Näett louis d'or charbon de lumière ma nuit et mon soleil

[sovay]

handful_ofdust has Tumblr-posted one of my favorite artifacts. I first saw it in Talking to the Sun: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems for Young People (1985), published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and illustrated with objects from Met's collections. It was photographed from a slightly different angle then, accompanying a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor:

I want to say your name, Naëtt! I want to make you an incantation, Naëtt!

Naëtt, her name has the sweetness of cinnamon it's the perfume where the wood of lemon trees sleeps.
Naëtt, her name has the sugared whiteness of coffee trees in flower
It's the savannah which blazes beneath the masculine love of the mid-day sun.
Name of dew cooler than shade and the tamarind tree
Cooler than the quickly-passing dusk when the heat of day is silenced.

Naëtt, it's the dry whirlwind and the dense clap of thunder.

Näett coin of gold coal of light my night and my sun
I your champion have made myself a sorcerer to name you
Princess of Elissa exiled from Fouta on a catastrophic day.

(I don't know the translator. The original text is here.)

It was "Fragment of a head of Queen Tiye. Yellow jasper. Egyptian, Dynasty 18 ca. 1417–1379 BC" when I read about it as a child. I see it's now "Fragment of the face of a queen," her identity as split and partial as the curve of her lips or her eyes lost to the smooth cleavage of stone.

It's still beautiful.

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

That's lovely!

I bumped into Alan Rickman, twice, about a year apart. The second time I said "You, again?" and he looked puzzled and I explained I'd run full into him coming around the corner at the Leicester Square Tube station and he said "Oh, pardon me," and bowed slightly and gave me a grin.

Which isn't a Met story, but it's the one you reminded me of. My top Met story was when Jackie O. bought her tag from me and the young woman working with me that day didn't know who she was.