[DOWNLOAD] "Paciurea's Chimeras (Dimitrie Paciurea)" by Apollo # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Paciurea's Chimeras (Dimitrie Paciurea)
Author : Apollo
Release Date : January 01, 2003
Genre: Performing Arts,Books,Arts & Entertainment,
Pages : * pages
Size : 173 KB

Description

Striking her wings with the dragon tail, as she leaps and flies, and spits fire from her nostrils, comes the green-eyed chimera, wheeling, yelping..."I incite to perilous voyages and great enterprises. With my paws I have chiselled architectural wonders...I look for new scents, larger flowers, untried pleasures. If anywhere I catch sight of a man contented and wise in spirit, I fall upon him and strangle him."(1) A malevolent, pleasure-seeking, she-creature, Gustave Flaubert's chimera is also endowed with the divine spark of creativity. This elevates her above the beast in the Iliad: 'a foaming monster the Khimaira/of ghastly and inhuman origin/her forepart leonish, her tail a snake's/ a she goat in between. This thing exhaled/in jets a rolling fire/'. (2) Homer's graphic description provided the ekphrasis for subsequent variations oil the theme, fixing the representation of the chimera in art historical iconography. Popular in antiquity, its hybrid specificity of 'a lion with a goat's head in the middle of its back and tail ending in a snake's head' was consistently maintained. (3) However, it was Flaubert's creature that captured the imagination of the Symbolists, who adopted her in their pantheon of beasts, rendering The Temptation of St. Antony obligatory reading after his death in 1880. (4) The Chimera became a ubiquitous presence, and we even find her making a comical guest appearance in Huysmans's Against Nature as a coloured terracotta toy brought to life by a female ventriloquist for the entertainment of her lover, Des Esseintes: 'the marvellous dialogue of the Chimera and the Sphinx, spoken in deep guttural voices, now raucous, now piercingly clear, like voices from another world. "Here Chimera, stop!" "No, that I will never do!" and then the incantatory lines: "I seek new perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures still untested". (5)