ve finally received return correspondence from a philologist I admire who’s long left the Academy proper but stays in touch; I’m including his translation of the song and some explanatory notes. I’m then also going to follow up with some thoughts of my own; not to declaim or demean his expertise with the Ancient language, but I have context based on your travels and experiences - and my own, or call it an Acting Academician’s intuition, that suggest certain amendments to his proposed text. But for the moment, I’ll let him speak for himself:
Concerning a hymn recovered in transcription from the burning plane, provisionally titled The Twelve-Wound: an apotropaic antiphon presumably commemorating the Apoleia.
I interpret this text as two-voiced liturgy for soloist and chorus, representing a people faced with the (hypothesised) long-distant catastrophe that dismantled the Ancient world. The first-person is prosopopoeia - an abstract concept given human voice, and represented as speaking or acting.
I am the Twelve-Wound (1), the Degenerated
Twelve lights are quenched; twelve heroes fall (2)
I arise before my season; I arise in anguish.
What am I? What is to become of me?
– and the world cries out: IT DEVOURS! IT DEVOURS!
I, the Devourer, no longer wish to be.
I am unripe, half-wrought, torn asunder.
(She bears forth, and bears forth, and bears forth.)
Ever do I fall short of my aim. (3)
– and the world cries out: IT DEVOURS! IT DEVOURS!
Death passes through me, and never departs from me.
Twelve throats, twelve eyes (4).
When? When comes the full complement? (5)
When shall it come down upon us, in its fullness?
– and the world cries out: IT DEVOURS! IT DEVOURS!
I am the Twelve-Wound,
I bide until the true birth.
(1) - “dodektroma” decomposes rather neatly into “twelve” and “wounds” - compare our modern word ‘trauma’, which we believe derives directly from the Ancient term. But does this mean “wounded twelve times”, or “causing twelve wounds”, or something utterly different? Why does this hymn refer to the Apoleia in this particular and euphemistic fashion?
(2) - There are other possible readings of this line; the clear reading, to me, refers to mortal heroes who fell in battle, perhaps during the catastrophic upheaval of the Apoleia.
(3) - “To fall short of the mark” here is a physical metaphor that carries much weight. One could say that failing to uphold the Virtues is a falling-short of the mark, in the same way. To reach for what was not within your grasp; to fail at one’s own moral and ethical goals, or those of society.
(4) - “Twelve eyes” is uncertain, but in juxtaposition with “Twelve throats”, I feel confident that this is some sort of physical description, of what I dare not speculate.
(5) - As in the crew of a Glass-Ship.
I hope that this has been of some help to you, Academician. It was an honor to once more apply myself to the most ancient secrets which the ocean in its majesty holds vaulted for us, those of the Ancient world, and what befell it.
Caion, again.
My friend could not have had the context of the Deepforge that I have due to my connection to the Library, and I thought it prudent - behold me now thinking like the Academician! - to limit the extent to which knowledge of what ‘swims’ below the surface of the Beast is shared widely, at this point in time. But, knowing the full context, rather than simply the text… I’d like to try my hand at a translation. It will be rougher; I intend to preserve points of ambiguity rather than smooth them with certainty which I do not possess.
I am the Dodektroma, the unborn (1)
Twelve lights are guttering, twelve lights fall (2)
I <rise before/refuse/resent/stand against/object to/defy> my appointed time; I <same ambiguity> my suffering.
What am I? What am I becoming?
The world cries out: “Devour me!” (3)
The world cries out: “Devour me!”
I do not wish to be the devourer. (4)
I am the untimely, the unfinished, the sundered (5)
I am born, and born, and born (6)
Always I fall short of the mark. (7)
The world cries out: “Devour me!”
The world cries out: “Devour me!”
Death comes at my hand, but not from my heart.
Twelvefold massacres, twelvefold <circles/cycles>.
When? When the Pleroma? (8)
When will my hour come ‘round at last? (9)
The world cries out: “Devour me!”
The world cries out: “Devour me!”
I am the Dodektroma,
I await my Alethic birth. (10)
(1) - ‘Dodektroma’ does have a fairly clear reading of “twelve-wound”, but… especially in light of the words which immediately follow it I would be remiss to omit that “ektroma” means ‘miscarriage’, and is attested in Ancient texts as implying ‘one untimely born’, or illegitimate, or otherwise monstrous and out-of-place. I can’t think of a way to translate this that preserves all the meaning, and am choosing to consider it a self-chosen name on the part of the entity in question.
(2) - My esteemed colleague’s translation of this line feels like a stretch, to me.
