kishkes & knubble

en una gota de agua buscaba su voz el nino

среда, апреля 12, 2006

finest honey ( curdled ) : useless to the bee

a very clever medieval poet in Hebrew is named Immanuel of Rome. some verse:


The Odious Girl

O creative Intelligence! The day you created Gershom's daughter, you shamed the universe, for in her body you brought odium to perfection. It seems you had a vile dream and interpreted it.

Perhaps you vowed to lump all loathsome things together? Or else proposed to fashion an owl and a monkey? How did you ever dream up such a dream? Were you soul-sick or were you drunk?

Tell me, Angel of delineation: were your scribers or callipers stolen from you, so that you had to use a winnowing shovel in making Gershom's daughter?

Or did the stars rise up against her? Did the Crab and the Scorpion then station themselves at the tail end of the Serpent, as it ascended the heavens?

The Wife's Complaint

Two years have already passed since I took a husband, but he is still alive, and I can have no pleasure. If only he would die of lightning's dart ir thunder's roar, I would be queen among the charming ladies.

Day after day I call for Death to come, for my soul longs for a change of fare. I do not know how this outrage will end. Oh, perish the day when I came into his house!

I see that my neighbour, within the span of thiry months, has three times buried a husband. All the neighbourhood wives exclaim: "How happy she must be!

"She spurned heroes and princes. Like a lioness, she made her lair among young lions, and she lay in their midst, bearing her cubs."


The Miser

--And this poem I wrote about the man who secretly wore my clothes:--

Behold this scoundrel -- may his end be bitter, may the heavens lay bare his guilt! He has flocks of his own, but rather than deplete them he prefers to take the poor man's lamb. He has a foreskin, but for fear of wearing it out he would rather use his neighbor's when he copulates.

The Egoist

This friend -- when I summoned him, to come to his aid, he swooped to my side like a bird from its high nest. But when I summoned him, to come to my aid, he turned as deaf as an asp that stops its ears. He is like a blacksmith's dog, living in a forge: he dozes off and sleeps to the sound of the hammers, but wakes up for meals to the sound of teeth.

I forget whose translation: align="right">tell no one this

a major poet of Russian died recently.

Slav related to Rus slava, glory, &, more originally, slovo, word. neighboring persons were calld Nim, for mute or wordless; this survives as, among cetera, the contemporary Russian for German -- nemjets -- & the name of actor-cum-biblical-hooplameister Leonard Nimoy. the onomatopoetic equivalent in Latin is barbarus, literally "person who when he talks sounds like this: barbarbarbar", meaning simply foreigner, whence of cors our barbarian.

or

Slav from slowein, a name for a river full of jags used for purification

or

Slav from the (I forget) proto-slavic for entangled. knots were sacred to the ancient Slavs.

Russian has two words for Russian, importantly; rossijskij means of the Russian Federation, while russkij means of Russian ethnos. the language, then, is russkij for sure; the olympic team is rossijskij. the distinction is active (whereas it's my understanding that, in Chinese for instance, it's normal to call evrything zhong, even tho zhong is the "middle" of "Middle Kingdom" (a bad translation), while the people are han) & makes changes in language.

Rus' is, either way, the parent form of both; it's probably an old Viking word for oarsman -- the Vikings founded Russia as a waystation on the trip downriver to -- that city of cats & burlaps, cardamom starcharts & feathers -- Baghdad

the death of Gennadij Ajgi

contained within the Russian Federation
are 21 autonomous republics
with hills language languages
national diameters
from sense to
similarity

anything is spoken

on the level of specificity
there's
only one a
& no end of thes

a palinode a rose that may rain
the loosestrife

passing in the rain
in slow dreams of pleasure

a language with as many
words for
love as loves
death as dead
words for
so what are words for

mouths wanted him to chase her
surface in the sense meaning
bound by conflicts
words for anything,
eye sphere atom ash
rose that may rain
in the slow passing of pleasure

a language in which "love" cannot
go in the accusative
or the aorist (Archie calls it a sponge)
because, in that flash of the transitive,
is already rain

a language in which
the sentence "I love you"
leaves you a stem
& torrents
and she, they, red petals & yellow

I do not know how to get the formatting right, but that text is, for now, spaced wrong

1 Comments:

Blogger d said...

The guy working next to me, who is sort of my boss because he's the only one who has explained what I'm supposed to do, just received a pair of Knicks tix from THE FIRM. THE FIRM has season passes to The Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees, all very very good seats. Sometimes, if you work here, you receive these. There does not appear to be any incentive program attached.

четверг, 13 апреля, 2006  

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