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Saturday, July 30, 2016

How do you spell Faro?

Faro is some kind of card game, in my mind it is used by card sharps to fleece the unsuspecting. It's also what we call leaders of ancient Egypt, though we spell it 'Pharaoh', or is it 'Pharoah'? Google likes the -aoh version. Amazon isn't so particular. We have
FARAON (PHAROAH) by Boleslaw Prus
and then we have
Pharaoh by Boleslaw Prus
I think the first one is in Polish, the second one might be in English. Prices range from $3 to $3,000. Not sure if I am going to order a copy (the $3 version) or not. Looks like there might be other versions as well.

It's kind of a famous book. Wikipedia has an article about it:
Pharaoh (PolishFaraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus (1847–1912). Composed over a year's time in 1894–95, serialized in 1895–96, and published in book form in 1897, it was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history.
Pharaoh has been described by Czesław Miłosz as a "novel on... mechanism[s] of state power and, as such, ... probably unique in world literature of the nineteenth century.... Prus, [in] selecting the reign of 'Pharaoh Ramses XIII'[1] in the eleventh century BCE, sought a perspective that was detached from... pressures of [topicality] and censorship. Through his analysis of the dynamics of an ancient Egyptian society, he... suggest[s] an archetype of the struggle for power that goes on within any state."[2]
Makes it sound kind of interesting.

St. Kinga's Chapel, deep in the Wieliczka salt mine
I'm looking at this because it gets mentioned in Wikipedia's article about the Wieliczka Salt Mine, which is kind of an old, old place. Reminds me of the mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings, except the dwarves were digging for gold and the Poles were digging up salt.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Romans, of course , had to bear FOUR spellings , viz:-
Fero, ferre, tuli, latum ;-)

Chuck Pergiel said...

Yes, I expect that ferro if pronounced the same as Faro. The other three might be names for iron, but I don't think they are pronounced the same.