Poems Found in Translation

Euripides: Ion in the Delphic Dawn (From Greek)

2012-01-28T04:08:00.000-06:00

Ion in the Delphic Dawn
By Euripides (Ion.81-111)
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Apollo driving horse-drawn dawn
Veers over earth, on his trail-blazed arc,
With fire that drives the stars away
Into the sacred dark.
The trackless peaks of mount Parnassus
Are floodlit in the blue
As beacons to receive for us this day
The wheeling sun we pray for.
O things of old forever new!
The desert incense rises to the rafters
Of the Sunlord. The holy-throated priestess,
Sits there on the gods' tripod, towers
On the seat of truthful power,
Ready to be how Apollo speaks,
The voice of one crying across the wilderness,
Crying to the Greeks!

O hallowed be Thy flame, Apollo!
And you, his Delphic servants, go
To silver-haired Castalia,
That living spring where men drink genius down.
Go, purify your hair in those pure waters
Which a god consecrated to his arts.
Then make way to the temple with your gifts
And in god-fearing silence stand.
Guard the goodness of your lips
That you may be well-spoken, speak good omen
To all who crave the oracle's commands.

But I, as I have done since childhood,
Shall do the services of a glad child:
With brooms of holy laurel boughs
I'll sweep Apollo's entryway,
Bring waterdrops to wet his blessed earth.
And as I bow to him, so with my bow
I shall bring down the birds' unholy hordes
That foul the sacred offerings.
I, motherless and fatherless from birth,
Honor these shrines with all the love of a son,
Apollo's shrines that raised me as their own.

The Original:

Ἅρματα μὲν τάδε λαμπρὰ τεθρίππων
Ἥλιος ἤδη κάμπτει κατὰ γῆν,
ἄστρα δὲ φεύγει πυρὶ τῷδ' αἰθέρος
ἐς νύχθ' ἱεράν·
Παρνησιάδες δ' ἄβατοι κορυφαὶ
καταλαμπόμεναι τὴν ἡμερίαν
ἁψῖδα βροτοῖσι δέχονται.
Σμύρνης δ' ἀνύδρου καπνὸς εἰς ὀρόφους
Φοίβου πέταται.
Θάσσει δὲ γυνὴ τρίποδα ζάθεον
Δελφίς, ἀείδουσ' Ἕλλησι βοάς,
ἃς ἂν Ἀπόλλων κελαδήσῃ.

Ἀλλ', ὦ Φοίβου Δελφοὶ θέραπες,
τὰς Κασταλίας ἀργυροειδεῖς
βαίνετε δίνας, καθαραῖς δὲ δρόσοις
ἀφυδρανάμενοι στείχετε ναούς·
στόμα τ' εὔφημον φρουρεῖτ' ἀγαθόν,
φήμας τ' ἀγαθὰς
τοῖς ἐθέλουσιν μαντεύεσθαι
γλώσσης ἰδίας ἀποφαίνειν.

Ἡμεῖς δέ, πόνους οὓς ἐκ παιδὸς
μοχθοῦμεν ἀεί, πτόρθοισι δάφνης
στέφεσίν θ' ἱεροῖς ἐσόδους Φοίβου
καθαρὰς θήσομεν, ὑγραῖς τε πέδον
ῥανίσιν νοτερόν· πτηνῶν τ' ἀγέλας,
αἳ βλάπτουσιν σέμν' ἀναθήματα,
τόξοισιν ἐμοῖς φυγάδας θήσομεν·
ὡς γὰρ ἀμήτωρ ἀπάτωρ τε γεγὼς
τοὺς θρέψαντας
Φοίβου ναοὺς θεραπεύω.

Lucilius: R.I.P (From Greek)

2012-01-25T00:38:00.002-06:00

R.I.P
By Lucilius
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Rest now in peace, and may the dust rest easy
Upon the grave your carcass leases,
Poor little Willy, that it may be easy
For dogs to dig you out in pieces.

The Original:

Εἴη σοι κατὰ γῆς κούφη κόνις, οἰκτρὲ Νέαρχε,
Ὄφρα σε ῥηϊδίως ἐξερύσωσι κύνες.

Robert Louis Stevenson: Requiem (From English to Latin)

2012-01-20T15:29:00.000-06:00

Requiem
Robert Louis Stevenson
Convertit A.Z. Foreman

Subter immenso iaceam sepultus
Sideris caelo. Nam ego quam libenter
Vitam egi longe. Libit et viasque
Mortis inire.
Hos nota versos mihique in sepulchrum:
"Hic cubat laete, tetigitque terram
Nauta. Venator viridi relicto
Colle quiescit."

Original:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Caedmon's Hymn to God (From Old English)

2012-01-18T19:53:00.000-06:00

This is arguably the oldest extant sample of English poetry. It is attributed by Bede to the poet Caedmon of the early Middle Ages and, if so, it would be Caedmon's only surviving work (though Caedmon was known to have written a great many works in his day, all other surviving works attributed to him have since been shown to be the work of later poets.)

Cædmon's Hymn to God
By Cædmon (Ostensibly)
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the poem in Old English

Hail now the holder of heaven's realm,
That architect's might, his mind's many ways,
Lord forever and father of glory,
Ultimate crafter of all wonders,
Holy Maker who hoisted the heavens
To roof the heads of the human race,
And fashioned land for the legs of man,
Liege of the worldborn, Lord almighty.

The Original:

Nū sculon heriġean heofonrīċes weard,
Meotodes meahte ond his mōdġeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder, swā hē wundra ġehwæs,
ēċe Drihten, ōr onstealde.
Hē ǣrest sceōp eorðan bearnum
heofon tō hrōfe, hāliġ Scyppend;
þā middanġeard monncynnes weard,
ēċe Drihten, æfter tēode
fīrum foldan, Frēa ælmihtiġ.

Baudelaire: The Albatross (From French)

2012-01-18T19:01:00.000-06:00

The Albatross
By Charles Baudelaire
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click here to hear me recite the French

Often for sport the crewmen will ensnare
Some albatrosses: vast seabirds that sweep
In lax accompaniment through the air
Behind the ship that skims the bitter deep.

No sooner than they dump them on the floors
These skyborn kings, graceless and mortified,
Feel great white wings go down like useless oars
And drag pathetically at either side.

That sky-rider: how gawky now, how meek!
How droll and ugly he who shone on high!
The sailors poke a pipestem in his beak,
Then limp to mock this cripple born to fly.

The poet is so like this prince of clouds
Who haunted storms and sneered at earthly slings;
Now, banished to the ground, to cackling crowds,
He cannot walk beneath the weight of wings.

The Original:

L'Albatros

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

Sappho: To an Unlettered Woman (From Greek)

2012-01-14T12:11:00.000-06:00

Someone asked if I'd do one of Sappho's poems. So here's a short one. It's not a love poem (which is what she's famous for) so much as, well, a hate-poem, displaying a side of Sappho so at odds with her amatory lyrics that some have questioned its authenticity as Sappho's work. However, it's not obviously spurious in the way a couple of other poems attributed to her are.

To an Unlettered Woman With No Appreciation for Poetry ¹
By Sappho
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

When you die you will lie dirt-dumb and leave no memory of you,
No mourner who wanted you while you lived. You eschew the Muse, eschew
Her roses, her home. Into Hell as on Earth you'll pass unnoticed, fade
Away from us, dithering with the dead in nethershade.

Notes:
^1- The title of the poem describes the woman as ἀμούσος, literally "museless"- but semantically closer to things like "uncultured, inelegant, rude" etc. Here, though, the implication has to do with poetry more specifically.

The Original:

Πρός ἀμούσου γυναῖκα

Κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα μναμοσύνα σέθεν
ἔσσετ' οὐδὲ πόθα ὔστερον· οὐ γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων
τὼν ἐκ Πιερίας, ἀλλ᾿ ἀφάνης κἀν Ἀίδα δόμῳ
φοιτάσῃς πεδ᾿ ἀμαύρων νεκύων ἐκπεποταμένα.

Wang Wei: Impromptu Verses on Life in the Hills (From Classical Chinese)

2011-12-21T13:23:00.000-06:00

Revised

Impromptu Verses on Life in the Hills
By Wang Wei
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click here to hear me recite the original in my idea of what literary Medieval Chinese sounded like
Click here to hear me recite the original in Modern Chinese pronunciation

In solitude, I close my brushwood door.
Through vast dimmed air, I face the downbound sun.
Though cranes nest in bare pine trees everywhere,
My wicker gate greets barely anyone.
Tender bamboo lies dusted with fresh powder.
Red lotuses cast off their olden bloom.
Though lamp-fires at the ford are on the rise
The water-chestnut pickers all turn home.

The Original, with transcriptions:

Han Characters　

山居即事　
王維　

寂寞掩柴扉，　
蒼茫對落暉。　
鶴巢松樹遍，　
人訪蓽門稀。　
嫩竹含新粉，
紅蓮落故衣。
渡頭燈火起，
處處采菱歸。　

Middle Chinese (Stimsonian Transcription)　

shrɛn giu tziək jrhiə̀　
iuɑng ui　

dzhek mɑk qyɛ̌m jrhɛi fiəi　
tsɑng mɑng duə̀i lɑk xiuəi　
hɑk jrhau ziong zhiò biɛ̀n　
rin fiɑ̀ng bit mən xiəi　
nuə̀n djiuk hom sin fiə̌n　
hung len lɑk gò qièi
dhò dhou dəng xuɑ̌ kiə̌　
chiù chiù tsə̌i liəng giuəi　

Modern Chinese　

Shānjū jí shì　
Wáng wéi　

Jìmò yǎn cháifēi, 　
cāngmáng duì luò huī.　
Hè cháo sōngshù biàn, 　
rén fǎng bì mén xī. 　
nèn zhú hán xīn fěn, 　
hónglián luò gù yī. 　
Dùtóu dēnghuǒ qǐ, 　
chùchù cǎi líng guī.　

Emily Dickinson: Ce Monde n'est point Conclusion (French to English)

2011-12-14T18:44:00.000-06:00

On dirait que quand j'ai envie de traduire un poème originellement écrit en anglais, c'est le français auquel j'ai recours.

Ce Monde n'est point Conclusion
Par Emily Dickinson
Traduit par A.Z. Foreman

Ce Monde n'est point Conclusion.
Il y a au-delà un Ordre:
Comme la Musique-- invisible--
Mais comme le Son-- sonore--
Il attire et fait délire--
La Philosophie --ignore--
La Sagacité s'agace de tout
Ce qui doit la Clore--
Son Concept déroute les érudits--
Sa Conquête a valu aux gens
Le mépris des Générations
La peine du Crucifiement--
La Foi glisse et rit et se rassemble,
Rougit devant toute fenêtre
Pince un fétu de l'Évidence--
S'oriente sur la Girouette--
Maint Os qui Gesticule en Chaire -
Maint Alleluiah en forte gamme--
Nulle drogue ne tranquillise la Dent
Dure qui ronge l’âme--

L'Original:

This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond --
Invisible, as Music --
But positive, as Sound --
It beckons, and it baffles --
Philosophy -- don't know --
And through a Riddle, at the last --
Sagacity, must go --
To guess it, puzzles scholars --
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown --
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies --
Blushes, if any see --
Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
And asks a Vane, the way --
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
Strong Hallelujahs roll --
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul --

Yehuda Amichai: "The two of us together and each one alone" (From Hebrew)

2011-12-14T12:06:00.000-06:00

Here's a poem which I literally cannot read without crying (you can tell in the recording.) It's by Yehuda Amichai, a Hebrew author who drew material from every aspect of living Israeli language, be it fossilized biblical idioms, youth-slang, nursery rhymes, legalese, or popular songs- often mixing them together to invent new expressions, and sometimes even new registers of language to suit his needs, as he does in the following poem (published in 1955 in his first book).

When he wrote this poem, Amichai had seen a great deal of combat both during WWII as a member of the British Army, and -more importantly- during Israel's War for Independence as a member of Palmach, the elite strike force of the underground Jewish army known as the Haganah. In addition to fighting the British, and protecting Jewish areas against Arab incursions, Palmach was also responsible for a great many violent and sadistic acts of ethnic erasure that left dozens of Arab villages in ruins, an unknowably high number of Arabs (civilians, combatants and everything between) dead, and hundreds of bright Zionist thinkers busy rationalizing the whole affair with half-truths and victim-blaming.

Even in poems as early as this, one can sense Amichai's nascent and prescient fear, in the face of continuing Arab-Jewish strife, that Israel was slowly being transformed into a permanent garrison state. But the poem is not a political commentary or lamentation. That historical, moral and biographical sensibility is fused with, and subsumed into, the grander theme of lost innocence, of a world without redemption and the futility of the rightly mocked notion that "all you need is love".

The two of us together and each one alone¹
By Yehuda Amichai
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in Hebrew

Look sweetie- one more summer's turned dark
And my dad hasn't come to the amusement park.
The swings keep swinging on their own.²
The two of us together and each one alone.

