Cipro. Pigmalione. Alcune migliaia di anni fa. by Aitan
Maledetta Afrodite! Maledetto il giorno che ascoltasti il mio pianto e facesti di lei una donna vera. Maledetto il movimento lento della sua gamba destra sul busto eburneo ancora immobile di statuaria bellezza; e maledetto ancor di più il momento in cui la sua bocca mi parlò d’amore. Maledetta e maledetto me che cerco ancora di farle assumere la stessa statica posizione dell’avorio che plasmai.
La statua che mi innamorò ora non sta ferma per più di due minuti. Afrodite, la mia vita non vale quei due minuti. Maledetta! perché non senti ora che piango e piango ancor di più?
Notes
It’s very difficult to illustrate Aitan’s stories, they are very rich in detail, so there is not much one can add with the drawings. Still this is a great challenge for me and I love it this way! In this case I tried to represent the imperfection deriving from motion which Pygmalion complains about in this story. In fact the story is about how the sculptor misses the times when his statue (which was brought to life by Artemis) would still be standing still and not be walking around all the time.
There is an interview with me and Cubber on Lospaziobianco.it, but of course, it’s in Italian. If you still want to check it out, it’s here: link diretto all’intervista con noi
Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.
A friend of mine, Valerie, has recently pointed out that I never gave any English translation for the text in Sed Tantum Dic Verbo (like the one in the picture above), and being it quite fundamental for the comprehention of the story, this could be a problem for all of you, who don’t read Italian.
So here is a short synopsis of Cubber’s text, the comic is based on. I decided not to provide a real translation, because the text is quite complex and I’m not such a good translator.
Synopsis
Cubber’s story is written as a kind of police report, by an imaginary office for “christmas decoration prevention”. It tells about some people who put a figure of a Sphinx into a nativity scene. The spynx then tries to reach the infant Jesus to tell him something (but we’ll never know what). They try to stop the Sphinx by putting the shepherds in its way, but the sphinx would just bite them and eat all their sheep. Then the fisherman tries to catch the mythological animal while asleep (because it’s eaten too much), but the sphinx escapes. As a final resort, they give Saint Mary a holy cleaver while Joseph puts straw and mud into the ears of the infant to protect him against the words of the sphinx.
notes
The text is written so that the distinction between the real world and the miniature world of the nativity scene becomes quite blurred, what I have done in my comic version of it, is to tell the story from a different temporal point of view, i.e. tell the story from the traces the events have left in the world.
