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On the Wild Pansy

In a brief Appendix to his canonical work of structural anthropology, La Pensée Sauvage (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss addresses the double entendre inherent in the book’s title, originally translated into English as The Savage Mind and more recently as Wild Thought (Portuguese O Pensamento Selvagem). The translations do not preserve the double meaning of ‘pensée,’ a word that denotes both ‘thought’ and the small flower known as viola tricolor or field pansy, and more provocatively as the flower of the Trinity. A survey of German, Polish and Ukrainian folklore reveals various …