The horizon loses its ships off the shore.
Hard to hold onto a thing anymore.
The fighters waited behind the hill.
How much we need of mercy still!
The two of us together and each one alone.

The moon is sawing the clouds in two.
Let hand-to-hand love bring me against you.
We alone will make love where the two camps fight.
Perhaps we can still make everything right.
The two of us together and each one alone.

As the first sweet rain was once salt sea
So, it would seem, has my love changed me.
I am brought to you slowly, and fall. My dear,
Receive me. No angel redeems us here.
Because the two of us are together. Each is alone.

Notes:

¹- According to one of my Israeli correspondents, the refrain/title of this poem is taken from a lease contract. שניהם ביחד וכל אחד לחוד (literally "Both of them together and each one alone") is Israeli contractual language corresponding to the more opaque phrase "both jointly and severally" in English legalese (i.e. describing the liability of a husband and wife, both as a couple and as individuals, entering into a contractual obligation in common law legal systems.)

²- According to the same Israeli correspondent, the three opening lines in the original are an allusion to a children's song popular when Amichai wrote this poem, titled "אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק" Abaleh bo laluna park (Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park). To hear a recording of the song click here. The song's refrain runs thusly:

אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק
שם נחמד, עליז ונפלא
אבאל'ה בוא ללונה פארק
נתנדנד על הנדנדה

Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park
It's nice and happy and wonderful there
Daddy, come lets go to the amusement park
We'll swing around on the swings.

I compensated by translating the lines to also echo certain verses from Faith Hill's Butterfly Kisses Daddy's Little Girl and Glasvegas' Daddy's Gone.

The Original:

יהודה עמיחי
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד

ילדה שלי, עוד קיץ עבר
ואבי לא בא ללונה פארק.
הנדנדות מוסיפות לנוד.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

אופק הים מאבד ספינותיו -
קשה לשמר על משהו עכשיו.
מאחורי ההר חכו הלוחמים.
כמה זקוקים אנו לרחמים.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

ירח מנסר את העבים לשניים -
בואי ונצא לאהבת בינים.
רק שנינו נאהב לפני המחנות.
אולי אפשר עוד הכל לשנות.
שנינו ביחד וכל אחד לחוד.

אהבתי הפכה אותי כנראה
כים מלוח לטפות מתוקות של יורה;
אני מובא אליך לאט ונופל.
קבליני. אין לנו מלאך גואל.
כי שנינו ביחד .כל אחד לחוד.

Farzona Khujandi: The Flute-Player (from Tajik)

2011-12-05T07:13:00.000-06:00

The Flute-Player
By Farzona
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click here to hear me recite the original in Tajik Persian

Where is the bazaar?
I want to buy a whole eyeful of kindness.
I want my soul
To wear a dress of ecstasy's silk.
There is a merchant
Bringing me a whole crazed spectrum of joy's colors
From the city of desires.
But here, here at the bazaar, here at the bazaar of Khojand,
Faces are sour and talk beats down like the sun,
And I ache for cool Tabrizi sweets.
Where is the bazaar?
A flute-player tells me:
Come by with ears used to naught but the sounds of scorn,
And listen to the light reciting Yā-sīn¹ to the dark
Open your eyes used to naught but the shades of shame,
And behold truth's beauty.
Where is the bazaar?
The flute-player is there
Calling my heart with his voice
Calling my heart to his hat, full of loose change but not one pearl.
I am a tear's jewel.
I must go.

Notes:
¹ Yā-sīn: a chapter from the Qur'ān, often said to have healing powers when recited for a sick or troubled loved one.

The Original, in Tajik Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic:

Найнавоз
Фарзона Хӯҷанди

Роҳи бозор куҷост?
Ман басе мехоҳам аз чашме меҳрубонӣ бихарам.
Ман басе мехоҳам пироҳане дошта бошад
Руҳам аз ҳарири шодӣ.
Тоҷире ҳаст ки аз шаҳри таманноҳоям меорад
Ранги мунири шодӣ
Лек ҳайҳот дар ин бозор, бозори Хӯҷанд
Чеҳраҳо туршу суханҳо тунданд
Канди Табриз дилам мехоҳад.
Роҳи бозор кучост?
Найвозе ҳаст дар он ҷо ки ба ман мегуяд:
Гуши нашнида ба ҷуз ҳарфи ҳақорат пеш ор
Бишнав нур, бихонад ба сиёҳии Ёсин
Чашми нодида ба ҷуз ранги қабоҳат бигушо
Ба ҷамоли ҳақ бин.
Роҳи бозор куҷост.
Найнавозе ҳаст дар он чо ки диламро ба садо мехонад
Ба кулоҳаш ки пур аз як дурри маҳтобӣ нест
Гавҳари ашк бимонам, биравам

نينواز
فرزانه خجندى

راه بازار كجاست؟
من بسي مىخواهم از چشمى مهربانى بخرم
من بسى مىخواهم پيراهنى داشته باشد
روحم از حريرى شادى.
تاجرى هست كه از شهر تمناهايم مىارد
رنگ مونير شادى
ليك هيهات در اين بازار ، بازار خجند
چهرﻩ ها ترش و سخن ها توندند
قند تبريز دلم مىخواهد.
راه بازار كجاست؟
نينوازى هست در آنجا كه به من مىگويد:
گوش نشنيده به جز حرف حقارت پيش آر
بشنو نور، بخاند به سياهى يا سين
چشم ناديده به جز رنگ قباحت بگشا
به جمال حق بين
راه بازار كچاست؟
نينوازى هست در آنجا كه دلم را به سدا مىخواند
به كلاهش كه پر از يك دُر مهتابى نيست
گوهر اشك بمانم، بروم

Meditation: Christianity, Antiquity, and Fiat Nox

2011-12-01T23:54:00.000-06:00

Men and women are being beaten, tortured and killed. True, they are victims of men. But the killers kill in God's name. Not all? True, but let one killer kill for God's glory, and God is guilty. Every person who suffers or causes suffering, every woman who is raped, every child who is tormented implicates Him. What, you need more? A hundred or a thousand? Listen, either he is responsible or he is not. If he is, let's judge him. If he is not, let him stop judging us.
-Elie Wiesel

Some readers have noted hostility to religion, and in particular organized religious institutions such as Christianity, in my work and wondered about it. It's a reasonable question, after all: what's it to me? Why would I have a problem with ideas and philosophies different from my own.

The answer to the latter question is: I don't have a problem with ideas and philosophies I disagree with. The fact that someone believes in a god does not make me think less of them. It's a part of their life I'll never fully understand -as someone who is at this point largely immune to religious experience- but I can understand that what appears ridiculous to me doesn't appear thus to others and I'm not going to tell someone off for the sheer thoughts they may entertain about the nature of the universe. Though I probably won't hide the fact that I find it amusing or weird, (and often the justifications used to prop up those beliefs will strike me as flat-out stupid. As if spirituality needed to be based on sense.)

I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun.
-Will Durant

What I have a major problem with is people who do have a problem with this kind of heterodoxy and can't deal with disagreement, or who use religion (or something like religion) to justify doing harm to other humans. This is a phenomenon which I call "assholiness" or "taurocoprotheosis" (from the Greek meaning "deification of bullshit.")

My personal guideline is: "Think someone's ideas are silly, and tell them so in no uncertain terms if you like, but don't go burning heretics or electrocuting priests or stealing the the communion chalice to use as a beer mug. That's just dirty pool." As for the former question of why I bother caring, it's a complex answer that would require a book to thoroughly set forth.

But there's a more limited version of the question I get more often, and that is: "what's your problem with Christianity?" (I suspect that it's because a sizable percentage of the world's fully fluent English-speaking internet users, and certainly the overwhelming majority of native speakers, if not Christian per se, live in historically Christian societies.) That question too is a complex one, partly involving biographical details which I don't want to go into on this site, and partly philosophical in the same way as the more general question mentioned earlier.

But partly it's because the legacy of Christianity in the modern world (especially the culturally Western/Westernized world I live in currently) so often gives me cause for sorrow and mourning, and so rarely a reason for joy. Christianity was the first institutionalized religion to just refuse to leave people be. For every person who has found happiness and meaning through Christ, there are pogrom-casualties, holocaust-victims, crusade-atrocities and torture-victims throughout history to spare, and an even greater number of people denied the possibility of leading a more satisfying life due to intellectual, sexual or genderal repression either directly due to Christianity or due to a belief system Christianity was (in part) the inspiration or impetus for. Not to mention the catastrophe of the arts which I'll get to later. And no, Christianity is not alone among religions in having its gruesome chapters. But it is my position that the Christian notion that a single god-image, and a single addressee of worship, and even manner of worship, must sweep the whole world has had especially disastrous consequences for free thought, and here's why:

Any religion that claims without proof that all other belief systems are by nature false or heretical cannot foster an honest acceptance or tolerance of religious diversity.

Yes, I know not all Christianities are like that either in spirit or in practice. And it's not the Christian relationship to divinity that is the target of my ire, but Christian proselytism and the Christian tendency to exercise one's own morality on others. I don't hate Christianity. I hate what human civilization has become because of it.

I think examining the classical world will help make my point. First, some background on Ancient Roman religion:

Part I: What Made Christianity Different?

This is Ben-Zed, god of food! And…Li, goddess of passion! And Mo-goth, god of the underworld, and protector of front doors. Gods by the bushel! Gods by the pound! Gods for all occasions!
-Londo Mollari

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosophers as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful
-Edward Gibbon

While the second quotation above has been rightly criticized for being too charitable toward Roman society, it is far less off the mark than many seem to admit.

The social function of Roman religious practice developed as a way of relating to the state, to one's ethnos (and religious allegiance to the emperor-cult came to be part of being a Roman citizen). Roman military culture was religious in the extreme, (the gods would not look kindly on an army that dishonored them), and it had its founding-myths and a belief in a divinely appointed destiny, to be sure. But there wasn't any kind of dogma or fundamental creed to speak of. The state-mandated aspects of religion did not really push into private devotion too much. What mattered was that one give Rome its due by sacrificing to gods in a way that Rome approved of. For Romans under Augustus, this meant making ritual sacrifice in acknowledgment of the Emperor's rightful place not as a god per se (as some later Christian historians would later claim) but rather as the head of the Imperial Cult, as the embodiment of what they stood for. For a Roman, under the late republic as under the empire, the concept we would refer to as "religion" was indistinguishable from what we think of as "civic duty."

Roman society really didn't care much about what kind of afterlife -if any- anybody believed in, what their belief was about the ultimate nature of the cosmos, whom they prayed to when sick or whether they gave thanks for a good harvest year to the Roman Ceres, the Greek Demeter, the Semitic Dagon, the Slavic Veles, the Gaulish Sukellos or the Etruscan Fufluns. What gods a denizen of the Empire worshiped on their own time was strictly between them and those gods as long as they didn't challenge the civic religion, and were willing to make sacrifices etc. for it. To not do so would have been less "blasphemous" as we understand it than "treasonous."

For one did not need to believe in Roman gods in order to participate in Roman religion. If you were a Celt worshiping Gaulish gods under Caesar or Augustus, and said to a Roman friend while visiting him "I don't believe in your Roman gods, so I can't participate in a municipal sacrifice to Neptune as your hometown's patron god" you would have come across as truly weird, and being a prick for no reason. Rather as if an Englishman today were to say to an American "In my opinion the Americans were wrong to rebel against British rule in 17775, so I refuse to go watch the 4th of July fireworks with you." To both of which the answer would be "quidnam malum ad te attinet, cacator?" or "what the hell do you care, asshole?" One could, if one wished, be openly doubtful and still make the sacrifices in honor of the Emperor. During the late Republic, for example, no less an intellectual than Cicero was on safe ground questioning religion as irrational, as long as they didn't get in the way of its practice- which which he viewed as vital for social stability. During the late empire, a kind of proto-monotheism or henotheism was especially prevalent among the roman upper class (due to the influence of stoicism.) Nobody who held such beliefs took too much trouble to hide them- they didn't need to as long as they went through the motions to give Roman civil religion its due. What or why you worshiped wasn't as important as how.

This is partly because Roman religion wasn't antagonistic in the way many modern religions can be today- not in the sense of "My god can beat your god" or "you just worship devils" or "only my gods are the real ones." While Romans had a habit of ascribing great events and catastrophes to the gods, people probably didn't go about claiming that the Carthaginiains lost the Punic wars because their gods were weak or non-existent (though the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice was abhorrent to many.) And when Titus Flavius Vespasianus put down the first Jewish rebellion, he could go no farther than to conclude that their god must have foresaken them for some reason. One would be hard pressed to find a counterpart in the pre-Christian empire to modern Muslims, Christians and Jews all fighting over whether Muhammad, Jesus, or Moses had the biggest dick. Roman history doesn't have a parallel to the Biblical King Josiah ordering the destruction of anything built for any god other than Yahweh.

