Your teeth are like stars: they come out at night

[nameandnature]

The Song of Sidney made me laugh. You probably need to have read the original to get it.

I still get Christian sub-culture jokes, despite God's absentee landlord behaviour and the serious diplomatic incident resulting from the misbehaviour of one of his ambassadors (why yes, I am watching a lot of Babylon 5 lately). If only there were a way to keep that sense of shared community and lose the obsession with blood, sex, sin and death which seemed so inseperable from it.

Comments

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

Personally think the original still rocks - there's some lovely bits of text in that there Book!

[nameandnature]

Oh, I agree, it's lovely (although some of the similes are a little odd to modern ears, hence the parody). The Church has tended to allegorise it (it's about the relationship between Christ and the Church, and so on). I'm not sure that Jewish people interpret it that way, though, and it was theirs first.

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

some of the similes are a little odd to modern ears

There's some great metaphors in the Sanskrit classics - "hips like a chariot's wheels" confused one of my undergrads, as did the constant references to Rama's mother being like a turtle. Rama himself is often compared to a lotus, which is reasonable, but he has "lotus hands" at one point in the Ramayana, which sound a bit useless to me. Also, "Elephant hips" are traditionally praised - think there's scope for a cross-cultural misunderstanding there!