Dactyl, Dactyl, Dactyl! [to the cadence of "Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!"]

James Joyce pronounced the title of his great work as YOO-lysses, not as the U.S.ian yooLYSSes. Samuel Beckett pronounced his own most famous work as GOD-oh, not as the Frenchian god-OH.

This made Ulysses, like Mulligan, Dedalus, and Ursula, a dactyl. And Godot a trochee.

Milton's "Paradise Lost" is a dactyl followed by a single-syllable stressed foot. So is Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". I think that that is not an accident.*


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Metamorphosis Encrypted:

If you take the letters K-A-F-K-A and keep the vowels as they are, but raise K eight letters counting up from the next letter in alphabetical order, you will get the sequence S-A-_-S-A; if you then count up the same interval from F, the entire cyphered sequence is
S-A-M-S-A.

Kafka concealed himself under the Samsa carapace thereby, slipping in yet another layer--what Ezra Pound called a "ply"--to the richness of the work. It is like Raphael placing his self-portrait among the figures in a crowd scene aside from the attention-focus of the painting.**



* And Beckett's pronunciation makes Waiting for Godot a dactyl followed by a trochee.
** The word "kavka" in Czech means "jackdaw". A jackdaw is a black bird that is a member of the crow family--a kind of metamorphosis built into Franz Kafka's very name: When you call out "Kafka!" on the street in Prague, do you refer to a man? Or a bird? Or a man-bird chimera? How does the word "kafka" signify?...