Moreover, pre-christian Rome was not in any meaningful sense a theocracy as some irresponsible textbooks claim. The res divina, the religious offices of roman governance, was not a blending of church and state. Those two concepts didn't exist as such. Public policy was not dictated by religion- though not all Romans saw it that way. But functionally, religion changed and evolved to fit the exigences of a changing and evolving political reality. Since the beginning of the Empire, whatever be the various ethnic groups' beliefs and practices regarding the divine, they were also (ideally) to be members of a single national supercult of the emperor that united them. One can see the logic behind such ideology/religion (not that there was necessarily a difference between the two in the Empire.) For in a time of slow communication, with distances being a much greater issue than modern humans can usually imagine, the Empire would only hold together if a common identity could emerge, if Gauls, Thracians, Britons, Africans etc could look at each other and say "yeah, these are my peeps."

But this need for unity and convergence was not normally visited upon the provincial populations in the form of culture to be adopted at swordpoint. Rather, Rome's general foreign policy was this: conquer populations by force and brutally suppress any resistance with extreme cruelty and severity (and yes, I know it was CRUEL AND SEVERE), but instead of forcibly Romanizing them, just make Romanization as easy and attractive as possible (e.g. sharing Roman engineering technology and expertise, offering Latin language-training for any and all who wanted it, give army recruits from the provinces the similar generous benefits to native Roman recruits etc.) After all, the gods were thought to have given the Romans a manifest destiny to bring their civilization and greatness to more parts of the world. And it made sense to demonstrate that greatness positively so that the new subjects might see that it was in their own best interest to Romanize (assuming they were deemed civilized enough to be Romanized. Many Germanic peoples were deemed too savage to be worth bothering.) The fact that Roman provinces of Dacia, Gallia, Hispania, Callaecia etc. gave birth to Romance-languages is a testament to how effective this was.

This policy of encouragement rather than duress was also evident in Roman religious attitudes. When Rome-as-state annexed new regions and peoples, the gods who reigned there no less than the people they presided over were encouraged to become part of the Rome-as-church, and the manner in which the new Roman subjects related to their now-Roman gods was granted official sanction as a religio licita ( "legal religion", or to paraphrase it more faithfully "permissible divinity-society-person dynamic").

For this reason, the Romans, leaving the local religious belief systems in the empire largely intact, preferred where possible to promote interpretatio Romana, the characterization of these new Celtic/Thracian/Dacian/Germanic/Iranic gods as simply a different, but not necessarily inferior, regional understanding of their own Roman ones (a practice which was borrowed from the Greeks who had earlier employed it in their view of the Roman Gods, ultimately leading the pantheons to converge closely.) Thus the writer Tacitus, for example, could acknowledge Germanic tribes' worship of Thor and Odin by understanding those gods as as the Germanic versions of Hercules and Mercury (even if some of their practices were distasteful to him personally.) Ditto for the Egyptian Ammon as Jupiter, Etruscan Tarun as Venus etc. Where equivalences were harder to rationalize, Rome had no ethno-religious qualms about simply adopting the foreign god into the Roman pantheon, like the cult of Isis- a goddess borrowed from Egypt, or Cybele borrowed from the Phrygians. It was so pervasive that sometimes it's hard today to tell whether a god was indigenous to Rome/Greece or an import. For example, the jury's still out on whether the cult of Mithras was a local Roman development or an import from Persia mediated through the Balkans. And the categories weren't fully fixed (e.g. Isis is her own entity at times, and at others she's equated with Venus/Aphrodite.) Nor were the Greeks and Romans the only ones to do this. There's some evidence of Germanic tribes doing the same with e.g. Thor and Jupiter. And it seems to have been a common practice in the Near East as well. Mesoamerican religions have done likewise. In otherwords Rome was not unusual in this respect. It was also Rome's main strengths- by not having a clearly delimited theology, and assuming that there were gods who ruled everywhere on earth, it was possible to continue broadening the scope of divinity as the Empire expanded.

There are few instances where this syncretic adoptive religious fraternity, which I might call "the heterotheon", broke down in Roman history. Aside from Judeo-Christians, the most significant act of religious persecution by Rome (for which we have reasonable attestation) was against the Gaulish Druids. Note that it wasn't belief in Gaulish/Celtic gods like Taranis, Belenos, Toutatis etc. that was a problem. Rather it was the Druids' social function (or at least what was perceived to be such) as a potential alternative and threat to Roman power. (There was also the matter of Druidic human sacrifice, which Romans of the time in question seem to have found just as horrific as most people would today, but the main problem was political.)

Rome's quandary with Jews was similar to this. Romans, Greeks and other Mediterraneans were quite willing to acknowledge the Jewish Yahweh as real or worthy of worship. And this they did- under various guises at various times equating Him with Jupiter, with Sabazius, with Dionysus etc. In fact, in a sizable swathe of Asia Minor, a hybrid of Yahweh-worship and Sabazius-worship (no doubt catalyzed by the significant Jewish population that had accrued there) seems to have resulted in a monotheistic cult of the god Hypsistos, "the highest of the high" (the only god, creator of all, never-begotten etc.) whose adherents, unusually for Asia Minor, abstained from eating pork.

Rather, once again, it was the political exclusivity of the Yahweh-only movement which had come to call itself "Judaism" which posed a problem. With Judaism the record is clearer than with the Druids. The Yahweh of Judaism was not just a god dear to a specific people, but one which deemed them His only chosen ones and helped them win wars against rival beliefs to prove that point and often wouldn't even acknowledge any other possible god as a deity worthy of the name. This, more than anything else, was what Romans must have been worried by: a rival to the Roman social order, Roman identity and the Roman civic religion.

Even so, although Romans found obstinate Jewish monotheism weird and a little disturbing, it wasn't despicable to them at first. Cicero did denounce it as a superstitio (a pejorative which might be paraphrased roughly as "religious sentiment gone dangerously mad" or maybe "theomania" if I'm going to go coining words), but from the start Caesar was generally inclined to let them be. And later on there were even times when Jews were exempt from official sacrifice if it was really necessary (in context this meant Rome was sometimes really bending over backwards to be benevolent.) It was only under the poor management of the whackjob Nero, when local tension between Jews and Greeks erupted into actual violence (it's impossible to know who threw the first spear, nor does it much matter), that Rome lost its patience and the shit finally hit the Judeo-Roman fan.

The Romans could deal with the Jews to a degree, whose religious practices they found bizarre but were just on the knife-edge of tolerable (though that knife would eventually start stabbing), but the Christians were an even bigger problem. The Christian god wasn't just an annoying issue of "my God can beat your god like no other." but rather a seriously problematic issue of "my God can be your god and no other". This God wasn't just a god worshipped by some people, but one that could make people die rather than obey the Emperor's orders to make a token ritual sacrifice. And one that was gaining support at what must have seemed terrifying speed. This is the kind of god who could piss Emperors off. A god who was no longer a version of the divine some people preferred to be feal to, but, as with the Druids, a competitor to earthly potentates and powers. And so early Christian friction with Roman government could only end with extinction of Christianity, or the Christianization of the Roman government. The latter ended up being the case. Romans were right to see Christianity as a threat to their society, values and social order.

Mind you, I am NOT so damn stupid as to think that this justified burning Christians (or anyone else, for that matter) by the chariot-load! Nor do I think that Diocletian was right when he had Christians arrested, tortured, mutilated, burned, starved to death. I'm simply trying to explain why such a thing came to be seen as necessary to so many legislators and prefects of an empire that normally had a very good track-record of religious tolerance and pluralism.

Early Christians seemed downright insane to Romans, and it's easy to see why. One can discern in early Christianity the kind of behavior we associate with cults and fanaticism today: preying on credulity and insecurity, telling people what thoughts they can and cannot have, telling adherents that "the end of the world is near, so be prepared" (e.g. Tertullian) indoctrination of adherents so completely that they'd rather die than go through the motions of a sacrifice, and callous cruelty to people over issues of belief. It's the kind of thing that lead St. Jerome to go out of his way to make it known to Aconia Fabia Paulina, the grieving widow of the recently dead pagan senator Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, that the husband she was mourning was in Hell and would never have peace. (Jerome's sainthood still baffles me. How can you canonize an assholy prick like that!? Did God so love the world that he liked it when you talk shit to a grieving widow about her husband!? I dearly wish there was a hell for that little bastard to go to). Long story short: there is no definition of "fanatic" or "cult" which cannot be applied to early Christianity:

--And God said "Let there be Night!" and there was Night.--

In the cruel reigns of Decius and Dioclesian, Christianity had been proscribed, as a revolt from the ancient and hereditary religion of the empire; and the unjust suspicions which were entertained of a dark and dangerous faction, were, in some measure, countenanced by the inseparable union and rapid conquests of the church. But the same excuses of fear and ignorance cannot be applied to the Christian emperors who violated the precepts of humanity and of the Gospel.
-Edward Gibbon

As Christianity spread, the pluralistic cross-pollination of pre-Christian Euro-Mediteranean religious figures was much ridiculed by early Christians (including the Church Fathers, such as the assholier-than-thou Tertullian.) as a sign of impurity, as well as inconsistency and illogic (the presumption that spirituality is -or should be- somehow consistent or logical would make some of the smartest most spiritual people I know shake their heads and snicker.) Things like this, for example, were now mere signs of falsity and foolishness.

Christianity claimed jurisdiction not only over piety of public behavior (performing the right rituals in the right ways) as the Romans did, but also the purity of private behavior, philosophy and thought- and to the majority of Church Fathers' there was only one source of such purity:

Whence:

"Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. "
-(Matthew 10:32-34)

He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad
-(Matthew 12:30)

However much later post-enlightenment Christians tried to de-fang the above words by insisting that it doesn't mean what it appears to, god was now holding the mind in binary thrall. That a gospel containing passages like this managed to make its way into the canon in the 4th century speaks volumes of an obsession with the punctilios of dogma, and at best a disregard for the tendency of people to take a sound bite and run with it. If Christ (or whoever put these words in his mouth) wanted brotherly behavior among humanity, he had a piss-poor understanding of the human condition, or an even more piss-poor editor.

Doctrines like this, to a Roman of Caesar's time, would have seemed like the very essence of superstitio: divinity ruling every aspect of a person's outer and inner life, spirituality gone out of control. Cicero himself put it thusly:

Nam cum omnibus in rebus temeritas in adsentiendo errorque turpis est, tum in eo loco maxime, in quo iudicandum est quantum auspiciis rebusque divinis religionique tribuamus; est enim periculum, ne aut neglectis iis impia fraude aut susceptis anili superstitione obligemur.

As in any discussion, it is ill-advised to rashly accept the unqualified propositions of others, or to assert such ourselves. The most important issue at hand for our purposes is this: how much weight do we give omen-readers, divine ceremonies, and manners of observance? On the one hand, if we neglect them, we run the risk of a high crime against sanctity. On the other, if we embrace them we risk losing all perspective in an intoxication with the sacred, like an old woman. (my translation)

--Treatment of Jews--

The effects of this bizarre but influential need to regulate and legislate the mind were many and monstrous. Once the Church(es) got themselves organized and in fighting form, they bought into a notion of Christians as comrades-in-arms (συστρατιώτῃ, in St. Paul's terms). Heterodoxy in most of Christendom -even in Byzantium, often enough- was like practicing yoga in a prison shower: an invitation to get wildly screwed. Even the most assimilated Jews could to varying degrees be stigmatized and victimized throughout Christian history- not even for worshiping a different god-figure, but merely for not worshiping Him in the precise way Christianity prescribed.

The Christians who wasted so much ink cataloging the religious excesses of pagan Rome in martyrologies never once stopped to realize that Jews endured far more grief under Western Christendom (and much of Eastern Byzantium) than they ever had under any pagan emperor before the insane Nero. The modern sense of perpetual potential victimhood that is often associated with Jewish culture (and which, combined with the "my God beats yours" sentiment, continues to fuel grotesque Jewish fundamentalism and harassment of Arab farmers in the West Bank) is largely the heir of that Christian absolutism, whose festering antisemitism provided a convenient cultural tool for the Nazis to exploit later.

Whereas Caesar jumped through legal loopholes to keep Synagogues from being illegal under Roman law, Jews in Western Christendom during the Middle Ages were the victims of all kinds of assholy harassment in the form of massacres, ostracizations and forced conversions galore- punctuated by the occasional reprieve when someone like Charlemagne or a local potentate happened get enough fiber in his diet to be in a good mood that day, with Pope after Pope doing little more than issue worthless pieces of parchment saying "you know, you should really be nicer to the Jews, guys!" to almost no effect, and with scant enforcement.

