John Donne Palimpsest
As virtuous men pass mildly away
And click ‘delete’ on their life’s file,
Messaging their FB friends to say
I’m checking out, but with a smile:
Let’s not freak out and make a scene
Cuz if we do, we’ll lose all cred;
Stop blubbering like a silly teen
Who’s just been told her puppy’s dead.
Like when someone pulls a fire alarm—
A dickish move, though no one died;
But a real fire does way more harm
Than making people wait outside.
We’re better than those fools who just
Want to get laid and can’t deal
With being apart, because lust
Is the only thing they really feel.
I feel you, baby; we’re secure
Enough in our love that absence
Makes the heart grow fonder, more sure
Of each other despite the distance.
So, by that logic, even though
I have to ghost, it’s like I’m here;
In fact, the farther away I go
It’s like, the closer I draw near.
Your kiss is like a tweet gone viral
That gets retweeted endlessly
Trending #love; it spirals
Around the world, and back to me.
And even though – stay with me, now—
That tweet (your kiss) is everywhere,
I’ll give it the emoji ‘Wow!’
And that, my dear, I’ll never share.
You are to me a perfect piece
Of code that nobody can hack;
Your algorithms give release
To me, but keep me looping back.
Milton Palimpsest
When I consider how my light is spent
Playing stupid games like Mafia Wars
Shooting perps and going for high scores
In a dark and damp room in the basement
While the landlady yells at me for rent
And upstairs neighbors stomp around the floors
Making noise while doing Sunday chores;
I’m all: SIGH — Whatever — at that moment
My guy gets killed and the deep, empty black
Seems to whisper: “Chill out. It’s no big deal.
Everyone’s got to figure out their own
Path, and life goes on, insane and out of whack;
So even if this war you fight’s not real:
It’s also cool to sit and play alone.”
Emily Dickinson Palimpsest
Because I could not stop for Death
I texted my friend Marcie
To grab him and we hooked up later
At Club Immortality.
We slow-danced — grooving
To a soft tune
That made us sway until
It jammed hard – Suddenly–
We whirled past the Pit
Where kids like to Grind
And Strobes flashed — so hot
We couldn’t tell
What was What — shivering
With sweat my dress
about to slide off — Dizzy
Death said — Let’s Chill
We paused at the Bar
Kind of a bummer — crowded
No room to sit or even
Put down your Drink–
Since then it’s been ages — but–
Just today Death texted me
And said Let’s try this
New dive called “Eternity”
Pound Palimpsest
And then went down to the ship. Then
became Men’s Rights Activists,
set queer keel to breakers,
then played the $1.5 billion powerball
27 times and lost, sat down
in a daze of tickets feeling numb-
ers falling around us, then got confused
about apostrophes, divots in green
earth filling with blood, then established
domains like “Circe.com” and “Odysseus.org”
fighting for words among cybersquatters, then
voted for Donald Trump, quoting erroneously
from the Constitution, “a man of no fortune…”
“And I stepped back” “ill-starred”
“Lie quiet Divus,” “I mean”…
So that:
H.D. Palimpsest (These Walls Don’t Fall)
On April 6, 2016, an Iraqi college student flying from L.A. to Oakland was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight after another passenger heard him speaking in Arabic on his cell phone.
An ‘inshallah’ here and there,
some threats sent (and retweeted)
through your (and my) feed:
terror of Muslims — no offense–
causing the wheels to halt, the passengers
to disembark from the plane
in hijabs, thawbs, prayerbeads
clicking, the prophecy scrawled
on a paper napkin:
there, as here, bombs resound
in the market, temple, mosque; then
as now, an ambiguous sin:
sudden death from below or
falling from the sky, here,
there, puffs of sand
mark an absence, an open room
where a wall was, or
a stump for a hand:
so in the devastation
a drone strikes, collateral damage haunts us
in the gloom:
unaware, the satellites zoom
in on the craft, ‘Reaper’
or ‘Predator’ we know not:
we type furiously on our devices;
fighting, arguing
in comment streams — we’ve got
too much to say, we post to our walls
where ‘likes’ proliferate,
hieroglyphs of modern affect;
Iraq has nothing to teach us,
we see ourselves in a funhouse mirror,
slow faces melting in hate,
letting the pressure build until
bile bursts from our fingers
(what people will say online!):
inside, mediated pathos,
outside, the whirl of a virtual floor
throws off our footing
and we scroll down, drunk,
searching for a door
that is not there:
the body was made for
no such long sitting without moving,
yet the eyeballs cling to the screen:
the ass? it has grown numb,
the heart sinks down, dead weight,
joints, muscles atrophied, skin gone sallow,
yet the dream holds:
we share the meme: we wonder
who made it? what for?
