Category Archives: verse and worse

Google Translate is not good at classical Greek

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 19-35, in my amateur translation:

Prometheus, you will always suffer under 
One tyrant or another, uncomforted:
That’s the price of befriending people.
A god, you didn’t fear the rage of gods
When you gave mortals the forbidden gifts.
The penalty: you’ll always guard this rock,
This awful rock. No sleep, no rest; you can’t even
Move your leg. You just sing out your anguish
To no effect. Prometheus, it is a hard thing
To change the mind of the king of the gods.
For every new ruler is harsh and cruel.

And according to Google TranslateTM:

Arthovoulos Themidis absolutely, 
Nearby of dissolvable copper
I use human ice cream
It is neither the voice nor the brute form
Light, constant flame retardant
you have to pay for flowers. Tied up
lei a variety of hidden hides,
thunderstorms if the sun again:
This is a bad thing
bury you: à à à ù ù ù

this is what I give to the philanthropic way.
God forbid, not even for the balloons
Honorable Mention I Am Out Of Trial.
There are no stone guards here
Arthostadin, Cleft, the knee flexor:
a lot of good people and good people.
Type: Two grams of unpleasant brakes.
You left me alone in the new hold.

More Temperate

Most trees have leafed out for two or three days.
Each leaf unfolding in place to fill its space, green;
But the trees that flowered are wilting now,
Bold blooms shrinking to leave more space between,
Dwindling to stipples along each bough.
Superimposed: a lacy screen, damascened,
Patches on a slate background--the dripping sky--
Grey except at some hidden place where a break
Must let the sun flood up to certain high
Shingles, a wire, a spire that's a streak
Of brilliant white. All silent, a still sheen,
Sheer, stretched thin to fade or end in a blaze.

tangled beauty

Let us be glad for tangled things--
   For soiled fingers raking thick-stemmed grass;
     For matted fur on long, warm ears;
Or child's hair idly twisted in rings.
   A thatch of ganglia fires in the brain's wet mass:
     A thought--electric--splits, connects, adheres.

All things rooted, snarled, or tensed,
   Whatever needs some mesh to form its mass,
With loops, forks; twists, knots; ends, tears.
   Let's give thanks for things that are soft and dense. 

See also: for Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Pied Beauty, illustrated.

when the lotus bloomed

I was so distracted, tense, and busy
That I missed the lotus bloom.
Though preoccupied and hasty
I sensed something in the room—
Caught that subtle scent of longing,
That mute yearning to be still—
But I hadn’t yet an inkling
That the flower was my will.

(Answering Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali #20, “On the Day When the Lotus Bloomed,” which begins—in Tagore’s own English translation—“On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.”)

anxieties of influence

Emerson, Lowell, cummings, and Plath,
Stevens, Roethke, Frost, MacLeish, and Hall,
Ashbery, Bishop, Eliot and Rich–

I write them down in verse, shuffling their names
To fill my lines, making them my material,
They who took all the words I want to use.

(Longfellow, his house a federal shrine,
Is too “historic” to trouble me much.
Phyllis Wheatley, too, but all honor to her;
And grey Amherst is a world apart.)

My adopted city is still more theirs than mine,
Though they have settled into matte darkness
While I still walk the prosaic blocks,
Narrow sidewalks, double-decker homes,
Gingerbread, brutalism, and maple leaves,
And belligerent drunks who own their spots
Until the streetlights dim and the town stirs.

— Cambridge, MA, November 2018