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memories of my ghost sista

~ the dead are never satisfied

memories of my ghost sista

Tag Archives: translation

irrumabo

05 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by babylon crashing in Poetry, sonnet

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Catullus, gnostic gibber, Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, poem, Poetry, priggish schlock, sonnet, translation

Before the Great War poets saw Gnostic

gibber everywhere. “Hark! The voice of Dawn!”

they’d write and then Dawn would say some stomach

turned tripe about Divine will and Bygone

virtues. After great wars and great horror

the shit got real. “Make it new,” had no place

for, “Lord’s sweet orbs of night,” or whatever

passed as gritty for those sad fucks. “Embrace

vulgar and speak truth,” Catullus charged us.

Brother, even now they still don’t get it;

if those hard sibylline K’s in Cunt, Cock

and Cum offend how will they bear witness

to real horror? –– “Irrumabo?” Shit,

time to go Orphic on your priggish schlock.

][][

NOTES:

When the subject of wretched poetry comes up my first thought is of those slushy, inbred Victorians, who gave us some of the worst doggerel to be found in the English language. Full of pomposity, being grandiloquent without humor or irony, they seemed entirely unwilling or unable to write about anything without heaping bathos all over it: “Theirs not to make reply,/ Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.” Yes, please put this schmaltz out of its misery. It’s no surprise that the artists who survived WWI quickly realized that their forebears were altogether useless when describing the horrors that they themselves had just witnessed. Burning it all down and salting the earth after was the only logical way to go. Thus, “Make it new,” became Modernism’s imperative and we’ve been following that maxim ever since … with mixed results. I lay claim to the Roman poet Catullus (84-54 B.C.) as poetic progenitor (that’s approximately 84 generations back). He’s a clean old man; though these days Catullus is chiefly remembered for a line of verse considered so obscene that a complete English translation of it wasn’t even published until the 20th century. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” which translates as: “I will sodomize and face-fuck you” (best opening line to one’s critics ever). That is the, “vulgar truth,” that I look for in poetry.

whack

31 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by babylon crashing in Erotic, Poetry

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blind satyr, bloody breath, byéjémshen, dansés jémshen, erotic poetry, poem, Potawatomi, sonnet, translation

No womb, no bloom, no plume of bloody breath

claiming divine chaos, divine vision ––

It’s the ones that want to kiss me to death,

lips to lips, our hips to hips, that won’t shun

this plump flesh, that I want. “Burn your marriage

bed,” the blind satyr said. “Dansés jémshen.”

Little daughter, kiss me. As if carnage

were that whack. Once again my swelling skin

rests in the palm of your hand, distending

the dark all around. No womb, no bloom, just

my cum coating your fingers. Lick them clean.

“Byéjémshen.” Come kiss me. I’m wanting

to want you. My whack smack. My angel dust.

My sick urges. My infernal machine.

refute

24 Sunday Oct 2021

Posted by babylon crashing in Erotic, sonnet

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bode'wadmi, erotic poetry, ghostly sex, halloween, joe orton, poem, sonnet, spilled ink, translation

“Through the wall stole a weird form who unbent

herself and stood tall.” I’ve had nbodewbi

ghosts, drunk and horny, slither like portents

to my bed before. Sex, grim and ghastly,

is all that the dead offer. Whatever

you think about lust now, that memory

will haunt you. Ghostly sex is still better

than no sex, they say. Perhaps most don’t see

it like that. Hot to leave their flesh and blood

behind they’ll grasp at any fairy tale

that says eternity is chaste. I know

how our souls refute that. These castrated

ghosts can only moan; when you’re cold and pale

come find me. You know I won’t say no.

][][

Notes:

The first line is a reworking of the beginning of George Houghton’s poem, The Witch of York, “Up o’er the hill and broken wall/ There stole a weird form, bent but tall.” In Bode’wadmi (the Potawatomi language), nbodewbi is a verb meaning drunk and horny. I think Joe Orton summed it up nicely when he said, “Enjoy sex. When you’re dead, you’ll regret not having fun with your genital organs.”

Quote

quote unquote

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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mary barnard, quote unquote, Sappho, translation

And I said … I shall burn the fat thigh-bone of a white she-goat on her altar …

Sappho

Quote

quote unquote

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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barks, quote unquote, Rumi, this we have now, translation

When the nightsky pours by it’s really a crowd of beggars and they all want some of this …

Rumi, fragment (trans. C. Barks)

Quote

quote unquote

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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fragment, lombardo, quote unquote, Sappho, translation

I loved you once, Atthis, long ago. You seemed like a child to me, little and graceless.

