Brendan the Navigator, Brandán el Navegante, Brendan de Clonfert et la moins connue des îles Canaries

 

Jasconius // Aspidochelone // Aspidochélon

- Il existe dans la mer un être nommé tortue à bouclier, semblable au dragon ou à la baleine

-  There exists in the sea a creature known as the shield-turtle, resembling the dragon or the whale.

 

During Inktober of 2024,  when the prompt was "navigator" I made a little picture about Saint Brendan.

And I knew about the legend of phantom island of San Borondon for a good long while. 

Yet somewow, I've never made the connection between the two - the difference in the writing of the name was sufficient to mask it. Up till today, that is.

Now I know it all started with Saint Brendan. It was him and his companions who stopped by what they assumed was an island. They were wrong, the island was not an island, but rather a giant creature called Jasconius. They woke him up by making a campfire at his back.

I prefer to think of him as a dragon rather than a whale. He learned to hide much better since Saint Brendan's time.  Here he is, dreaming happily, undisturbed by campfires.

Of Foxes, Dogs, and French Proverbs

 

Quand le renard se met à prêcher, prends garde à ta poule // When the fox starts preaching, look out for your hen.

Today, due to a not very obvious chain of associations*, I've started to look for some proverbs related to foxes. There were quite a few, as in many cultures they are perceived as sly, clever, deceptive and ruthless at the same time. 

And here is a fox, looking rather pious with his eyes fixed on a book, but with his ears pricked, alert to any opportunity that comes his way. 

_____ 

*  Now, to the chain of assotiations. I saw a set of pics from a dog show of Pastor Garafiano, a breed of dogs from La Palma island. They are very cute looking dogs, and one of the possible coloring is a rich, fox-like orange. So, foxes sprang to mind, and here we are.

Levez-vous!

Levez-vous, Monsieur le Chat, vous avez de grandes choses à faire! // Get up, Mr. Cat, you have great things to do!

Today, for no particular reason, I remembered the phrase "Levez-vous, Monsieur le Comte, vous avez de grandes choses à faire!" linked to Henri de Saint-Simon. Specifically, his servant was instructed to use it to wake him up daily.

I was surprised to discover that the phrase is apparently not as well known by the French themselves, let alone by English speakers, as it is by my generation of Russians. There are historical reasons for this, but I won’t enter into them now.

Sometimes, as in my case, the derivative jokes are better remembered than the original phrase itself. For example, I had to google the historical details, but I remembered this joke by Andrey Knyshev perfectly:

Всем известно, что великий французский мыслитель Сен-Симон просил с вечера своего лакея будить его по утрам словами: "ВСТАВАЙТЕ, ГРАФ! ВАС ЖДУТ ВЕЛИКИЕ ДЕЛА!" Однако, мало кто знает, что ответом лакею утром была обычно площадная брань да башмак в голову.

Everyone knows that the great French thinker Saint-Simon used to ask his footman to wake him up in the morning with the words: 'GET UP, COUNT! GREAT THINGS AWAIT YOU!' However, few people know that the answer the footman usually got was foul language and a shoe to the head.

The cat doesn’t have a footman, and I am not entirely sure who the joker behind the door is. The cat, however, is being polite. No shoe is thrown, and the foul language is staying entirely inside his head.

Vous inventez bien, vous, jeune oisif ridicule

Vous inventez bien, vous, jeune oisif ridicule // Richard of York gave battle in vain // Every hunter wants to know where a pheasant sits 

At the moment I am following a watercolor mini marathon, given one by one of the teachers of an online art school: https://drawing-dog.com/ 

The mini marathon is excellent, but there is one curious point to it. Since I've signed up to it from Spain, the site insists on giving me lessons in English, rather than in the original Russian. I don't mind, the translation is good overall, and some curious mishaps make me chuckle a bit. One example of such happened when the teacher said that he works with a very limited palette, the rainbow spectrum, from which he can mix every possible shade he might ever need. The translator then said "Every hunter wants to know where a pheasant sits". I recognized it as a russian mnemonic for the rainbow color sequence, "каждый охотник желает знать где сидит фазан" and then thought "hang on a second". 

It took me a while to remember what the English mnemonic was (Richard of York gave battle in vain, of course), and later I searched a bit for the French one. 

And here it is: "Vous inventez bien, vous, jeune oisif ridicule", “You’re quite the inventor, you ridiculous idle youth!”.

It´s sort of worse than either Russian or English, since the violet and green start with the same letter - violet and vert. And it is in reverse in relation to both, starting with violet and ending with red. 

But well, this is French, after all.

And anyway, I prefer another Russian mnemonic for the same thing - "Как однажды Жак-звонарь головой сломал фонарь", "Once, Jacques the Bell Ringer Broke a Lamppost with His Head". It has a certain French ring to it, I think.