Lot 49, the tower is everywhere.

[Albert Rolls]

That's interesting. Who's the translator and what's the date? The line, Latinized, is "Ho pasi kleinos Oidipous kaloumenos," at least according to Tragedy and Civilization: An Unterpretation of Sophocles by Charles Segal (209) and means "I who am called Oedipus, glorious to all" (209). But the only other transliteration that reads "Ho pasi kleinos Oidipous kaloumenos" that I can find is in a note in the Life of Cicero by Anthony Trollope (Ch 6, note 123. Trollope doesn't translate it.)

-----Original Message----- 
From: Mark Kohut 
Sent: Jul 30, 2011 7:25 PM 
To: pynchon -l 
Subject: Lot 49, the tower is everywhere. 



A friend of mine has read The Crying of Lot 49 for the first time. 
In discussion, I educated him a bit on the concept of 'the tower' in comparative religion, in Yeats, in Pound/Eliot
modernism down to 'All Along the Watchtower'.................
 
He said, I have recently reread Oedipus Rex and in the translation I had, when Oedipus meets Queen Jocasta on
the road and is asked who he is, he says, "I Am Oedipus, the Tower"............
 
That's Oedipus, one of Oedipa's ancestors somehow.