Sappho, fragments (tran. S. Lombardo)

Quote

quote unquote

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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fragment, lombardo, quote unquote, Sappho, translation

For me neither honey nor the honey bee.

Sappho, fragments (tran. S. Lombardo)

Quote

quote unquote

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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fragment, lombardo, quote unquote, Sappho, translation

What girl has seduced you? Draped in burlap, she doesn’t even know to pull her rags down over her ankles.

Sappho, fragments (tran. S. Lombardo)

Quote

quote unquote

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by babylon crashing in quote unquote

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lombardo, Poetry, quote unquote, Sappho, translation

blessed one/ lovely braids … O Cypris may she find you more bitter still and Dorikha not boast of her desire come to fulfillment a second time.

Sappho, fragments (tran. S. Lombardo)

qiu jin: i die unfulfilled

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by babylon crashing in Historic Research

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1911, ch'iu chin, China, Chinese, i die unfulfilled, personal hero, Qiu Jin, radical feminst, translation, translation theory


autumn rain/ autumn wind/ i die unfulfilled

Poetry translation is never an exact science. Taking a
concept, rich with metaphors, from one language and somehow then discovering a similar meaning in another has challenges. How does one
find that original essence – the core of what the poet was trying
to say – in an alien tongue? I have always found translation to be
a synthesis of everything that has been done before my attempt and
then a smoothing out of all the rough bits into something that sings
to me. If there was a philosophy to this it’d go: be illiterate in
all languages, just resonate with the soul of what is being said. I
suppose that is the difference between professionals and amateurs. I
will always be an amateur. To misquote the Japanese haiku poet Issa:
“there will always be farmers/ laboring in the fields/ I don’t
feel guilty.”

Today I turn my attention to the Chinese radical
feminist, revolutionary and martyr, Ch’iu Chin (better known through
modern translation as Qiu Jin). If you’ve never heard her name before
just know this: she was a lesbian poet who tried to overthrow the
Qing dynasty in 1907 and then was executed, beheaded. One day someone will
translate all her poetry, essays and speeches into English and that
will be a blessing. Just now I am only looking at her last words, her death poem. They’re
simple, they look like this:

秋风秋雨愁煞人

Technology fails us. According to Google Translate we
get, “Autumn autumn rain sad people.” which are at least English
words strung together in some sort of order. And they fail to capture
any meaning of this poem. First let me reprint the best translation
that I’ve found:

Autumn rain, autumn wind/ I die of sorrow.

[from the documentary, Autumn Gem]

Now let me tell you why this is so good. Ch’iu Chin’s
name literally translates into, “Autumn Gem,” and the ‘autumn’ is
the metaphor that works in this poem. By the time of her arrest she
was burned out, depressed and had realized that her revolutionary
goals would never happen. She let herself be captured and executed so
that she could become one of the Chinese heroines of myth who rose up
to fight for women during times of oppression.

As one says, there are no bad translations, just
different interpretations. I point this out simply because these are faithful to the word but the translators did not seem to know why
they were written:

O Autumn Winds chilly, O Autumn Rains chilly, (Why you
are spilling)


Frank C Yue

Autumn wind autumn rain makes one gloomy


Lu Yin

For whom does the autumn rain and wind lament?


Sjcma
 

All of which, out of context, still works. Getting
executed would make one gloomy and spill. Then there is the fact that Ch’iu
Chin became a symbol for the 1911 Revolution and her words were used
to express the woes of other people, and thus we get the royal ‘we’


Autumn wind and rain have brought overwhelming grief to
many


Albert Chan
 


The sorrow of autumn wind and autumn rain kills


China Heritage Quarterly

Again, this is all just a matter of interpretation of
what comes before. Like I said, I can’t read Chinese, I can just
guesstimate from the works of others. If I’m wrong then I’m wrong
and this was just a curious post that won’t mean anything. Still, I
love the poetry of Qiu Jin and if I can be part of helping her find
an English audience then let us say that my day was good. Two translations that I think are kind
of marvelous:

Autumn wind and autumn rain often bring forth unbearable
sorrow


Alan Cykok
 

The autumn wind and autumn rain agonize me so much.


Badass Women of Asia 

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