I should mention that things were initially, all in all, better for Jews in Byzantium where harassment of Jews was milder, involving mere limitations on the kinds of occupations they were allowed to have, prohibitions against the construction of new synagogues, limitations on the use of Hebrew, prohibition of celebrations of passover when it happened to come before Easter and, of course, routine public proclamations of contempt for Jews and symbolic condemnations for deicide (even when expanding Jewish rights!) So at first they were only humiliated instead of brutalized. I guess, since being demeaned as an inferior is preferable to being slaughtered as a heretic, this would be a step up. But there were forced conversions under e.g. Heraclius, and sporadic periods of scapegoating persecution of Jews. And soon enough Jews fell victim to passing Crusaders who would often ravage them for sport, and cause many Jews to commit mass suicide rather than submit to the forced conversion the crusaders foisted upon them- a practice which the Byzantines saw fit not to prevent and even to facilitate sometimes since, I guess, their tolerance of Judaism was only skin-deep (and they could always blame it on those Half-Goth Latin savages if ever they needed to reconcile themselves with the Jewish populace later.) And eventually all Byzantine tolerance for Jews was shot to hell, with local harassment of Jews outright encouraged, Jewish property getting confiscated every time the Empire had a cashflow problem, and Jewish populations finally being forced into ghettos. (Ah, Byzantine Christianity- So elevated!)

--

Christian absolutism was also , in my opinion, likely indirectly passed on as some of the more unpleasant aspects of early Islam, via Christian ideas of the narrow path to salvation and the unacceptability of heterodoxy etc- all to say nothing of the fact that none of the Islamic imperial conquests or Islam itself would have come to exist without Christianity. So in a way I have people like Emperor Constantine to thank for 9/11. (As if murdering his own son Crispus and his own wife Fausta wasn't bad enough. He must have run out of cheeks to turn or something. An assholy man if ever there was one. I confess that his being deemed a Christian Saint is profoundly offensive to me, as someone who despises the veneration of cruelty.)

Moreover, the extreme reaction to Christian hegemony fostered not moderation but rather the opposite kind of fundamentalism in the Soviet Union which developed a religion of a ruling class that not only hid by denying its own existence but also inherited the same zealous mania and intolerance of the pogrom-pushing 19th century Christianity they professed to be so different from. But the technology and bureaucratic scale of 20th century Russia meant an even greater bodycount. The Stalinist cult which was responsible for a deathtoll equivalent to about 7 holocausts combined was no less a religion than the belief in the divine which it attempted to exterminate. The absolutist notion that "our thoughts on society are right and all other thoughts are evil, and so are the people who think them" was a continuation and mutation, filtered through Marx and 19th century sociology, of the notion that "our God is the true one and all others are devils." The wolf of Christian-inspired religious absolutism had shorn itself of Christ and God and taken on the sheep's clothing of economics and sociology, but its my-way-or-the-highway essence remained as strong as ever. But I'll be fair and allow that, while Christianized absolutism was a major factor, it certainly wasn't the only one. Christianized absolutism just took a bad situation and made it much, much worse.

This leaves us with Nazism. I've already touched on how Christianity provided the Nazis with the bedrock of antisemitism which Hitler capitalized, but again I should be fair and allow that, while Christianized absolutism did play its part in the Nazi cult (as it has in so much racism,) Nazism was as much a child of the depression as it was of Christian cultural baggage.

Anyway, the rest needs no explanation: the slaughterfests of conquistadors, the pogroms, the spanish inquisition. Pick your favorite European religious atrocity of intolerance and praise the Lord! (The one exception is China, and I'll get to that in a later post)

But wait, Christian history has more joys to offer the classicist. This time, literary ones.

Part III: Classical Literature under Christendom

...dum Capitolium scandet cum tacita virgine pontifex...
-Horace

One of the greatest tragedies of Classical Greco-Roman History is not to be found in Euripides or Seneca, but in Christianity.

It's no secret that something which, in varying ways and to varying degrees in various regions, resembled the modern understanding of homosexual love/lust was not only tolerated but taken for granted in much of pre-Christian antiquity. And it's not surprising that this cultural phenomenon, in its various Greek and Roman incarnations, would find its way into Classical literature. Here are a few examples:

Eupolis, a contemporary of Aristophanes, devoted two comedies to the theme of older men being manipulated by the seductions of gold-digging young boys. Another of his plays entitled "Dippers" features a song where young boys are urged to lift their legs high and shimmy their butts artfully.
The play "Boy-lovers" by Diphilus has a character who can't stop going on about the lovely features of a boy he's seen.
Aeschylus, in his play "Mirmydons" depicts Achilles as moved to take up arms against the Trojans by the death of his lover Petroclus (whereas the Homeric depiction of the Achilles-Petroclus duo leaves open the question of romantic attachment, Aeschylus leaves no doubt about them being very much into each other- in every sense of the preposition.)
Sophocles in "The Women of Colchis" mentions the pretty thighs of Ganymede lighting Zeus' fire.
In Euripides' celebrated tragedy "Chrysippus" the climactic tragic moment is the Theban King Laius' rape of the Elean boy Chrysippus.

Some of you might be wondering "Euripides' celebrated tragedy? How celebrated exactly? I've never heard of it." No shock there. Odds are, unless you're a Classics Geek, you haven't heard of any of these works, even if the names Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are familiar to most literary afficionados in the west, and even if some of them were held in great esteem by many cultured Greeks and later Romans (e.g. Cicero, the man I love to hate lovingly, in his "Tusculan Disputations" mentions Euripides' play as a demonstration of how passionately men can love men, and what this passion can lead to if indulged without moderation.) There's a reason for that: they're all gone. No copy has survived (though pieces of Aeschylus "Mirmydons" have recently been recovered from bits of papyrus used to mummify a body.) And this is only the tip of a very, very long, thick....iceberg. These all but vanished in the first 1300 years or so of Christianity.

The main problem is not that such works were destroyed or banned. Although book-destruction did happen, it wasn't libricidal gay-bashing, contrary to the position of the mythomaniacs, some with Classics degrees, who still insist that Christians e.g. burned Sappho's books. The key issue is copying-practices. With the knowledge of writing in the Latin West concentrated in monasteries, and the Christian Byzantine Empire in the Greek West (where any germinations of an educated secular middle class were ripped out at the root) so mired in piety, purity and pedantry that it stifled literary eroticism even of a heterosexual nature among its upper classes, certain books were simply less widely copied.

What little remains of the literary expression of classical homoerotic, heteroerotic, and generally raunchy social phenomena survives little thanks to Christian copyists, and very often in spite of them. For example, the main modern manuscript source of Plautus' comedies is a 4th century compilation which had been scrubbed blank by a monk and then overwritten with St. Augustine's commentary on the Psalms- useful for historians of orthography and for the devout perhaps, but containing no insight whatsoever that I couldn't get from any old dime-a-dozen Sunday-school teacher. It's taken quite some doing to read most of it. This is because the need for writing-quality vellum (more durable than paper or papyrus) was great and vellum was hard to come by. Therefore the practice of scrubbing manuscripts for new material was a common one. But when a synodal proclamation in the late 7th century prohibited the overwriting of any manuscript containing Scripture or the writings of the church fathers, this meant that non-Christian literature (especially texts using unusual or difficult language like poetry, and more especially those containing historical stages of the language different enough from its literary medieval version to pose comprehension problems to some guy in a scriptorium) was the first thing to be wiped out. This means furthermore that copyists wouldn't just go about refusing to write something deemed indecent, but they were probably actually looking for reasons to scrub a manuscript for e.g. a new decree to be prepared in writing, a freshly-canonized saint's life to be fabulated and written down, or yet another ornately illuminated Gospel. Moreover, it meant that a secular text was less likely to be recopied than a Godly one. Some classical authors were nonetheless copied because they were deemed indispensable for some reason, often because they were seen as worthy models of "Good Latin" (like Horace or Virgil- despite the obvious admiration for young boys' bodies espoused by the former.), or they were promising targets for ideological and theological kidnappings, such as Martial whose habit of decrying various forms of overindulgence might have appealed to certain monks, or Seneca whose Hellenistic Stoicism was approved of by the Church Fathers as an inspiration for piety and moderation. (So much so that a popular legend developed that Seneca had been converted to Christianity by St. Paul before he committed suicide in a hot bath, the latter portrayed rather hilariously as some kind of weird clandestine baptism. Eventually this resulted in a series of forged correspondences between St. Paul and Seneca, and St Jerome even made an enthusiastic case for Seneca's sainthood. Nor can I overlook the irony of the fact that the ever-so-pious author of the ever-so-pious Latin Bible translation wanted to canonize a suicide-victim- having no idea that in a few centuries the idea of a suicide saint would be unthinkable.)

I add that it's not just historical witnesses to sexual diversity that fell victim to this Dark Age Under Our Lord and Censor. The texts that were erased through this kind of negligence are uncountable. Literally uncountable, because we can only count the ones whose title some grammarian or other happened to mention. Texts which would be of extreme interest to every kind of historian have been ejected from existence by this indirect Christian censorship in unholy conjunction with the devourings of time. (To take one example: of delight to historical linguists would be the book by Suetonius, entirely dedicated to the description of contemporary Greek profanity and the peculiarities which distinguished it from its Latin counterpart. Now, if only medieval monks weren't scared so fucking shitless by words for shit and fuck!)

So far this may seem mainly like a practical issue with unfortunate consequences for secular literature. "After all, it's not their fault they needed the vellum" one might think. No it's not. But the fact that there were attempts to set up special libraries to store secular literature in both the Eastern and Western empires is a testament to the fact that the problem was recognized as such- and so the excuse that "they had no idea these books would become hard to get" doesn't hold much water with me. Moreover, which books were worthy of storage, and which were too "dangerous" to be widely circulated was always a game of political and theological baseball, and the need to control thought by proxy through book selections. Heated disagreements and sticking points like the iconoclastic controversy in the 8th century resulted in particularly large amounts of Christian libricide. It's easier to burn a book than to write one, and with access to literacy firmly in the choke-hold of a Christian Church that was often worried about sniffing out heretics, and of a small affluent class with a vested interest in protecting their position it's not hard to do the math. (Compare this with the periods and places under the Islamic Caliphate where non-clerical middle class literacy was not hard to come by, and it's not hard to figure out why much Greek philosophy only survived the first millennium in Arabic translation.)

Another example to lead to my next point: one single manuscript containing the poems of Catullus' (about all kinds of love, homosexual, heterosexual, hetairosexual etc.) managed to survive the first millennium. This manuscript is first mentioned by Bishop Rather of Verona in the 10th century who discovered it and subsequently reproached himself for enjoying such indecorous poetry so much. That original manuscript is now lost- what we have are various copies of that manuscript, and copies of copies, in all kinds of poor condition, and it is thanks to the humanists of the Renaissance that Catullus escaped oblivion at all.

Renaissance Humanists were, of course Christian (one was even a Pope!) and much of their work was motivated by a belief that they were supplementing and complementing, not supplanting or contradicting, Christianity. But nothing endemic to Christianity (or religion) per se seems to have been the conditioning factor. More than anything it was a willingness to examine the world and the ideas and arts of pre-Christianity, a belief that something of value (whatever the definition of "value" one might have) was to be gained from the arts of people whose feelings about the cosmos may have been alien or even apparently execrable. Dante exemplifies the beginnings of this trend when, in the Inferno he puts the literary figures of antiquity in a special place on the outer fringes of hell for the "virtuous unbaptized" where they are afforded a much-diminished but restful and pleasant version of heaven.

In a nutshell what made the Humanists so industrious and so different from their predecessors was open-mindedness. This, for the West, was a beginning of the breakdown in the West's notion that the mind somehow needs to be protected from learning. From then on, when someone asked the question "why not?" it wasn't always (even if it still often could be) a simple matter to shut it down with "because I/we/they said so."

But even the Humanists had had the classics sanitized and desatanized for them by a thousand years of passive censorship. Who could say what Humanism would have brought about had the Greek-scholars of the Renaissance been able to read, for example, Aeschylus' dramatization of how Petroclus and Achilles felt about each other? If alternate notions of sexuality had been more available in the venerated classical tradition during the Renaissance, would the homophobic attitude of the modern Catholic Church still be around to make me embarrassed to be human?

In addition to the well-known forms of grotesquery such as the Christian Crusades and the Islamic conquests, the institutionalization and enthronement of the monotheistic religious impulse, whether enslaving one's thought processes to a cosmic figure (as in many versions of Islamo-Judeo-Christianity), or making a religion out of Humankind or a subset of it (as with Stalinism, Nazism or the Jucheism of North Korea), has resulted in several kinds of intellectual, literary and artistic impoverishment- and I see no reason not to see institutionalized Christianity as one of the truly worst offenders, if not the worst.

Of course, it could be argued from a certain perspective that it was the ambient intellectual and spiritual climate of Rome and Judea that made this possible and inevitable, that if it wasn't Christianity, it would've been something else just as annoying. This argument presumes that whatever rose in Christianity's place would have been as destructive to antiquity, would not have subsumed Roman paganism instead of destroying it, and wouldn't have been better at any number of things. Moreover, even if true, the argument is at best an excuse- not a justification.

Freethinking has had to assert itself in an uphill battle against such things over and over again. The vast literary artistry of antiquity, now decimated to such a paucity that the original texts of the entire published corpus of classical literature can fit on one wall of a university book store, is a casualty, in part, of such a battle.

