The Old Philosopher

The Old Philosopher

Sixty-seven years now I've banged my hard-thinking brains

  'round the world. So, still a kid in the pink?

Meh, maybe. In truth there were those first twenty-five years

  when I did not even bother to think.

 

-Reese Warner (after Xenophanes)

 

This poem of mine came out at the webzine The Asses of Parnassus recently. It's an adaptation (not really a translation) of a short poem by the philosopher Xenophanes, who was born in Asia Minor (the west coast of Turkey) and died in Syracuse. His years are approximately 570 - 478 B.C. The poem was preserved as evidence that Xenophanes lived to be at least 92 years old.

 

The Greek original:

ἤδη δ᾽ἐπτα τ´ἔασι και ἐξήκοντ᾽ενιαυτοί
  βληστρίζοντες ἐμὴν φροντίδ᾽άν Ὲλλάδα γῆν
έκ γενετῆς δὲ τότ᾽ἦσαν έείκοσι πέντε τε πρὸς τοῖς
  εἴπερ ἐγω περὶ τῶνδε οἶδα λέγειν έτυμως.

The fun word in this is blastrizontes (the word that begins with a B at the beginning of the second line). It's an unusual word and  means something like to toss and turn, and is usually used of someone suffering from a fever. I didn't exactly preserve that metaphor.

 

The poem shows up in Diogenes Laertius' brief biography of Xenophanes in The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Here's Pamela Mensch's more literal translation:

 

Seven and sixty years have by now been

  Buffeting my thought up and down the land of Greece;

And since my birth there have been twenty-five more,

  If I may speak truly about these matters.

 

-Xenophanes (tr. Pamela Mensch)

 

Not much is actually known about his philosophy.

"When Empedocles said to him that the wise man remained undiscovered, he replied, 'As one might expect, since it takes one to find one.'"

I don't know that Gumby is actually an eminent philosopher, but still he managed to photobomb my picture.

The old philosopher shown above is from Raphael's 'School of Athens' in the Vatican, reproduced on the cover of my copy of Diogenes Laertius. He's usually identified with Carneades, and not Xenophanes