Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Streaming Youth of Gargantua Summarized

The first of this month in the west is All Saint's Day. In cheeky homage, a bit about Gargantua's youth seemed this year especially to be mockingly appropriate.
"Gargantua, from the age of three to five years, was brought up and instructed in all proper discipline, by order of his father; and this period he spent like the little children of the country, namely: in drinking, eating, and sleeping....
He wallowed in the mud, smudged his nose, dirtied his face, ran his shoes over at the heels, frequently caught flies with his mouth, and liked to chase butterflies of his father's realm. He pissed over his shoes, shit in his shirt, wiped his nose on his sleeve, dropped snot in his soup, and paddled around everywhere. He drank out of his slipper and ordinarily scratched his belly with a basket. He sharpened his teeth on a top, washed his hands in his porridge, and combed his hair with a goblet. He would set his butt on th ground between two chairs and cover his head with a wet sack. He drank when he ate his soup, ate his cake without bread, bit when he laughed and laughed when he bit, often spit in the basin, farted from fatness, pissed against the sun, and hid himself in the water from fear of the rain. He struck when the iron was called, moped around, was as sweet as sugar when he wanted to be, flayed the fox, said the monkey's paternoster, went back to his sheep, turned the sows out to hay, beat the dog in front of the lion, put the cart in front of the oxen, scratched himself where he didn't itch, tried to pump everybody, reached for too much and got little, ate his white bread first, put horsehoes on the geese, tickled himself to make himself laugh, was always running to the kitchen, offered sheaves of hay to the gods, made them sing the Magnificat at matins and found it quite alright, ate cabbage and passed white beets, knew flies when he seen 'em in white milk and pulled their legs off, scratched paper and smeared parchment, drew on the goat's leather, reckoned without his host, beat the bush without getting the birdie, believed that clouds were bronze canopies and kidneys were lanterns, took two miller's fees for one sack of grain, played the ass to get the bran, made a hammer out of his thumb, took the cranes at the first leap... always looked a gift horse in the mouth, ... made a ditch of the earth taken from the ditch, guarded the moon from the wolves, if the clouds fell hoped to catch larks, made a virtue of necessity, made soup of such bread, cared as little for the shorn as for the shaven, and every morning flayed the fox."
Our translator and editor Samuel Putnam, says that 'flayed the fox' means that he vomited.
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from pp. 78-80: Samuel Putnam: Portable Rabelais: Viking Portable Library: Second Printing: The Colonial Press Inc. USA, 1955
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