It is a casualty that I am reminded of every time I return to the Greek and Latin poets and playwrights and think just how deep the Christian nail has been driven into the hands of European classical heritage, how much inventive literature has, for the sake of unoriginal cosmology, been bled dry to all but the last drop. At such times I cannot help but think to myself "That blood be upon Christendom, and on its children."

A Bible in every hotel room in North America, and Classical scholarship now has to resort to archeological dumpster-diving, literally rummaging through ancient trashpiles for a few lines of precious half-readable text by Sappho or Menander. Does it piss me off? Yeah, you could say that.

3. Q & A anticipating the comments

Q: So do I resent religion?
A: Yeah, sometimes, in some ways. But it's not belief in the divine that I resent at all, so much as the consequences those beliefs can have.

Q: Does Christianity annoy me more than some other religions?
A: Yeah. Though this may also have something to do with the fact that as a westerner, I'm most acutely aware of Christianity's crimes against human sanity. Then again, I don't think many forms of religious zealotry have done quite as much damage, or had nearly as much influence on other belief systems, as the Christian kind. Buddhist fundamentalism, and the painfully authoritarian articulations of Confucianism, have their share of the gruesome and tragic. But they weren't spread over multiple continents by conquerers, used to rally forces for trans-continental crusades, or an inspiration to so many other successful belief systems to try the same ugly thing.

Q: But don't you realize that this isn't real Christianity? This kind of thing wasn't what Christ wanted for humanity!
A: I get this response often, and it is so ridiculous to me as to be offensive. I truly don't give a crap. Christ's teachings (and the sanitized, edited version of them which was given canonical form in the Gospel a few centuries later) ultimately resulted, directly and indirectly, in millions upon millions of people acting like brutal, cruel, assholy maniacs in His name or God's on an unprecedented scale, from the jungles of South America to the crusader-massacres of Asia Minor and the Levant, to even (albeit often to a much milder extent) the empires of the Near East and Central Eurasia under Christianity-begotten Islam. Hair-splitting over whether some carpenter named Joshua may have meant one thing or another would be small comfort to the Jewish woman in Kishinev who had her unborn child gouged out of her gut by a bayonet in the hands of a man screaming "In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit." (Yes, that's an actual incident described in a surviving Yiddish diary.) Christ wouldn't have liked it? Well then I dearly wish He had done the world a favor and shut His trap, instead of ultimately defacing human intellect by introducing the notion that there's only One "true" religion, (and subsequently given indirect rise to ideologies of there being One acceptable way of doing things in general e.g. the militant versions of socialism of Eastern Europe and Asia) for the whole damn world. It is thanks to His influence that European (and later, to a lesser extent, Near Eastern) empires for most of the past 2000 years have almost without exception been manically afraid of cultural, philosophical and even linguistic heterogeneity. (On the last point consider that the ancient Roman, Greek and Persian empires never tried to wipe out regional languages or dialects, as long as at least some of the locals were willing to learn the dominant international language -or some version of it- for sheer practical reasons. Now compare this with the British in India or the Spanish in South America where the initial tolerance and even promotion of the local languages in administration was halted under the influence of missionaries and the church- because unchristian languages are the devil's tools.) Apologizing to a corpse and saying "sorry I didn't mean to slaughter you" does nothing but insult and demean the memory of the dead.

Q: But what about the positive ways in which Christianity has affected the world? The end of slavery, gender equality, compassion, charity etc.
A: Christianity can't take credit for such things.
The institutionalization of Christianity didn't free Roman slaves. All it did was allow slaves to participate in the liturgy, and result in the occasional proclamation that masters shouldn't be too mean to their slaves for no reason. There were those such as St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Patrick who were outright opposed to slavery, but they had scant effect. Even someone like John Chrysostom, while saying that slavery wasn't very Godly, nonetheless urged slaves not to be too disobedient. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine and countless others offered justifications for slavery. In the Middle Ages, slaves who ran away from their masters were condemned by the Church (in both East and West) and barred from communion. Oh and there was that Byzantine prohibition against Jews owning Christian slaves (lest their Christ-killing masters convert them away from the One True Faith.) Once slavery finally started to fall into controversy, of course, people attempted to recharacterize and reinterpret New Testament expressions like "slave/serf of God" (Greek δοῦλος θεοῦ, Latin Servus dei) as "servant of God". The American abolitionists may have been Christian, and justified their beliefs in outspokenly Christian terms, but that was because there was no other acceptable moral framework available in America. If your culture insists that Christianity is the only true faith, how are you going to justify your philosophy to yourself or, failing that, to the world at large other than in terms of that faith? If you were an abolitionist and an atheist at heart, who truly believed that slavery was wrong for purely secular reasons, you could be shunned and scorned for simply admitting their atheism- but if you pretended piety and attempted to use Christian concepts to push your point, you might stand a chance. That's what hegemony is: power and control so total that nobody even notices it.
As for sexism: women in antiquity, though hardly given equal footing with men, were not deemed the origin of sin the way they were by many early Church Fathers and people like St. Jerome (indeed some Roman Stoic writers like Seneca, though they very much believed in gender roles, rejected the notion that there was anything wrong or shameful about being a woman in and of itself.) And even in the mainly patriarchal world of Ancient Greece (where it is usually held that women could never be citizens under any circumstances) there was at least one city-state, Sparta, where women were citizens, could kick some serious ass in battle if there was a shortage of men, could have certain positions of power over men, could own and inherit land, and where a woman married to an elderly man was allowed and even encouraged to have sex
with a younger man on the premise that a child should have the most fit parentage possible in order to spawn the strongest Spartans possible. On the other hand, the notion that prostitution is unholy and ipso facto evil and destructive has few instances that cannot be traced back to Judeo-Christian morality (consider the pre-Christian religious prostitution once common in many parts of Eurasia.)

Q: But is this absolutism really unique to Christianity originally?
A: I wouldn't go so far as to call it unique. But it is certainly in many ways an oddity and deviation from what seems to have been typical throughout much of human history. There are few parallels to be found (one thing that comes rather close is Egyptian Atenism, whose progenitor was eventually seen for the crackpot he no doubt was.) Empires predating or uninfluenced by Christianity or Christianized Eurasia have almost always been much more flexible about local belief systems. For example not just the Romans, but also Alexander the Great's Indo-Greek empire, the Aztec empire, the Mayans, Incas, Maurya, Kushan, Akkadians etc. were all quite tolerant of local beliefs and rituals (though practices deemed outright immoral- such as human sacrifice in Roman-occupied Gaul and Carthage- were usually not okay.) It's hard for me to judge all empires including those for which not enough evidence is available (or about which I haven't read enough) on the incidence of religious persecution, such as Achaemenid Persia- where it's hard to figure out how Zoroastrianism spread precisely- though at least some rulers, such as its founder Cyrus, were at least not pricks about it and quite tolerant. And it's clear that the later Sassanids, Parthians etc. were all more or less okay with religious heterogeneity, though some religions which threatened the power dynamic were less okay than others that didn't.

J. V. Foix: Lord God (From Catalan)

2011-11-29T18:04:00.000-06:00

Lord God
J.V. Foix
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

Lord God, make my work hard and give me more.
Darken the night and keep the landscape sealed.
Raise walls against me on a harsher shore,
And weave your work on forestland and field.

Hands tied and dry as Hindus’, let me see
You clad in skins. Cut fissures for your dew
Into my mind! I am the Nobody
Who yell in tears and yell the name of You.

I’ll be a common serf for you, Dear God,
Raping the field and gleaning in the sod,
My lowly body loaded and diseased:

Yea through the darkest ditch I will walk free
If with your eyes you light the worlds to me
Where I will bask in you, where life falls eased.

The Original:

Senyor Déu

Feu, Senyor Déu, el meu treball més dur,
Fosca la nit, i el paisatge més clos,
Alceu-me murs en un ribatge cru,
Empal'lieu forests, prades i flors.
Lligat de mans i sec com un hindú,
Vestit de pells, obriu al Vostre ròs
La meva ment! Entre tots, só ningú,
I Us dic el nom sense repòs, i amb plors.

Só el serf comú si així Us plau, Senyor Déu,
I en camps forçats o en foradats pregons,
Plagat de cos i amb fardells damunt meu,
Em sé llibert si en el més negre fons
Els Vostres ulls il·luminen els mons
Que amb Vós delesc, i em fan el viure lleu.

Samih Al-Qasim: Rain On the Newsstand (From Arabic)

2011-11-23T16:42:00.000-06:00

Rain On the Newsstand
By Samih Al-Qasim
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Arabic

Rain out of the blue
Sky on the morning papers
Rain
The ink flows from one language into another.
The mannequin's features vanish from the cover
With the face of the athlete proud of his first prize.
Mascara runs, rampant, in an actress' eyes;
The bled crimson oozes;
Wounds open
On the op-ed page.
The kiosk closes its door.
Rain once more
Out of the dark on the late edition.

The Original:

مطر على كشك الصحف

سميح القاسم

مطر فجائي على صحف الصباح

مطر

يسح الحبر من لغة على لغة

تغيب ملامح المانيكان عن وجه الغلاف

ويختفي وجه الرياضي الفخور بكأسه الأولى

يذوب الكحل في عيني ممثّلة

ينز الأحمر القاني

وتنفتح الجراح

في صحفة الآراء

يغلق بابه الكشك الصغير

مطر،

على العدد الأخير

Alexander Pushkin: "What's in my name for you?" (From Russian)

2011-11-22T03:48:00.000-06:00

This poem was written in the album (signature book) of the Polish countess Karolina Sobańska in response to a request to sign it. The countess was a notorious collector of great minds and mistress to one of Tsar Nicholas' administrators. The album had already been immortalized by Mickiewicz's signature.

"What's in my name for you?
By Alexander Pushkin
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Russian

What’s in my name for you? What good?
It will but die: a wave’s sad sound
On sands where it has splashed aground,
A cry in a benighted wood.

Its traces will lie dead among
these album pages: the design
of someone's epitaphic line
in some unfathomable tongue.

What is it, then? Lost to the past
in new emotion's insurrection,
upon your soul it will not cast
the tender rays of recollection.

But on a day of hushed regret
pronounce it with a sigh of pain,
and tell the cold: “There's memory yet!
There is one heart where I remain.”

The Original:

Что в имени тебе моём?
Оно умрёт, как шум печальный
Волны, плеснувшей в берег дальный,
Как звук ночной в лесу глухом.

Оно на памятном листке
Оставит мёртвый след, подобный
Узору надписи надгробной
На непонятном языке.

Что в нём? Забытое давно
В волненьях новых и мятежных,
Твоей душе не даст оно
Воспоминаний чистых, нежных.

Но в день печали, в тишине,
Произнеси его тоскуя;
Скажи: есть память обо мне,
Есть в мире сердце, где живу я…

Sandro Penna: Lady on a Streetcar (From Italian)

2011-11-20T12:30:00.000-06:00

Lady on a Streetcar
Sandro Penna
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

You’d like to kiss your boy who doesn’t want to:
He’d like instead to look at life outside.
You’re disappointed then, but still you smile:
At least it doesn't ache like jealousy,
Even though he already looks just like
The other who “to look at life outside”
Left you like this.

The Original:

Donna in Tram

Vuoi baciare il tuo bimbo che non vuole:
ama guardare la vita, di fuori.
Tu sei delusa allora, ma sorridi:
non è l'angoscia della gelosia
anche se già somiglia egli all'altr'uomo
che per «guardare la vita, di fuori»
ti ha lasciata così...

Anna Margolin: Slender Ships (From Yiddish)

2011-11-20T09:21:00.000-06:00

Best known in her time as a reporter, the Yiddish poet Anna Margolin, (born Rosa Lebensbaum, in Brest-Litovsk, in 1887) had a tempestuous youth that took her through Odessa, Warsaw, London, Paris and the Land of Israel/Palestine before she finally settled in New York at the age of 26.

Slender Ships
By Anna Margolin
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in Yiddish

Slender ships drowse on over the swollen green water,
Black shadows sleep on the cold heart of the water.
All the winds are still.
Clouds like ghosts in the speechless night shift over and slip under.
Pale and tranquil, the earth awaits the lightning and the thunder.
I will be still.

The Original:

שלאנקע שיפן

שלאנקע שיפן דרימלען אויפן געשוואלן גרינעם וואסער

שווארצע שאטנס שלאפן אויפן קאלטן הארץ פון וואסער.
אלה ווינטן זײַנן שטיל

כמארעס רוקן זיך געשפענסטיק אין דער נאכט דער שטומער.

בלייך און רויִק ווארט די ערד אויף בליץ און דונער.

איך וועל זײַן שטיל.

Short Story by Abdulelah Abdulqader: Viagra (From Arabic)

2011-11-19T11:41:00.001-06:00

From now on, when translating short stories, I'm going to try to limit myself to stories which have not appeared in English before, or whose extant translations are so bad as to make one wish they hadn't. I'm also going to take care not to do anything that compromises the author's control over the original. Sometimes this may mean not providing the text of the original. In this case, though, it just means linking to the original text on the author's website.
Dr. Abdulelah Abdulqader Hussein is an Iraqi playwright and director based in Dubai and quite an accomplished crafter of short stories. The original Arabic text of the following story can be found on his website here.

