snakesnakewhale

Jake Byrne, 2023

We passed on horseback without speaking
    Through cities of bleached bone and powdered glass
    When I plunged my pen into the lich's mirror
You told me you'd given me everything I needed

My marital bed a ditch where milk-sky and memory admix
    You said true love never promises to stay
    Some needs come second to the resumé
Relapse with me. Let's be adepts playing at cantrips

A pocketful of perfumed air
    Chokeberries' dark epistles
    Your cum congealing on the hair of my chest
These magic missiles

But all illusions wane, crumble like lichen in a dry season
    I can recall the rite but cannot perform the ritual
    You can lead a hearse to water, but it's no Viking funeral
Not for the cursèd opaque waterbed of your elfin immigration lawyer

Not for the scarred arms of the berserker otter
    Who fucked me raw against the wall
    Promising all the while he'd pull out graceful as
A siege of herons from the water

He showed me how to rip a bezoar from the stomach of a kid
    A sea of mead could not satisfy my id
    Nor could a kiss land gentle as a fist
My harvest-sworn companion, how did we come to this?

I meant to say I loved you
For you I'd remake the world as mine
Who cares. It doesn't matter. Forget about it. Nevermind

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1933

Thirty years together---
clearer than love.
I know your grain by heart,
you know my lines.

Wasn't it you who wrote them on my face?
You ate paper, you taught me:
There's no tomorrow. You taught:
Today, today.

Money, bills, love letters, money, bills,
you stood in a blizzard of oak.
Kept saying: For every word you want
today, today.

God, you kept saying,
doesn't accept bits and bills.
Nnh, when they lay my body out, my fool, my
desk, let it be on you.

One of my favorite unconventional translations, alongside Stephen Berg's With Akhmatova At The Black Gates and Dark Elderberry Branch by Kaminsky & Valentine.

War Music is a "variation" on the Iliad that became something of a lifelong project of Logue's. Unfinished at the time of his death, it nonetheless grew from the commissioned translation of a single passage (book 16, Patrocleia) to a rather complete interpretation of the whole epic, absent Logue's planned final section, Big Men Falling A Long Way. The most recent edition includes the author's notes on Big Men, for a glimpse at what the conclusion might have looked like.

Speaking of editions, of interest to me as a translation geek are Logue's constant self-revisions as War Music matured through several printings. From the opening words the 2023 edition contains notable differences to its 1997 sibling, itself changed from the '81, '91, '94 etc. drafts.

See how the '97 edition begins:

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Whose beauty's silent power stops your heart
Fast walk, face wet with tears, out past its guard,
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and say:

Now, here is the finalized text from literally six months ago (my pre-order copy is dated January 27th):

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach, and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
Split by a double-doored gate;
Then through the gate a naked man
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath the inch-high waves that slide
Over each other's luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, burst into tears, and say:

Finally compare both to the corresponding original, maybe the most famous opening lines since Genesis:

    Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the
    Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. ---Lattimore

Here is a second comparison, between Homer and the '23 Logue---from the initial rupture between Agamemnon and Achilles, the dispute over Chryseis:

    Then in answer again spoke brilliant swift-footed Achilleus:
'Son of Atreus, most lordly, greediest for gain of all men,
how shall the great-hearted Achaians give you a prize now?
There is no great store of things lying about I know of.
But what we took from the cities by storm has been distributed; it is unbecoming for the people to call back things once given. No, for the present give the girl back to the god; we Achaians thrice and four times over will repay you, if ever Zeus gives into our hands the strong-walled citadel of Troy to be plundered.'
    Then in answer again spoke powerful Agamemnon:
'Not that way, good fighter though you be, godlike Achilleus, strive to cheat, for you will not deceive, you will not persuade me. What do you want? To keep your own prize and have me sit here lacking one? Are you ordering me to give this girl back? Either the great-hearted Achaians shall give me a new prize chosen according to my desire to atone for the girl lost, or else if they will not give me one I myself shall take her, your own prize, or that of Aias, or that of Odysseus, going myself in person; and he whom I visit will be bitter. Still, these are things we shall deliberate again hereafter. Come, now, we must haul a black ship down to the bright sea, and assemble rowers enough for it, and put on board it the hecatomb, and the girl herself, Chryseis of the fair cheeks, and let there be one responsible man in charge of her, either Aias or Idomeneus or brilliant Odysseus, or you yourself, son of Peleus, most terrifying of all men, to reconcile by accomplishing sacrifice the archer. ---Lattimore

Cinch your jockstrap, here's Logue:

    Until Achilles said:

    'Dear sir,
Where shall we get this she?
There is no pool.
We land. We fight. We kill. We load. And then---
After your firstlings---we allot.
That is the end of it.
We do not ask things back. And even you
Would not permit your helmet to go round.
    Leave her to Heaven.
And when---and if---God lets me leap the Wall,
Greece will restock your dormitory.'

    'Boy Achilleus,' Agamemnon said,
'You will need better words
And more than much more charm
Before your theorising lightens me.
    Myself unshe'd, and yours still smiling in the furs?
Ditchmud.'

    Widening his stare:

    'Consult. Produce a string. Or---
Now listen carefully---I shall be at your gate
Demanding Uxa, Ajax, or
At my lord Diomed's for Gwi---
Kah!---What does it matter whose prize she I take?
But take I shall, and if needs be, by force.

    'Well . . .
We shall see.

    'And now
Let us select and stow a ship,
Captained by you, lord Thoal, or by you,
Our silencer, Idomeneo.
At all events, some diplomatic lord
To take my pretty Cryzia home
That holy smoke and thermal prayers
Commend the Son of God
To exorcise the insects we refresh.'

God damn.

C.P. Cavafy, 1919

It's like him, of course,
this little pencil portrait.

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship's deck,
the afternoon magical,
the Ionian sea around us.

It's like him. But I remember him as better looking.
He was sensitive almost to the point of illness,
and this highlighted his expression.
He appears to me better looking
now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago---
the sketch, the ship, the afternoon.

C.P. Cavafy, 1911

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon---don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon---you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind---
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you a marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

He screws all the girls he can find
and makes himself out a charmer,
and somehow he’s managed to escape
being sent to the grinding-mill
and donkey’s work.

versus

but he’s the guy that loves the gals
a Devastating Male—
my God, when will they catch the man
and lock him up in jail?

versus

This is the big lady the ladies all fuck for?
I’d plug his face with a horse dick instead.

Whoa.