Navarth

Navarth, generally referred to as 'the mad poet', is a character in The Palace of Love (pub. 1967), the third of the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, though his writings are occasionally referred to in other, unrelated novels by Vance (eg Araminta Station). Navarth in person appears more eccentric than mad, a Salvador Dali-ish petulant extrovert and creator of 'happenings', one of the more amiable in a long line of Vance's self-absorbed egotists. We first encounter him on Earth, old and forgotten, living in reduced circumstances on a canal-boat in the ancient (but fictitious) city of Rollingshaven: apparently a Vanceian conflation of Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg. The chief protagonist of the novel-sequence, Kirth Gersen, induces Navarth to help him in his quest to find the galactic master criminal Viole Falushe (with whom Navarth was long ago involved when the criminal was merely the schoolboy Vogel Filschner), and the pair eventually travel through space to Falushe?s notorious ?Palace of Love? (it proves a chaste enough place) in the far Beyond. The most extended example of Navarth's verse that is presented to the reader, the bouncily sinister ballad 'Tim R. Mortiss', is a rather fetching absurdist reworking of the 'Lament for the Makars' by the 15th-century Scottish poet William Dunbar.

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Demon Princes: The Demon Princes is a five-book series of science fiction novels by Jack Vance, which cumulatively relate the story of one Kirth Gersen as he exacts his revenge on five notorious criminals, collectively known as the Demon Princes, who carried his village off into slavery during his childhood. Each...

Jack Vance: John Holbrook Vance (b. August 28, 1916 in San Francisco, California; various alternative birthdates between 1916 and 1920 have been cited in different sources) is generally described as an American fantasy and science fiction author, though it has been reported that Vance himself objects to that la...

Salvador Dali: Salvador Felip Jacint Dal? Dom?nech (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was an important Spanish painter, best known for his surrealist works. Dal?'s work is noted for its striking combination of bizarre dreamlike images with excellent draftsmanship and painterly skills influenced by the Renaiss...