Viagra
By Dr Abdulelah Abdulqader
Translated, from the Arabic, by A.Z Foreman

She tried to cleanse her body, to purge it of his hot fluids which had polluted her crotch. That was when she realized that she was no longer a virgin. Before she could catch her breath, the man she had met tonight for the first time mounted her for the tenth, and so she found herself a sex slave at the mercy of a sex-crazed man who knew no value and accorded her no importance beyond using her for carnal pleasure. It was as if she were giving him his first night, and his last.

This wasn't his first marriage. He was a serial polygamist who'd divorced two women, and who had now made this new wife the sixth on the list of marriages he had under his belt, marriages whose expensive dowries he had paid with money he had not sweated for, though nobody knew how he had come into such money or where it had come from. Rumors and hearsay, which no one could confirm or deny, were all that was known of this sadist.

She had put up with the filth of his body, the stench which had proven intractable to all the colognes and fragrances he had used to try and give himself a veneer of dandy refinement.

All night he refused to give his body or her any rest. He was a bestial man, predatory even in his emotions. He collapsed from exhaustion, nearly fainting on her. She asked him if he'd let her go, just till morning. He laughed, letting his gaping mouth reveal the deformed yellow teeth blackened by nicotine, and hollered in a frenzy:

"I payed good coin...you better stay!"

Hers was the misery they called a marriage, forced upon her by her father's greed for an astronomically high dowry, by backward tribal social norms, and by a peniless lover with neither the money to pay her dowry nor the courage to stop the transaction now sealed by a lawful contract of wedlock.

He suddenly started wheezing like an old dog, his eyes sunk, the paunch of his naked gut heaved, his limbs began quivering. Then he stopped moving. She tried to resuscitate him, shaking him, and an empty viagra container tumbled down from the edge of the bed.

A short while had passed, from the singing and merriment of the wedding which dozens of well-wishers had attended, to the night of her de jure rape- a short while which for her had been an epoch. In that epoch she had become the widow of a one-night marriage, and in no time at all she enjoyed her Viagra-given liberty.

Short Story by Horacio Quiroga: The Feather Pillow (From Spanish)

2011-11-18T22:20:00.001-06:00

It occurred to me recently, after conversation with a friend, that there is no earthly reason for me to limit myself to poetry. When I read a brilliant short story, for example, why should I hesitate to render it into English just because my blog mainly deals with poetry? I shouldn't. So I'll be translating short-stories, too, from now on.
And that's why we have a short story on deck in this post. A short horror-story to be precise. This particular tale, "The Feather Pillow" is by Horacio Quiroga, sometimes praised as the Poe of Latin America (an unworthy Anglocentric appellation which Quiroga, who excelled little Eddie Poe in nearly every way, certainly does not deserve.)
I must have been 15 when I first read this story, for no other reason than that I had a rather insane crush on a Dominican classmate of mine who had become obsessed with Quiroga's short stories, and graciously lent me her copy of his collected stories.
The story terrified me as no other horror story ever has, or probably ever will. As a result, I spent the next few nights terrified by nightmares about my pillow, and the next few days with an even greater crush on my classmate.
For brief note on why this story is still with me a decade later, see my comment after the translation.

The Feather Pillow
By Horacio Quiroga
Translated, from the Spanish, by A.Z. Foreman

Their honeymoon was one long shudder. A blonde, angelic and shy young thing, her childhood fantasies of being a bride had been chilled by her husband's stern nature. She loved him very much even so, though sometimes with a slight twinge when, as they returned home through the streets at night together, she would glance up furtively at the impressive stature of her Jordan who had been silent for the past hour. He likewise was in love with her, but never made it known.

For three months -they had been married in April- they lived in a singular kind of bliss. Doubtless she would have wished less severity in those strict heavens of love, a more expansive and spontaneous tenderness; but her husband's immovable manner would always hold her back.

The house in which they lived affected her twinges and shuddering in no small fashion. The silent patio's whiteness -friezes, columns, and marble statues- gave the autumnal impression of an enchanted palace. Inside, the glacial brilliance of stucco and the totally bare walls reenforced the feeling of unpleasant cold. On crossing from one room to the next, the echo of footsteps reverberated all through the house, as if long years of neglect had sensitized their resonance.

Alicia spent her entire autumn in this strange love-nest. However, she had determined to cast a veil over her dreams of old, and still lived in the hostile house, trying not to think of anything until her husband came home.

It is no surprise that she grew thin. She had a slight bout of the flu which dragged on insidiously for days on end. Alicia would never be healthy again. Eventually she was able to go out one late afternoon into the garden, resting on his arm. Listlessly, she looked around from side to side. Suddenly Jordan ran his hand slowly, with deep tenderness, over her head, and Alicia promptly burst into sobs, throwing her arms round his neck. For a long while she cried all her stifled fears out, wailing louder at Jordan's slightest caress. Then her sobs began to subside, and she stood a long while with her face hidden against his neck, wordless and motionless.

That was Alicia's final day out of bed. The next morning she felt faint as soon as she awoke. Jordan's doctor examined her with the utmost thoroughness, prescribing complete bed-rest and calm.
"I don't know" he said to Jordan in a lowered voice on his way out to to the street, "she has this great weakness that I can't explain. And there's no vomiting or anything… if she wakes up tomorrow and nothing's changed, call me right away."

The next day Alicia woke up feeling worse. Doctors were called. They diagnosed it as acute idiopathic anaemia, completely inexplicable. Alicia had no more fainting spells, but was visibly moving toward death. All day long in complete silence the bedroom lights stayed on. Hours went by without the slightest noise. Alicia dozed. Jordan all but lived in the drawing room, its lamps also on. He paced ceaselessly, with tireless persistence, from one end of the room to the other. The carpet swallowed the sound of his steps. At times he would enter the bedroom and continue his wordless paces up and down alongside the bed, pausing for an instant to look at his wife at each end.
Soon Alicia began to hallucinate: vague, indistinct visions, at first floating in the air and then descending to the floor. Her eyes stretched wide open, the girl stared constantly at the carpet on either side of the head of her bed. One night she was suddenly transfixed, staring at one spot. After a while she opened her mouth to scream, her nostrils and lips beaded with sweat.

"Jordan! Jordan!" She shrieked, rigid with fear, her eyes still fixed on the carpet.

Jordan ran into the bedroom. When she saw him appear, Alicia screamed in horror

"It's me, Alicia! It's me."

Alicia stared blankly at him, at the carpet, and back at him; and after a long pause of stupefied confrontation, she came back to her senses. She smiled, taking her husband's hand in her own, caressing it, trembling, for half an hour.

Amongst her most recurrent hallucinations, there was a hominoid creature, poised on its fingers on the carpet, eyeing her.

The doctors returned to no avail. They had before them a waning life, bleeding away day by day, hour by hour, and they knew not why. During the last consultation, Alicia lay in a stupor while they took her pulse, passing her inert wrist from one to the other. For a long while they observed her in silence, and then went on to the dining room.

"Huh…" the chief physician shrugged in discouragement "This case is serious…there's not much to be done…."

"That's it then!" snapped Jordan, staggering suddenly.

Alicia was ebbing away in an anaemic subfever which grew worse in the afternoon but always let up somewhat after dawn. During the day, her illness did not progress, but every morning she awoke pallid, barely conscious. It seemed only at night that her life drained out of her in ever-new billows of blood. Always when she woke up she had the sensation of lying collapsed in bed with a million-kilo weight on her body. Following the third day of this episode, she never left her bed again. She could hardly move her head; she didn't want her bed to be touched, not even to have the pillow plumped. Her crepuscular terrors made their advance in the form of monsters that dragged themselves to the bed and scrambled up onto the bedspread.

Then she lost consciousness. The last two days she raved ceaselessly in a feeble voice. The lights stayed on, their vigil illuminating the bedroom and drawing room. In the deathly silence of the house, the only sound was the monotonous delirium from the bedroom and the stifled thud of Jordan's eternal pacing.

Finally, Alicia died. The servant, when she came in afterward to strip the now empty bed, stared for a while in puzzlement at the pillow.

"Sir" she called to Jordan in a low voice. "There are stains in the pillow that look like blood."
Jordan approached the bed quickly and bent over the pillow. There indeed on the pillowcase, on either side of the hollow left by Alicia's head, were two small dark stains.

"They look like bite-marks" the servant murmured after a moment of unmoving observation.

"Hold it up to the light" Jordan said.

The servant lifted it, but instantly dropped it and stood staring, pallid and trembling. Without knowing why, Jordan felt his hairs stand on end.

"What is it?" he murmured hoarsely.

"It's really heavy" the servant stammered, still trembling.

Jordan picked it up. It was extraordinarily heavy. They carried it out of the room and on the dining room table he slashed open the case and ticking. The outer feathers floated away and the servant shrieked with terror, her mouth agape, covering her face with balled fists: At the bottom of the pillowcase, among the feathers, slowly moving its hairy legs, was a monstrous animal, a living, viscous ball. It was so bloated one could barely make out its mouth.

Night after night, ever since Alicia had taken to bed, it had applied its mouth - one might better say its snout- to her temples, sucking her blood. The bitemark was scarcely perceptible. The daily plumping of the pillow had doubtlessly at first hindered its advance, but once the girl could no longer move, the suction became vertiginous. In five days, five nights, it had drunk Alicia dry.

These bird-born parasites, usually quite tiny in their natural environment, can grow to enormous proportions under certain conditions. Human blood seems particularly favorable to them, and they are not uncommonly found in feather pillows.

Note:

Beyond the obvious merits as a quasi-gothic horror-story, this is also a gothic human tragedy. On the one hand, it is a tragedy of human psychology. The true cause of Alicia's illness was not caught in time because it was just too simple: it required no M.D. or medication. All it required was the right actions, looking for answers to the right questions, to see what the servant discovers immediately upon looking at Alicia's pillow. On the other hand, ask yourself: how is it that this all escaped her husband's notice? How is it that on their honeymoon, a husband failed to notice the blood on his new bride's pillow- which his servant noticed immediately? Obvious answer: they were never even in the same bed together. It is a romantic, even sexual tragedy as well.

The Original:

Su luna de miel fue un largo escalofrío. Rubia, angelical y tímida, el carácter duro de su marido heló sus soñadas niñerías de novia. Ella lo quería mucho, sin embargo, a veces con un ligero estremecimiento cuando volviendo de noche juntos por la calle, echaba una furtiva mirada a la alta estatura de su Jordán, mudo desde hacía una hora. Él, por su parte, la amaba profundamente, sin darlo a conocer.

Durante tres meses -se habían casado en abril- vivieron una dicha especial.Sin duda hubiera ella deseado menos severidad en ese rígido cielo de amor, más expansiva e incauta ternura; pero el impasible semblante de su marido la contenía siempre.

La casa en que vivían influía un poco en sus estremecimientos. La blancura del patio silencioso -frisos, columnas y estatuas de mármol- producía una otoñal impresión de palacio encantado. Dentro, el brillo glacial del estuco, sin el más leve rasguño en las altas paredes, afirmaba aquella sensación de desapacible frío. Al cruzar de una pieza a otra, los pasos hallaban eco en toda la casa, como si un largo abandono hubiera sensibilizado su resonancia.

En ese extraño nido de amor, Alicia pasó todo el otoño. No obstante, había concluido por echar un velo sobre sus antiguos sueños, y aún vivía dormida en la casa hostil, sin querer pensar en nada hasta que llegaba su marido.

No es raro que adelgazara. Tuvo un ligero ataque de influenza que se arrastró insidiosamente días y días; Alicia no se reponía nunca. Al fin una tarde pudo salir al jardín apoyada en el brazo de él. Miraba indiferente a uno y otro lado. De pronto Jordán, con honda ternura, le pasó la mano por la cabeza, y Alicia rompió en seguida en sollozos, echándole los brazos al cuello. Lloró largamente todo su espanto callado, redoblando el llanto a la menor tentativa de caricia de Jordan. Luego los sollozos fueron retardándose, y aún quedó largo rato escondida en su cuello, sin moverse ni pronunciar una palabra.

Fue ese el último día que Alicia estuvo levantada. Al día siguiente amaneció desvanecida. El médico de Jordán la examinó con suma atención, ordenándole calma y descanso absolutos.

-No sé -le dijo a Jordán en la puerta de calle, con la voz todavía baja-. Tiene una gran debilidad que no me explico, y sin vómitos, nada... Si mañana se despierta como hoy, llámeme enseguida.

Al otro día Alicia seguía peor. Hubo consulta. Constatóse una anemia de marcha agudísima, completamente inexplicable. Alicia no tuvo más desmayos, pero se iba visiblemente a la muerte. Todo el día el dormitorio estaba con las luces prendidas y en pleno silencio. Pasábanse horas sin oír el menor ruido. Alicia dormitaba. Jordán vivía casi en la sala, también con toda la luz encendida. Paseábase sin cesar de un extremo a otro, con incansable obstinación. La alfombra ahogaba sus pasos. A ratos entraba en el dormitorio y proseguía su mudo vaivén a lo largo de la cama, mirando a su mujer cada vez que caminaba en su dirección.

