Cloud Cuckoo Land
The word cloud cuckoo country is a loan translation of the ancient Greek word Νεφελοκοκκυγία Nephelokokkygia , which comes from Aristophanes ' comedy The Birds . It describes a city in the clouds, which the birds have built for themselves as an intermediate kingdom. In the meantime, the term is used in a similar way to that of the castle in the air : as a utopia without any grip on the ground, i.e. without a sense of reality.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer translated the word in this way as early as 1813 in his work About the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason , also later in his main work The World as Will and Idea and elsewhere. He gave it an expanded meaning by accusing other philosophers of only talking about the "cloud cuckoo country". While some Aristophanes translators had previously chosen the terms “cloud cuckoo castle” and “cuckoo cloud court”, Ludwig Seeger also spoke of the “cloud cuckoo home”. In his work On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense , Friedrich Nietzsche also referred to Schopenhauer's term.
Karl Kraus wrote a more modern version of The Birds in 1923 with the title Cloud Cuckoo Home .
In popular culture , the term describes a recurring topos that describes a diegetic world full of oddities and eccentric characters.
proof
- ↑ § 34
- ^ First volume, fourth part, § 53
- ↑ http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Cloudcuckooland Cloudcuckooland in the Topoi-Wiki TV Tropes , last accessed on April 11, 2014
See also
literature
- Bruno Zannini Quirini: Nephelokokkygia. La prospettiva mitica degli 'Uccelli' di Aristofane. Rome 1987, ISBN 88-7062-624-5 .
- Tim Krohn , Lika Nüssli (illustrations): The Cloud Cuckoo Country, based loosely on the play "The Birds" by Aristophanes . Swiss Youth Writings Foundation SJW, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7269-0570-5 ; French : Coucouville-les-nuées , ISBN 978-3-7269-0571-2 .