IV. Homage to Boris Lurie
Translation is enlightenment.
When you translate yourself to another language, cast away the dictionary.
If you do not forget your first language, on your death bed you will still say O Jerusalem.
O Jerusalem, your artichoke is highly competitive with other plant species.
Upon first taking the vow of poetry, he thought poetry was its own reward but he was mistaken.
For poetry is composed of letters. It letteth the loin lie down with the limb on a bed of rosemary and thyme.
Sie führt einen nach Lettland, um sich mit Lettinnen und Letten zu unterhalten, außer in Riga. It takes one to Latvia because they are very “live and let live” there. Except in Riga.
Yea, for it is most commodious of accommodation and communes with the community, poetry does.
Comma, comma, comma, commodity, you come and go, you go and come. (He often thought by adjusting the lines of others.)
Poetry and non-poetry are no different. Or is this true only for insufficiently rigorous poetry.
I, as a composer of insufficiently rigorous poetry, am part of the global struggle to alleviate poetry! Or so he thought. What’s with the pronouns.
Poetry can be alleviated by translation. Translation such as that of a body has been paragoned with enlightenment in this very poem.
For it taketh the load off. It relaxes the lexicon and reduces the syntax, liberalizing consumption.
No puns for me, Argentina. I have carried a case of the bitters to the Americas but all the locals give me is lip.
V. Bullet Ballet
The bullet is cognate to the German word for meatball.
It is said that every bullet has its billet. Is it a sweet billet.
No bullets have as yet lay down on pallets in the home that is this body.
They made their ballads, the talking heads. The ballads were burdensome.
O I fain would lie down lady muder.
My mother is watching some doodah of ballistics firing on her iPad. I am not sure what war she is participating vicariously in.
The little war went to market for many a belle bit the bull.
When the morality moron enters a market in porcelain, some bite the meat of their balls but others bite the meat of other people’s balls. And the pallid take up pilates, that is to say, the washing of hands.
When a ballet enters the brain, the head executive explodes.
That is to say that an uncertain ballet was broadcast every time the head executive of an uncertain nation was passing.
Many members of the copulation desired to observe that ballet on television. Such power had art in the old days!
Now what can you say save disgust emojis. Ballistics artists discussed market bias.
The civilian lay bellowing in the Sicilian manner as a list of bullets ran down his shirtfront.
Bullet lists allow you to organize information more easily for your reader. They do not imply any chronology or hierarchy of entries.
VIII.
What does it say on the imposter poster. What does it not say.
It says it has its back to the wall.
It says. The settler is unsettling. It says. This girl is on fire.
Hotter than a fantasy. Lonely like a highway. Better look the other way.
It says. These remnants of habitations lie on the shore in the shape of remnants.
Whose remnants are they. Who owns them.
O evening drone, O evening drone, how many dooms do you train your sights on.
Why don’t the dispossessed exhibit more self-possession. So it says. To.
People living on stolen land protesting other people for living on stolen land.
It says. These civilians are uncivil. Let us call them the uncivilians.
This army is humane and has many arms. Tunnel vision is the ophthalmology of freedom.
Free what. Oh, that’s Crazy Eddie. He’s giving it all away. We’re not gonna take it.
Calgon, take me away. Take him away. Shoot me now. Will you shoot him now or wait till you get home.
There’s no place like home. No place for whom. Let us hone in on it.
X. Doofus’s Spring Review
The nation is shattered. It is shuttered.
Grass pushes through cracks in concrete. No, glass. My bad.
Mounds of discrete concrete on corners, discreet treacly trickles.
Spring sprang sprung.
Are those tears occasioned by a pollen allergy.
No, pollen is еast of Stettin.
Is that honking the call of a solitary wild goose.
No, the booby-trap is alarmed.
High in a hole in a hollowed highrise: a light flash.
Will the nations get any notions to sew, whose fingers are red and turgid.
Passer-by passes on, call the ambivalence ambulance.
There is no signal on the cellular level.
All hedgehogs look just as wiry to a hare.
The grenade is not accepting my pin.
Notes
Boris Lurie arrived in New York in 1946, after surviving concentration camps in Latvia and Germany. As the founder of NO!Art movement in the 1960s, he protested the collusion of pop art and abstract expressionism with capitalist market values. Lurie’s own art was marked by the inability to reconcile his Holocaust experience with American consumer culture, which scandalized him.
The German word for meatball is Boulette. “Bellowing in the Sicilian manner” refers to the Bull of Phalaris, a torture instrument of an ancient Sicilian tyrant mentioned in Canto 27 of Dante’s Inferno. The poem was composed in response to Brian Turner’s Here, Bullet, for a reading at the Deutsche Oper in April 2024.
“Crazy Eddie” and “Calgon” allude to television advertising of the 1980s.
“Doofus’s Spring Review” is a pun translation of Du Fu’s most famous poem, “Spring View,” composed in 756 CE after the capture of the Tang-dynasty capital, Chang’an, by rebel forces in a catastrophic civil war.
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!