Pronto Alicia comenzó a tener alucinaciones, confusas y flotantes al principio, y que descendieron luego a ras del suelo. La joven, con los ojos desmesuradamente abiertos, no hacía sino mirar la alfombra a uno y otro lado del respaldo de la cama. Una noche se quedó de repente mirando fijamente. Al rato abrió la boca para gritar, y sus narices y labios se perlaron de sudor.

-¡Jordán! ¡Jordán! -clamó, rígida de espanto, sin dejar de mirar la alfombra.

Jordán corrió al dormitorio, y al verlo aparecer Alicia dio un alarido de horror.

-¡Soy yo, Alicia, soy yo!
Alicia lo miró con extravió, miró la alfombra, volvió a mirarlo, y después de largo rato de estupefacta confrontación, volvió en sí. Sonrió y tomó entre las suyas la mano de su marido, acariciándola por media hora temblando.

Entre sus alucinaciones más porfiadas, hubo un antropoide, apoyado en la alfombra sobre los dedos, que tenía fijos en ella los ojos.

Los médicos volvieron inútilmente. Había allí delante de ellos una vida que se acababa, desangrándose día a día, hora a hora, sin saber absolutamente cómo. En la última consulta Alicia yacía en estupor mientras ellos la pulsaban, pasándose de uno a otro la muñeca inerte. La observaron largo rato en silencio y siguieron al comedor.

-Pst... -se encogió de hombros desalentado el médico de cabecera-. Es un caso serio... poco hay que hacer...

-¡Sólo eso me faltaba! -resopló Jordán. Y tamborileó bruscamente.

Alicia fue extinguiéndose en subdelirio de anemia, agravado de tarde, pero que remitía siempre en las primeras horas. Durante el día no avanzaba su enfermedad, pero cada mañana amanecía lívida, en síncope casi. Parecía que únicamente de noche se le fuera la vida en nuevas oleadas de sangre. Tenía siempre al despertar la sensación de estar desplomada en la cama con un millón de kilos encima. Desde el tercer día este hundimiento no la abandonó más. Apenas podía mover la cabeza. No quiso que le tocaran la cama, ni aún que le arreglaran el almohadón. Sus terrores crepusculares avanzaron en forma de monstruos que se arrastraban hasta la cama y trepaban dificultosamente por la colcha.
Perdió luego el conocimiento. Los dos días finales deliró sin cesar a media voz. Las luces continuaban fúnebremente encendidas en el dormitorio y la sala. En el silencio agónico de la casa, no se oía más que el delirio monótono que salía de la cama, y el rumor ahogado de los eternos pasos de Jordán.

Alicia murió, por fin. La sirvienta, que entró después a deshacer la cama, sola ya, miró un rato extrañada el almohadón.

-¡Señor! -llamó a Jordán en voz baja-. En el almohadón hay manchas que parecen de sangre.
Jordán se acercó rápidamente Y se dobló a su vez. Efectivamente, sobre la funda, a ambos lados del hueco que había dejado la cabeza de Alicia, se veían manchitas oscuras.

-Parecen picaduras -murmuró la sirvienta después de un rato de inmóvil observación.

-Levántelo a la luz -le dijo Jordán.

La sirvienta lo levantó, pero enseguida lo dejó caer, y se quedó mirando a aquél, lívida y temblando. Sin saber por qué, Jordán sintió que los cabellos se le erizaban.

-¿Qué hay? -murmuró con la voz ronca.

-Pesa mucho -articuló la sirvienta, sin dejar de temblar.

Jordán lo levantó; pesaba extraordinariamente. Salieron con él, y sobre la mesa del comedor Jordán cortó funda y envoltura de un tajo. Las plumas superiores volaron, y la sirvienta dio un grito de horror con toda la boca abierta, llevándose las manos crispadas a los bandós. Sobre el fondo, entre las plumas, moviendo lentamente las patas velludas, había un animal monstruoso, una bola viviente y viscosa. Estaba tan hinchado que apenas se le pronunciaba la boca.

Noche a noche, desde que Alicia había caído en cama, había aplicado sigilosamente su boca -su trompa, mejor dicho- a las sienes de aquélla, chupándole la sangre. La picadura era casi imperceptible. La remoción diaria del almohadón había impedido sin duda su desarrollo, pero desde que la joven no pudo moverse, la succión fue vertiginosa. En cinco días, en cinco noches, había vaciado a Alicia.

Estos parásitos de las aves, diminutos en el medio habitual, llegan a adquirir en ciertas condiciones proporciones enormes. La sangre humana parece serles particularmente favorable, y no es raro hallarlos en los almohadones de pluma.

Homer: Scylla and Charybdis (From Greek)

2011-11-18T08:36:00.000-06:00

Scylla and Charybdis
By "Homer" (Odyssey XII.234-259)
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

And on we went, wailing      away at the oars
Steering into the strait      with dire Scylla to port
And to starboard the wrathspawned      sea-scourge Charybdis
Swallowing the salt tide       smashing all courage
And belching it back:      a boiling kettle
Seething over flames.      The spume she spewed
Went spraying the crests      of cliffs on the narrows.
When she sucked down the sea      you could see her roiling,
Hear the roar of the rock      all around, as the sand
Gaped black from the bedrock.      My men blanched in trauma,
Our eyes fixed on that deathmaw,      fearing her glutting.
And then Scylla struck,      whisked six of my men up,
Our six strongest hands.      As I spun my eyes aft
At good ship and dear crewmen      I caught sight of their feet
And hands adangle      overhead. Their voices
Cried out in hellhorror,      calling me by name
That one last time.      The way a fisherman
Crouched on a headland      casting his fell bait,
Hook sheathed in oxhorn,      will sense the thrashing
Of a fish on his rod      and rip it from the waters
To wriggle through the air,      my writhing men
Were carried up cruelly      to the cavern's mouth.
And there in her den      she devoured them raw,
My six toughest men,      friends screaming and reaching
Their arms toward me      in an endlife grapple.
And a deathly grief      gashed my spirit.
I witnessed naught worse      in my warring heart
In all my quests      across the strange sea.

The Original:

“ἡμεῖς μὲν στεινωπὸν ἀνεπλέομεν γοόωντες:
ἔνθεν μὲν Σκύλλη, ἑτέρωθι δὲ δῖα Χάρυβδις
δεινὸν ἀνερροίβδησε θαλάσσης ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ.
ἦ τοι ὅτ᾽ ἐξεμέσειε, λέβης ὣς ἐν πυρὶ πολλῷ
πᾶσ᾽ ἀναμορμύρεσκε κυκωμένη, ὑψόσε δ᾽ ἄχνη
ἄκροισι σκοπέλοισιν ἐπ᾽ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἔπιπτεν:
ἀλλ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἀναβρόξειε θαλάσσης ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ,
πᾶσ᾽ ἔντοσθε φάνεσκε κυκωμένη, ἀμφὶ δὲ πέτρη
δεινὸν ἐβεβρύχει, ὑπένερθε δὲ γαῖα φάνεσκε
ψάμμῳ κυανέη: τοὺς δὲ χλωρὸν δέος ᾕρει.
ἡμεῖς μὲν πρὸς τὴν ἴδομεν δείσαντες ὄλεθρον:
τόφρα δέ μοι Σκύλλη γλαφυρῆς ἐκ νηὸς ἑταίρους
ἓξ ἕλεθ᾽, οἳ χερσίν τε βίηφί τε φέρτατοι ἦσαν.
σκεψάμενος δ᾽ ἐς νῆα θοὴν ἅμα καὶ μεθ᾽ ἑταίρους
ἤδη τῶν ἐνόησα πόδας καὶ χεῖρας ὕπερθεν
ὑψόσ᾽ ἀειρομένων: ἐμὲ δὲ φθέγγοντο καλεῦντες
ἐξονομακλήδην, τότε γ᾽ ὕστατον, ἀχνύμενοι κῆρ.
ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἐπὶ προβόλῳ ἁλιεὺς περιμήκεϊ ῥάβδῳ
ἰχθύσι τοῖς ὀλίγοισι δόλον κατὰ εἴδατα βάλλων
ἐς πόντον προΐησι βοὸς κέρας ἀγραύλοιο,
ἀσπαίροντα δ᾽ ἔπειτα λαβὼν ἔρριψε θύραζε,
ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀσπαίροντες ἀείροντο προτὶ πέτρας:
αὐτοῦ δ᾽ εἰνὶ θύρῃσι κατήσθιε κεκληγῶτας
χεῖρας ἐμοὶ ὀρέγοντας ἐν αἰνῇ δηιοτῆτι:
οἴκτιστον δὴ κεῖνο ἐμοῖς ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσι
πάντων, ὅσσ᾽ ἐμόγησα πόρους ἁλὸς ἐξερεείνων.

Salvatore Quasimodo: Agrigentum Road (From Italian)

2011-11-14T01:11:00.000-06:00

Agrigentum Road
By Salvatore Quasimodo
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in Italian

There a wind remains that I recall afire
within the manes of horses as they slanted
their way across the planes, a wind that chafes
the sandstone and erodes the very hearts
of derelict caryatids cast down
Onto the grass. Soul of antiquity
Gone gray with age and rage, turn back and lean
into that wind, breathe of the delicate moss
clothing those giants tumbled out of heaven.
How lonely what is left to you must be!
And worse: to break your heart to hear once more
that sound resound and dwindle out to sea
where Hesperus already streaks the dawn:
a sad jew's-harp reverberating through
the throat of that loan cartman as he slowly
ascends his moon-cleansed hill again through dark
murmurings of the Moorish olive trees.

The Original:

Strada di Agrigento

Là dura un vento che ricordo acceso
nelle criniere dei cavalli obliqui
in corsa lungo le pianure, vento
che macchia e rode l'arenaria e il cuore
dei telamoni lugubri, riversi
sopra l'erba. Anima antica, grigia
di rancori, torni a quel vento, annusi
il delicato muschio che riveste
i giganti sospinti giù dal cielo.
Come sola nello spazio che ti resta!
E più t'accori s'odi ancora il suono
che s'allontana verso il mare
dove Espero già striscia mattutino
il marranzano tristemente vibra
nella gola del carraio che risale
il colle nitido di luna, lento
tra il murmure d' ulivi saraceni.

Edwin de Kock: Masterwork (From Esperanto)

2011-11-14T00:45:00.000-06:00

If I in some bizarre parallel universe believed in God, this poem gives a rough idea of how I'd imagine Him.

Masterwork
By Edwin de Kock
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Esperanto

If God writes down a little poem
And flatly christens it "John Smith"
Many in all likelihood assess it
As trite, its art-effects as unaesthetic.

Especially if the creation, in every way,
Shows everyday behavior; trowels bricks to earn
His honest bread; does not trill like a bird
In some archaically gorgeous grove,
But by hand -and not by beak- expresses
Himself in melody of slow-moved bricks
Bringing joy or sorrow into being.

Loving with sensational tenderness,
Stubbornly, his children and his wife,
And loving -with no trumpeting- his neighbors
Next door, in China and America,
While his blood courses placidly,
Or rapid with a thunder not quite muffled.

Does not have certain sure opinions
About an obscure universe,
But doublethinks, feels truly what great lies
Are told in every slogan that stokes bloodthirst
By means of bloodless bland abstractions
Against the planet's living or
His little world around the evening table.

Has no easy fix for life's snafus,
Whose life itself isn't always an easy thing
But is a stickler for such little joys
As can be seized from the hour that blossoms away
Over the manure of dying days.
Believes, and in no cynical ennui,
In beauty and good will beneath this sun,
And in the future mankind has no hope for
And does not grieve, nor leaves it to the winds,
But forges with his own two hands, or else
Holds on with patience and a striving faith.

John Smith. A work who won't
Delight the epicureans, won't console
The degradation-buffs with better days,
Rightly a displeasure to the salesmen
That peddle ideological panaceas,
The yawn of all the critics, the reviewers
And maybe even you.

But God, a modern poet,
Finds self-expression in this century's language.
Simply will not be bothered with entreaties
To create, from his blood or another's,
Anything new through routine revolution
(Which would be old-school!) but composes
For the mere few who understand,
With simple heart, a man whose title
Is modernly and modestly John Smith--
With otherworldly tenderness expressed
In this everyday dust of ours sincerely.

The Original:

Majstroverko

Se Dio verkas poemeton
kaj plate nomas ĝin John Smith,
multaj verŝajne opinias ĝin
banala, artefekte ne tre plaĉa.

Precipe se l' kreaĵo tute ĉiutagece
kondutas. Trule perlaboras
sian panon. Ne trilas kvazaŭ birdo
en iu arkaike bela bosko,
sed mane -- ne kantbeke -- sin esprimas,
per melodio de la lantaj brikoj
efektivigas ĝojon aŭ doloron.

