This translation machine is broken-
trying to say love and it says hate
put in a phrase of friendship tokens
and it levels one at hell's gate

"New-Speak" and Homeland insecurities
una máquina rota, spells of discontent
What breaks borders other language;
Is it bred of complacent, lazy lengua ?

Languishing in privileged syllables
boiling over rice stew vocabularies
slamming with a hip-go spiritual
trying to make sadza in this crucible

This hairpin empire vomits convolutions
history, her-story, suffer culture's debt
education's deficit mouths a babble revolution
while a classicist argument tattles future threats

Talk a tale of totem's gift in parable or song
spill some beans and climb a stalk up a golden path
Give tongue your peace with liberal speech along
while some may grunt we sing a verdant poem

-cec



sadza - in Shona, Ugali in East Africa, is a cooked cornmeal that is the staple food in Zimbabwe and other parts of southern and eastern Africa. This food is cooked widely in other countries of the region. Sadza in appearance is a thickened porridge.

So instinctively
A working class classicist
That his shopping lists,
Though composed as ottava
Rima's, always contained slang

and the three type of mustard: sarekpsa, dijon & bavarian.

i once offered a challenge,
   which wasn't much -
      never rhyme like a fool -
but narrate like horem -
   never rhyme like a "poet" -
rather, narrate like a virgil -
rhyme is dead,
   and the school of "poets"
obsessed, conscious of invoking
a pun metaphor whatever it
is they use to replace
craft of carpentry - nail
hammer etc. -
     and i was told:
  you want to make your writing
as rigid and bland as
an *ikea manual for putting
up some shelves?
        nothing spontaneous,
nothing nuanced,
  nothing of a cabaret voltaire
types of expression?
  fine by me,
mould me an effigy,
rather than, as a god,
an animate body of blood
**** and bones...
     and someone once said
of the porcelain ballerina
beauties: mandible on the stage,
but a necrophilic fest in
the bedroom...
          and yes, i have an answer
to nihilism...
like depression was once called
the romantic name
melancholy - this too was
once called by a romantic name...
someone once said:
there is nothing worse than
apathy -
   but as the name suggests:
a lack of pathology -
  and i bring into the chess match
a counter to nihilism -
apathy, or as it's known
in romantic terms:
                            nonchalance.
so i ask, are you dealing with
the "arithmetics" of poetry
i.e. metaphor + pun + simile = poem,
or, are you the classicist i take
you to be, enriching yourself
with the puritanical case of, narration?

PER NOCTEM IN NIHILO VEHI
( TO VANISH BY NIGHT INTO NOTHING )

my death approached me
but: went on by without
recognising it was I...

i hid in the filthy alley
of a passing hour
Death now furiously searching for me

no...Here: here
no...There: there - either
this tiny piece of time

the once and once
only

but Mr. Death had missed the moment
had to return empty handed
I finding myself madly in love with

the next second. . .

**

Mr. Death elects to speak in Latin...thinks it gives him a certain je ne sais quoi...

It's always great to cheat Mr. Death and his henchman Mr. Heartattack. I swore to myself that I would love the next second with all my heart!

In addition to its inclusion among the many translations of Catullus' collected poems, Catullus 101 is featured in Nox (2010), a book by Canadian poet and classicist Anne Carson that comes in an accordion format within a box. Nox concerns the death of Carson's own brother, to which the poem of Catullus offers a parallel. Carson provides the Latin text of 101, word-by-word annotations, and "a close and almost awkward translation".

Multās per gentēs et multa per aequora vectus
adveniō hās miserās, frāter, ad īnferiās,
ut tē postrēmō dōnārem mūnere mortis
et mūtam nēquīquam alloquerer cinerem
quandoquidem fortūna mihī tētē abstulit ipsum
heu miser indignē frāter adēmpte mihī
nunc tamen intereā haec, prīscō quae mōre parentum
trādita sunt trīstī mūnere ad īnferiās,
accipe frāternō multum mānantia flētū.
Atque in perpetuum, frāter, avē atque valē.

Having been carried through many nations and over many seas,
I arrive, brother, at these wretched funeral rites
so that I might present you with the last tribute of death
and speak in vain to silent ash,
since Fortune has taken you, yourself, away from me.1
Alas, poor brother, unfairly taken away from me,
now in the meantime, nevertheless, these things which in the ancient custom of ancestors
are handed over as a sad tribute to the rites,
receive, dripping much with brotherly weeping.
And forever, brother, hail and farewell.

Catullus 101

Marcus Aurelius was emperor over the last generation
of classicists and himself a classicist;      In Cruttwell's
view which had not been expressed by Teuffel,
Silver Latin was a "rank, ****-grown garden"
in decline. Cruttwell had already decried what he saw
as a loss of spontaneity             in Golden Latin
[an entirely fictitious phenomena composed               by  
writers of the Latin Silver Age  by fic·ti·tious supposed Golden Latin
authors                            fikˈtiSHəs/adjective
adjective: fictitious
not real or true,                 being imaginary or
having been fabricated.
"she pleaded guilty         to stealing thousands
in taxpayer dollars by having
a fictitious employee on her payroll"
synonyms: false, fake, fabricated,
sham; bogus, spurious,            assumed,
                                  a­ffected,
        adopted, feigned,      invented, made up;
informal:                                 pretend, phony
"a fictitious name"
antonyms: genuine
   relating                     to or denoting the imaginary
characters                     and events found in Silver Age fiction.
"the people in this novel are fictitious;
the background                                      of public events is not" ;
early 17th century:                                     from Latin ficticius
(from fingere ‘contrive, form’)
+ -ous (see also -itious).created
by the Silver Age as a fancied
juxtaposition to the decay of their own times].
That Teuffel                                     should regard the Silver Age as a loss
of natural language                          and therefore of spontaneity,
implies                           that there was a (              ) Golden Age,
                        passing over w/out comment
the discomfiting aspect for time-travelers
being              the impossibility of a Golden Silver Age:           excluding the bronze & Copper                     [cultures whose technologies
had more to do w/               agricultural duties,
leading to astronomy                 .               Instead, Tiberius                     brought  about a sudden collapse of letters.
The idea of a decline               had been dominant in English
society since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire. But once again, Cruttwell
evidenced some unease with the stock pronouncements:
"The Natural History                         of Pliny [typical of Dark Age Scholasticism]      shows how much remained to be done in every    
                              field of great interest."
However,       the idea of Pliny as a model is not consistent  
         with any sort of decline; moreover, Pliny did his best
work under emperors at least as tolerant
as Augustus had been. To include some of the best
writings of the Silver Age, (                        ),  Cruttwell
found he had to extend the period through the death
of Marcus Aurelius, 180 AD. The philosophic prose
of that good emperor was in no way compatible
with either [Teuffel's view of unnatural language]
or [Cruttwell's depiction of a decline].
Having created these constructs,   the two erstwhile
philologists found they could not then justify them;
apparently, in the worst implications of their views,
[there was no Classical               Latin by the ancient definition] at all  
                                 .
Some of the very best writing
of any period in world history
is a combination of stilted &
degenerate unnatural language.
                                 .
The Silver Age also furnishes the only
two extant Latin novels: Apuleius's
The Golden *** and Petronius's      Satyricon.
                                ☉
Per­haps history's best-known example
of fictitious Classical Latin was written by Pontius Pilate
on the placard placed above Jesus' Cross:
IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM,
which translates to Jesus the Nazarean
the King of the Judeans (Jesus of Nazareth
the King of the Jews).