Andrew Marvell Palimpsest (“The Grower’s Song”)
Used to be I had the world by the tail–
The lush buds fresh and sticky,
Green and kind behind the house
All of it, with me, a giant selfie
Till this babe Julie came and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.
Like, for real–but somehow even while
That happened the buds grew bigger
And toking ’em, you got an even better
Buzz than before, no doubt–
Since Julie hit the scene and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.
Ungrateful custies — how could you
Quit buying your dank from my stash?
And hang out smoking strange bongs
While I sit here, short on cash?
Cuz Julie came around and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.
And tho we once were buds (get it?)
I’ll have my revenge — I’ll pack
Us all in a great big bowl
And light it up, smoke the whole
Damn thing — Julie’s in the house and she
What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.
And so, my plants, who’ve been
More like me than myself, I’ll go
Up in a giant puff of smoke,
Forgotten like a stale old joke,
Since Julie’s here, and she
What I do the pot, does to my head and me.
Translator’s Note
These “translations” – or “adaptations,” “remixes,” etc. – of canonical poems in English resulted from the confluence of scholarly and creative pursuits, both of which continue to inform my evolving idea of translation. I had long been working on a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (books I-VI were published by Shearsman Books in 2015) that at times wanders far afield of the verse structure and sense of the Latin, and more recently, an even freer take on the Eclogues had seemed like a way-station for further experiments. In spring 2016, I had the opportunity to teach a class on poetry and poetics, and circumstances required that I use the Norton Anthology of Poetry for the textbook. Without recourse to my usual trove of small-press volumes, chapbooks, and alternative collections of verse, I was forced to engage – and guide my students through an engagement – with a large number of poems I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about in many years. A sort of semester-long march through some of the “greatest hits” of poetry in English, attempting to elucidate the difficulties of the poems and enjoying the students’ sense of wonder at the boldness of John Donne, the courage of H.D., the mysterious power of Emily Dickinson … A sense of wonder I had felt once upon a time, and now found myself feeling again. Applying some of the creative, discursive techniques I’d been developing in my Latin translation work seemed a natural thing to do – a fun way to “pop the hood and see how the poem worked,” as I was constantly challenging my students to do in classroom discussions – and indeed I learned a lot about the construction of these classic, canonical poems, technical issues of rhetoric and rhythm I never would have thought about if I hadn’t attempted these versions. More importantly I discovered possibilities; as Chris Piuma has written, a “queer mode of translation” is “one that overflows, overjoyed, overcome with potentials.” Joy and potential is what I found in the originals, and what I aspired to with these translations.
David Hadbawnik is a poet, translator, and medieval scholar. His Aeneid Books 1-6 was published by Shearsman Books in 2015. In 2012, he edited Thomas Meyer’s Beowulf (Punctum Books), and in 2011 he co-edited selections from Jack Spicer’s Beowulf for CUNY’s Lost and Found Document Series. He is the editor and publisher of Habenicht Press and the journal kadar koli, a co-editor of eth press, which focuses on creative interactions with medieval texts, and associate director of punctum books. Recent poems and translations have appeared in Blackbox Manifold and seedings.
Original Artwork by Michael Welsh. He is an artist, writer, and curator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He is a founding member of GWC Investigators, a paranormal research group and publisher of New World UNLTD. Welsh's work has been exhibited throughout the United States at High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; American Medium, Brooklyn, NY; Printed Matter, New York, NY; Appendix Project Space, Portland, OR; Bric Arts Media, Brooklyn, NY; GCA, Brooklyn, NY; Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN; Helper Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; among others. His artists books can be found on the Publication Studio and Social Malpractice Publishing labels.