Cloud cuckoo land by anthony doerr5/29/2023 In my novel, I hope to embrace the full range of contemporary and historical meanings of the phrase, from a beautiful utopia where there is no suffering, to an absurd and over-optimistic fantasy. “A True Story,” to a 1925 Robert Graves poem (“ Kingfishers, when they die, To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly”), to the 2014 LEGO movie. In the centuries since, a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ has been used to describe any number of fanciful worlds, employed in works from Lucian’s second-century A.D. In “The Birds,” two heroes, Trustyfriend and Goodhope, decide to leave Athens because it has become too corrupt, and-with the help of the world’s birds-build a better city in the sky, halfway between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods. A: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ ( Νεϕελοκοκκυγία) was a phrase invented by the comic playwright Aristophanes’ 2,400 years ago in “The Birds,” one his few plays that survives to this day.
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