(3) - I believe that my colleague assumed the existence of a transcription error or irregularity in the text, and inserted meaning to compensate, and as a consequence read the entire song as antiphonal hymn rather than unitary dirge. This is, admittedly, the line of which I am the least certain, myself - there is an irregularity in the text which makes it challenging to adequately translate. But this feels right to me, and I could not tell you why.
(4) - My colleague translates this as “I, the devourer, do not wish to be”, and this does comport with the information in the Library folio concerning the entity’s apparent death-wish. But I believe that this line is best translated as a plea; The world cries out, but she does not wish to devour it, she wishes to be otherwise than what she becomes.
(5) - The word here is precisely the same as that used in Ancient commentary on the constellation of the Sundered Wolf.
(6) - My colleague renders this “she bears”, possibly in concordance with some pronoun confusion which he seems to have been experiencing in the text / his reading of it as having an object and a subject. And it is certainly true that the Mother bears forth fiends! But I am confident in my translation, here.
(7) - The Ancients thought of the Virtues different than we did, and precious little remains of their ethics in a form which is useful to us. But we know that they believed in five cardinal virtues, and that each Virtue ought to strike a balance between overabundance on the one side, and a lack on the other; that there was a point of balance to be found, like an archer’s target, in the space between the two, and to err in either direction was ‘hamartia’. To fall short of the mark.
(8) - This is challenging to translate. “Full crew complement” suggests itself, especially to a modern ear who’s spent time in Glass-ships. I think that this carries more meaning than that, though - Ancient texts describe Pleroma in almost religious or ecstatic terms. “The Fullness”, as a peak experience, or as– having finally found one’s beloved, or one’s true calling. Satisfaction, completion. I’ve left it as ‘Pleroma’, here.
(9) - I agree with Salme’s translation of this line on poetic and also philological terms, especially considering her evidence from the entity herself. “When will things go as they ought?” would be another, more literal possibility.
(10) - “Alethic” could simply mean ‘true’, but given that which I know, I feel confident in my decision to also leave this in Ancient. If I had to, I might translate this “I am waiting to be born whole.”
And there you have it. I am not an expert, by any means, and perhaps my own reach exceeds my grasp here, but I’d rather reach for truth and come up short than to have never reached at all.
I hope that this helps you in some way.
Caion
Oh yeah, while we’re here:
Ilaï
Empyrean
ᾰ̓́σῡλον
Teleiokosmos
I AM JDICE
Well… at least one of those is just a word, my friend. ‘empyrean’ pertains to the highest part of the sky. Teleiokosmos… is a compound the precise meaning of which I couldn’t possibly translate without seeing it in context but ‘kosmos’ is ‘the world’, more or less, and ‘teleio-‘ implies either the end, perfection, or completion, so… that’s either very ominous or very hopeful, roll the knucklebones. Asilon I could swear… right! We talked about that one.
No idea as to the other two; they don’t look like any Ancient I recognise, or even anything like any Ancient I’d recognise. Did you run into a trove of Ancient text on Mu!? That would be tremendously exciting, if so! Think of the ways we could advance our understanding of the language with more of a corpus to draw on!
I mean, it kind of has the same general mouth-feel of an Ancient word so I was wondering if there might be more to it there.
↩ Caion #3170the precise meaning of which I couldn’t possibly translate without seeing it in contextBet it does not help one bit: “Teleiokosmos Summer Party”
Also no those are just some of the words on the OST that don’t immediately look like any language I recognize as a language re: first and last
…ahh, you’re aware of songs that you will eventually hear, but have yet to experience. That’s remarkably unsettling!
Also, you’re correct with regards to context not actually being helpful. Although– the title does imply an occasion for joy, rather than sorrow, I think. So perhaps that would colour my translation of the term towards the optimistic.
Caion, thank you so much for your work and for your former colleague’s work. It was especially interesting to see academic collaboration at work. I have a couple responses and some follow-up questions.
The line, as translated by your colleague:
↩ Caion #3165Twelve lights are quenched; twelve heroes fallI do think his interpretation is a stretch, but in the Traveler’s Guide there’s thirteen people cited as particularly important (you are among them). Aurelius refers to us as “Starwatched.” I wonder if that could … hm. Be part of it? There’s also the obvious and simple answer of the moons on the Beast reflecting light and slowly guttering out.
↩ Caion #3165The world cries out: “Devour me!”This is the precise name of the song on the final half of the OST that Jorule is referencing. Hm. I’m not sure you have context.
[Attachment: A list of songs on the OST in their written order, divided by disc]
↩ Caion #3165I believe that this line is best translated as a plea; The world cries out, but she does not wish to devour it, she wishes to be otherwise than what she becomes.I agree with this reading; when I spoke with Her she wished to be other than what She is.
