Opsen Passen Yellebroas

Opsen Passen Yellebroas is a long narrative poem written in the Insular dialect. Of scant literary merit, it is of interest to thaumatologists because it is speculatively attributed to the pseudo-historical wizard and demigod Morogyad, constituting one of the more contentious and less well-regarded entries in the Esoterica of Morogyad.

Content

The name Opsen Passen Yellebroas translates from the pre-Wesmodian Insular dialect as, roughly, I Want to be a Fish. The poem is long, filling almost a hundred pages of manuscript without, as those who have examined it frequently attest, ever getting interesting. The long, rambling narrative concerns the author's desire to enter the ocean as a fish and travel from place to place by swimming. The plot describes a journey in a vague spiral shape around various islands and cities in the Sea of Jars, starting in Tyros and ending in Oluz. During his journey the protagonist changes into various different types of fish, including a shark, a clownfish, a seahorse and a dolphin, though explanations for how and why these changes are effected are rare, and those that do exist are cryptic at best and imprecise and banal at worst.

Commentary

Among those who study pre-Wesmodian literature Opsen Passen Yellebroas is often cited as an example of how not to produce a poem; little effort has been made to use poetic forms or flourishes to accentuate or service a narrative that, for all of its length and its touristic subject matter, never really goes anywhere.
The interest in the poem from thaumatologists comes from its speculative attribution to Morogyad, one of the central figures in the study of magic in the Eleven Cities. This attribution is controversial given that Morogyad was not a shy author and usually clearly indicated his authorship in his work. Those who make the attribution defend it on two key points. First of all it can be broadly read as a fictionalised retelling of Upon Returning to the Ocean, a much less controversial component of the Esoterica by an author more given to recording personal reminiscences than composing poetry. Secondly, and perhaps more convincingly, the poem contains a number of motifs that also repeatedly appear in both Phardys Horodyas Karanrad, one of the central works of the Esoterica, and Gesturing to My Father, a rather more controversial and fragmentary text existing in various libraries around the Sea of Jars. For a forger to have had access to one of these texts is quite plausible; for them to know both is rather less so. Though controversial, therefore, the attribution is hard to dismiss out of hand.
The notion among proponents is that the repeated motifs in the poem constitute coded instructions on how to conduct the gestures referred to in Phardys Horodyas Karanrad in order to effect transmutation, either of the self or of other objects. Reports of successful experimentation are rare in the extreme, but like the attribution of the poem the idea is difficult to discount; low academic humour has it that the promise of power will have people reading even the least inspired poetry.

Availability

Copies of the poem are held in most credibly well-stocked libraries around the Sea of Jars and can be had from most scribes for a fairly reasonable fee.

Type

Text, Literary (Novel/Poetry)