Amadas per tenero sensacia
obstine la edzinon kaj infanojn,
kaj krome -- sen trumpetoj -- la najbarojn
apudajn kaj Ĉinuje aŭ Usone,
dum fluas lia sang' serene
aŭ eĉ kun tondro, ne ĉiam mutigita.

Ne havas certajn opiniojn
pri univers' malklara,
sed duonpensas, sentas jes mensogo
ĉiun sloganon kiu sangavidas
per la sensangaj abstraktaĵoj
kontraŭ la vivo de l' planedo aŭ
mondeto propra ĉirkaŭ la vespera tablo.

Ne konas facilajn solvojn por la vivkomplikoj
kies vivo mem ne ĉiam facilas
sed insistegas pri la etaj ĝojoj
kapteblaj el la horo forburĝona
super la sterko de mortantaj tagoj.
Kredas, ke sen cinika lac' ekzista,
pri belo kaj bonvolo sub ĉi suno
kaj la futuro, kiun homo ne esperas
kaj ne lamentas, nek lasas al la ventoj,
sed forĝas propramane aŭ eltenas
kun pacienco kaj strebanta fido.

John Smith. Verko kiu ne
ravigos epikuranojn, kiu ne konsolos
la insistulojn pri la mondrubiĝo,
kiu rekte malplaĉos al vendistoj
de ideologiaj panaceoj,
la recenzantojn oscedigos --
kaj eble ankaŭ vin.

Sed Dio, poet' moderna,
esprimas sin per la lingvaĵo de l' jarcento,
nur ne ĝeniĝas pri postuloj
krei per sia aŭ alies sango
rutin-revolucie ion novan
(laŭ la konservativa skolo!), sed verkas
por la malmultaj komprenantoj
korsimple homon, kun titol'
modesta, aktuala: John Smith --
kun stranga tenereco esprimita
en nia ĉiutaga polv', sincere.

Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati: Poem for the Man of Light (From Arabic)

2011-11-12T13:20:00.000-06:00

Poem for the Man of Light
By Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click here to hear me recite the Arabic

The man of light
Goes vagrant through my sleep at night
He stops in the abandoned corner
To extract words from my memory to write
And rewrite them aloud,
To blot lines out
He looks into the mirror
Of the house sunken deep in the darklight.
He recollects something
And slinks from my sleep.
I wake in dread
And try to recollect some thing
Of what he wrote, of what was said,
In vain. For the light
Has erased the papers and my memory
With daybreak's deadman white.

The Original:

قصيدة لرجل النور
عبد الوهاب البياتي

يتجول في نومي رجل النور
يتوقف في الركن المهجور
يُخرج من ذاكرتي كلماتٍ
يكتبها
ويعيد كتابتها في صوت مسموع
يمحو بعض سطور
ينظر في مرآة البيت الغارق بالظلمة والنور
يتذكر شيئاً
فيغادر نومي
استيقظ مذعوراً
وأحاول أن أتذكر شيئاً
مما قال ومما هو مكتوب
عبثاً ، فالنور
مسح الأوراق وذاكرتي
ببياض الفجر المقتول .

Homer: The Opening of the Odyssey (From Greek)

2011-11-12T11:24:00.000-06:00

A great many readers have, at different times, clamored to see my version of a passage from Homer, to hear what ancient Greek sounded like or to hear what Greek hexameters may have been like. So this is my way of responding. Since the poem is in quantitative hexameters, the oldest meter known in Greek, it seems appropriate that I bring English back to its oldest meters. My verse-practice here is a compromise between the Old English alliterative accentual tetrameters of e.g. Beowulf and the some Middle English alliterative revival This is a practice that has not been attempted in precisely this way as a manner for translating ancient epics.

The recording is an attempt to capture what an ancient professional ῥαψῳδός reciting the poem may have sounded like, using a reconstruction of what Greek sounded like in Athens in the late 5th century BC. For the musical accompaniment employing reconstructed ancient instruments, I am again ever-thankful to the paleomusicologist team Synaulia. For my meditation on the modern understanding of, and attempts at, authentic Ancient Greek pronunciation, click here.

"Fata virumque cano"
By "Homer" (Odyssey 1.1-10)
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in reconstructed Classical Greek pronunciation

Song-weaving Goddess,      speak the memory
Of that man: the waymaker      of words and deeds,
The wanderer, harrowed      through the world and the years,
After sacking the sacred       stronghold of Troy.
Many were the men      of many a nation
Whose cities he beheld,     whose hearts he grasped,
And many the nights      of misery in the fathoms
Of his spirit at sea      struggling for nothing
Save his life, his shipmates'      long-sought homecoming.
But for all his virtue      and valor could do
He couldn't defend them      from damning themselves,
Their reckless cravings      that wrecked them at last:
Those childish fools      profaned and slaughtered
And glutted their stomachs      with the Sungod's cattle.
And that prince of daylight      put out their lives,
And in their eyes darkened      the dawn of homecoming.
Their lore be your song      O lightninglord's daughter,
Immortal Muse!      Once more in our time
Let the legend begin      as you like. We listen.

The Original:

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε·
πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ' οὐδ' ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ·
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

Note:

The pronunciation in the recording is reconstructed classical Attic (i.e. that of Athens in the 5th century BC.) It is not an attempt at authentic Homeric pronunciation (i.e. that of the Ionian and Aeolian oral story-singers of the 9th through 7th centuries B.C. to whom we give the collective byline of "Homer"). So it's less the "original" pronunciation of the text than the pronunciation which Plato, say, would have given it.

The reason, quite simply, is that while we know a few of the ways in which Homeric pronunciation differed- with varying degrees of likelihood- from Attic (e.g. the Homeric existence of a "w" sound as in English "wet" which Attic lost, the Homeric pronunciation of υ as the back vowel /u/ of English "fool" rather than the /y/ of French "lune" or German "über" as in Attic, and about half a dozen other differences) we don't have remotely the level of evidence for it which we do have for the for the phonetic reality of 5th century Athenian utterance, including even such punctilios as sentence intonation and speech-rhythm. To my knowledge, no other pronunciation this ancient can be so plausibly reconstructed in such great detail, (save perhaps that of Vedic Sanskrit if the right people put their minds to it.)

For detailed scholarly work on the sounds of ancient Greek and the prosodic realities of Greek verse delivery see The Prosody of Greek Speech by A.M Devine and L.D. Stephen, Vox Graeca: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Greek by W.S. Allen, part II of Accent and Rhythm also by W.S. Allen, and Zu den Konstituenten des griechischen Hexameters by Stefan Hagel.

Samih Al-Qasim: Kafr Qasim (From Arabic)

2011-11-08T22:13:00.000-06:00

Since Mahmoud Darwish's death, Samih al-Qasim is probably the foremost living Arabic poet of Israeli-Palestinian origin. I'd go so far as to say that he ranks among the best in the entire Arab world. (But what do I know?) He grew up in the village of Rama, and witnessed the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 firsthand. The poem translated here deals with a massacre that was a particularly sad and enraging episode in Israeli history. See my note after the original text for more.

Kafr Qasim
By Samih Al-Qasim
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original in Arabic

No monument raised, no memorial, and no rose.
Not one line of verse to ease the slain
Not one curtain, not one blood-stained
Shred of our blameless brothers clothes.
Not one stone to engrave their names.
Not one thing. Only the shame.

Their ghosts are gyring even now, their groaning shades
Digging through Kafr Qasim's wreckage for graves.

The Original:

كَفرْ قاسم

لا نُصْبَ... لا زهرة... لا تذكار

لا بيت شعر يؤنّس القتلى ولا أستار

لا خِرقة مخضوبة بالدم من قميص

كان على اخوتنا الأبرار

لا حجرٌ خُطّت به أسماؤهم

لا شيء ... يا للعار!

اشباحهم ما بَرَحَت تدور

تَنْبُشُ في انقاض كفر قاسم القبور

On Kafr Qasim:

On October 29, 1956, on the same day the Israelis launched their attack on Egypt, the Israeli border patrol was given special orders. With the impending war in mind, authorities announced a 5:00 curfew (as opposed to the normal evening-curfew) in Arab villages on the border, bolstered with a shoot-to-kill order. Although it was already late afternoon when the order was given and the chief of the village of Kafr Qasim begged the authorities to rescind it, the Israeli military bureaucracy waffled and was ultimately unwilling to inconvenience itself. The villagers working in the fields were too far off to receive word of the curfew in time, and when they returned home, Lt. Gabriel Dahan carried out his orders and had his platoon open fire, murdering 48 civilians, including 13 children (one of them an 8 year old boy) and one pregnant woman. All were Israeli citizens.

It would seem the only reason the massacre was limited to Kafr Qasim, and didn't spread to the other villages where the death-curfew was in effect, is that the local commanders there couldn't bring themselves to obey such an order. (Though some accounts suggest that the shoot-to-kill order was limited to Kafr Qasim, even so, of those stationed in Kafr Qasim itself, Dahan's was the only platoon that did any shooting.)

News of the massacre was initially suppressed (Israel didn't get around to passing anything resembling a free speech law until decades later) for two months by order of Ben-Gurion, so that when the media blackout was lifted and the whole story spilled, it was seen as "old news" by the public in much of the (non-Arab) world, and even if not, it wasn't enough to occupy a whole news cycle. Though a trial was eventually held, and several officers convicted, most were pardoned- and those who weren't ultimately had their sentences reduced to 5 years or less. Indeed, several were promoted. Lt. Dahan was even placed in charge of Arab Affairs in Ramla, as a hilarious little joke from Ben Gurion. har har (sob). Colonel Issachar Shadmi, who was nominally in charge of the area to which the curfew applied, was later tried and found guilty on a technicality, a common tactic to prevent the true source of an order (in this case Shadmi's superiors) from being subject to legal scrutiny, or even verified. Shadmi served no jail time, and was ultimately punished with a fine of precisely one cent.

The trial also resulted in an absurd legal precedent: the judges presiding came to the conclusion that members of the military are not entitled to disobey orders for reasons of moral conviction or out of a subjective belief that a given order was illegal, nor did they have any duty to examine the legality of an order before obeying it, only that soldiers could, and had to, disobey those orders that are plainly illegal, leaving open the question of how one could determine which orders were plainly illegal without stopping to examine their legality, or how a soldier in the field could base that determination on anything other than subjective belief. (Meanwhile, somewhere in the cosmos, the ghost of Adolf Eichmann was chuckling.)

The massacre, being a fine manifestation of Israel as a shining example of Middle Eastern democracy, and of the extraordinarily high regard in which Israel at the time held its Arab population, quickly gained notoriety, and became a symbol for dissidence and resistance. The Israeli military realized that outright massacres of civilians were bad PR, and that it now had to resort to more civilized forms of dehumanization, such as humiliating hour-long personal searches at checkpoints, random arrests without charge, imprisonment of children to put pressure on their parents etc.

It would take another 10 years before the martial law under which Israeli Arabs lived was finally abolished, as Israel's policy toward its Arab citizens (at least officially, though hardly culturally) gradually changed to reflect the fact that Arabs were human. And it took until 2007 before president Shimon Peres finally gave an open full-throated presidential apology for the massacre which one of his predecessors had tried to cover up.

Dino Campana: Autumn Garden (From Italian)

2011-11-08T01:30:00.000-06:00

The punctuation and/or omission of it in my translation is (a) integral to the poem and (b) integral to my translation. The background music for the recording is a digitally retweaked orchestral version of the melody Captain Picard plays on his flute at the end of the Star Trek TNG episode "The Inner Light."

Autumn Garden
By Dino Campana
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Click to hear me recite the original Italian

Unto the ghosting garden unto the laurels mute
Of the green garlands
Unto the autumn land
One last salute!
Out to the dried hillsides
Reddened hard in the terminal sun
Confounded into grumbles
Gruff life afar is crying:
Crying to the dying sun that sheds
A blood that dyes the flowerbeds.
A brass band plays
Ear-piercingly away: the river fades
Out amidst the gilded sands: in the quiet
The great white statues stand at the bridgehead
Turned: and what was once is now no more.
And from the depths of quiet as it were a chorus
Soft and splendorous
Yearns its way to the heights of my terrace:
And in an air of laurel,
In an air of laurel languorous and blade-bare,
Among the statues immortal under sundown
She appears to me, is there.

The Original:

Giardino Autunnale

Al giardino spettrale al lauro muto
De le verdi ghirlande
A la terra autunnale
Un ultimo saluto!
A l’aride pendici
Aspre arrossate nell’estremo sole
Confusa di rumori
Rauchi grida la lontana vita:
Grida al morente sole
Che insanguina le aiole.
S’intende una fanfara
Che straziante sale: il fiume spare
Ne le arene dorate: nel silenzio
Stanno le bianche statue a capo i ponti
Volte: e le cose già non sono più.
E dal fondo silenzio come un coro
Tenero e grandioso
Sorge ed anela in alto al mio balcone:
E in aroma d’alloro,
In aroma d’alloro acre languente,
Tra le statue immortali nel tramonto
Ella m’appar, presente.