Do you have any resources on:
Also do you have any thoughts on the importance of twelve here? Multiples of six keep recurring but aside from the twelve moons of the Beast and … the way multiples of twelve keep recurring on Mu, I can’t think of why it’s such a significant number here?
yeah it’s towards the tail end so that was my guess too. Also, to fluff you up a bit, you’re probably More Correct than your scholar-ly acquaintence on at least one line (even if several of his read much better / has some really kick ass lines), since,
[Included here is the entire track list, specifically pointing towards ‘The World Cries Out: Devour Me!’ in particular though]
Oh, dear.
Salme, I’ll collate some information for you - I can answer at least some of those questions with some degree of competence, I believe, or at least bring you up to cruising speed in broad strokes with the current state of Samudran knowledge. Just let me collate my thoughts, first…
For what it’s worth, Jorule, on “Empyrean”—Awa seems to have some sort of … techne (“Empyrean Intuition”) that allows him to intuit where celestial bodies are?
So we’ve encountered it in that sense.
Oh shit wait you know that you can see logs. Sorry.
It feels a little less, ah - not pretentious because “starwatched” certainly is, self absorbed? something like that - than calling us the Main Characters or The Chosen Ones… especially since some of them weren’t chosen… would have been real funny if I’d opted to go with “Heroes” though.
I mean I liked “starwatched” better than the other options certaintly.
There should be a primer concerning the Ancient script in the foreword to the memory crystal which I gave you containing our understood lexicon; it might be difficult to find unless you know it’s there and you’re looking for it. Scholar-Archaeologist Sziremach was brilliant in many regards, but unfortunately organizational skill was not among them; woe unto us that he’s the one who was seized by the desire to master Ancient lexicography.
I have received a fascinating document upon putting out a request for Ancient commentary on the constellations. It is a badly-damaged and ancient Samudran record of an itself badly-damaged document of disputed provenance and which was itself never in our possession, in at least three distinct authorial hands, recovered from an expedition close to the sea’s edge, containing commentary concerning five particular constellations. My capacity to believe in coincidence is rapidly degrading over time, so I’ll reproduce the document in full, what little we still have of it.
Λέων ὁ Χρύσεος - […] disagree as to whether it is named for what it guards or for what it once was. The elder gloss calls it a debt-mark, a promise pinned to the sky so no one could pretend it was never made. The younger gloss calls this sentiment, and says a Lion does not remember owing anything - only that something is his, and will remain his, and the sky is simply where he chose to stake his claim […] a third hand, smaller, cruder: “ask it what it loved.”
Στρατιώτης καὶ Ἀδελφός - The fragment forks, and neither branch quite resolves. One tradition insists this is two distinct asterisms mistaken for one, close enough in the old sky to be read as a single figure by anyone not troubling to look twice. The other insists (with some heat, to judge by the underlining) that this is one figure under two obligations that were never meant to be compatible, and the ‘bridge’ in its other name (τῆς γεφύρας [??], gloss uncertain, possibly corrupted, unattested in other known literature) is not a bridge between places […]
Ἡ Σφύζουσα Καρδία - […] verbs share a root here, and the fragment does not tell us which was meant, or whether both were. Struck, it grieves. Beating, it lives. The text addresses these as the same event observed from both sides […] the striking never stopped happening, only receded far enough to feel like a rhythm instead of […illegible for eleven lines. Resumes mid-sentence] “…and so it goes on resounding in time, which is the only mercy that was on offer.”
Προσωπεῖον τοῦ Μονομάχου - The longest surviving passage, and the least settled. Three authors, none naming the others by name, all clearly arguing with each other across however many years separate the hands. First: the Mask is a face put on over grief, so the duel could be fought without the fighter’s own face getting in the way. Second, terser, unsigned: “a mask over grief is still a face; what expression does it choose to wear?” Third, added smallest and last, in a hand that trembles either from age or from something else: μνᾶσαι πυρὸς οὖσα [??] — “remember, being fire” — which is not a translation of anything above it, and may not belong to this fragment at all.
Λύχνος καὶ Ὀφθαλμός - The plainest gloss of the set, which the annotator clearly found suspicious. A marginal “too plain” survives in a third hand. Read straightforwardly, a light, and a thing that watches by it. Read the way the annotator seems to have wanted it read: a light made so that a thing which could not otherwise see would have something to watch by. Something was is appended beneath, in ink darker than the rest, and which did not legibly survive the damage to the document; whether original to the fragment or added by a later scribe is indeterminable.
