A strange couplet quoted by Kerouac and ascribed to Mountain Man Jim Bridger:
“I saw a petrified bird in a petrified tree,
Singing his petrified song.”
It reminds me of the parody of Vergil – the complete text of which I cannot find – by Charles Perrault. It is quoted by Dostoevsky in the The Brothers Karamazov:
J’apercus l’ombre d’un cocher
Qui, tenant l’ombre d’une brosse
Nettoyait l’ombre d’un carrosse.
Ever so slightly altered by Dostoevsky:
J’ai vu l’ombre d’un cocher
Qui avec l’ombre d’une brosse
Frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse.
“I saw the shadow of a coachman who with the shadow of a brush was cleaning the shadow of a coach.”
There are a lot of reasons why this works well as parody, not least of which is the incongruity of Aeneas finding 17th century coaches and coachmen in the underworld.
One Comment
Thanks for writing this, I was trying to track down the source and translation of this and was having some difficulty.