(Horace, Carmina IV, xiii “Audivere,
Lyce, di mea vota, di...”)
I lit candles, pranced
widdershins around them,
chanting harsh syllables
awkward as Klingon curses.
It worked, my dear. You’ve aged.
You paint and powder, paste
a too-bright smile on your
face.
Only the blind are fooled.
Your flesh has shriveled or
sagged.
Your hair, what’s left of it,
clings feebly to your scalp.
Look in your mirror; your
treason
is carved in your wrinkled
cheeks.
The powers that be are just,
if bought with prayers
enough.
Shannon Cochran as Sirella
The Klingons were an extraterrestrial humanoid warrior species in the "Star Trek" television and film series that began in 1966. As originally developed by screenwriter Gene L. Coon, they were characterized mainly by prideful ruthlessness and brutality. Their appearance was redesigned for the movies, acquiring ridged foreheads, and they became less totalitarian and more motivated by a strict warrior code of honor. They made their first appearance in the 1967 episode, "Errand of Mercy," were featured in all three seasons of the TV show, all five spin-off series (including an animated series), and eight of the feature films. In the first movie (1979) actor James Doohan devised a Klingon "language" consisting of made-up words; for the third film "The Search for Spock" (1984), linguist Marc Okrand, who had created the Vulcan dialogue used in the previous film and would invent Romulan for the 2009 movie, developed an actual working Klingon language based on Doohan's original dialogue. He chose the rarest form of sentence construction, object-verb-subject. When director Nicholas Meyer wanted the Klingons to quote Hamlet's famous line "to be, or not to be" in "The Undiscovered Country" (1991), Okrand developed the equivalent of "whether to continue, or not to continue [existence]." In 1985 he published "The Klingon Dictionary, " and the independent Klingon Language Institute published translations of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and "Much Ado About Nothing," the "Tao Te Ching," "Gilgamesh," and some books of the Bible.
ReplyDeleteWiddershins means to take a course opposite the apparent motion of the sun viewed from the Northern Hemisphere (to go counterclockwise) and is often used in the sense of "in a direction opposite to the usual. According to "The Oxford English Dictionary," its first appearance in print was in a 1513 phrase ("widdersyns start my hair," my hair stood on end).