As far as the Apoleia goes - there’s attestations of the term in both the most recently-created surviving remnants of Ancient text and in our own language, although they’re relatively few and far between; at some point it feels as though knowledge of it was deliberately suppressed for the purposes of the maintenance of eidesis. It’s clear that -something- happened to the Ancient world; that ‘something’ is considered to have been the Apoleia. The word means ‘destruction’, with the connotation of an irreversible shattering of a precious object, or a sea-vessel being obliterated upon the rocks.
With respect to the Virtues - I recall in our discussion with Scholar-Professor Xie that he or I mentioned “Dread, Curiosity’s old enemy”. Our understanding of Ancient ethics is profoundly fragmentary, but we know that Curiosity itself was among the Ancient virtues – it may have been that virtue associated with the pellucid gnosis – and survived to become, some would say, the cornerstone of our own Virtues. We also know that Curiosity was a careful balance; each Virtue was a target which could be either over- or under-shot (as discussed in my commentary on the song’s use of ‘hamartia’. Too much Curiosity, and you hit Dread; too little, and you are lost in what they referred to as ‘Murk’, which is delightfully and refreshingly straightforward, at least from the perspective of someone who’s tried to go diving in water that wasn’t terribly clear looking for kelp-clamberers.
We know that there were five of them - the Ancients seemed to have had a particular predilection for the number in terms of aesthetics and design - but unfortunately, we don’t have any information on what the other four may have been, to my knowledge.
I think that’s everything I’ve managed to scrape together that I thought may be useful for you? I dearly hope that it helps.
Oh, I assume Apoleia is, like, the old word for Apocolypse, then?
Shocking that there isn’t anything in that text on the Empty Space In The Sky, considering the other constellations at play.
I would be curious to hear the others’ thoughts on their respective constellations. Mine is. I would be very curious about what we could intuit about the … annotator? The one with the small, shaky hand. “Remember, being fire” is very similar to what the constellation itself said to me—“Remember, you are fire.” It seems to be. I mean, I’m not going to claim that no one else watched by the Duelist’s Mask was ever also fire, but it does seem very specifically in conversation with a theme describing myself that I’ve encountered over and over again.
↩ Caion #3227The word means ‘destruction’, with the connotation of an irreversible shattering of a precious object, or a sea-vessel being obliterated upon the rocks.This could be … nothing, but when I spoke with the Omniclast, the precise imagery he used was … himself as the wind, filling the sails of a ship, but filling those sails so fully the vessel broke upon the rocks. It would not surprise me that someone so-named as “the omniclast” would be involved with the shattering of the old world, but the symmetry in imagery felt. Exceptionally loaded.
↩ Caion #3229We know that there were five of them - the Ancients seemed to have had a particular predilection for the number in terms of aesthetics and design - but unfortunately, we don’t have any information onI am guessing we could probably make some reasonable guesses based off how other types of gnoses might fail either through too much or too little, but that would probably be idle speculation?
I do think the emphasis on fives is interesting, considering the importance of sixes—I wonder if that is the missing, changeable element? The Empty Space, liminal gnosis, that sort of thing?
I am…struck, to say the least…by the idea of “twelve heroes fall”–I know that you consider that to be an erroneous translation, Caion, but I am increasingly of the mind that the twelve “star-watched” are bound together in some way; possibly related to the “Apoleia.” Or…will be bound together? I don’t know.
At the very least it certainly doesn’t seem like an accident that it could be interpreted both ways.
Admittedly, hearing you say that that translation resonates for you makes me less confident in my statement that it’s a stretch. It’s definitely a possible interpretation of the given text, at any rate, and the usage of the same word in two distinct senses like that isn’t unknown in the attested literature…
Consider also, that per our Map. There are thirteen heroes.
With all due respect and consideration to Awa, I would consider him something of a…wild card…in that ontology.
Same. which is kinda fucked when you think about it, since that means there’d otherwise be no one from Valais.
Yes. That has gnawed on me. Though there is…something about Valais…
When I dreamed myself to Mu the first time, I passed by Valais in the process. It was…shrouded. Not just shrouded, but it seemed to be attempting to evade being seen and known. Like someone holding their breath whilst in hiding, so as not to betray even the smallest sound.
Strange, considering the Guide mentions the Pathos pulling people towards it fairly strongly.
yeah i’ve been betting The Prince fucked up something pretty bad on the way out
I think that might, to some extent, be characteristic of (one of) its overseer? “The Shadow”?
I also … hm.
↩ Aurelius #3342Strange, considering the Guide mentions the Pathos *pulling* people towards it fairly strongly.I also think the black hole that the Beast and Almachadta orbit have something to do with it? This is just … a guess, really, but the black hole itself lets nothing escape it. At the same time, it is a sun (the sun of Mu?) and casts enough light to illuminate the moons of the Beast?
These, however, are more thoughts about how narrative and themes work than how space (or space!) work so. Grain of salt?