verbosity city

25

fuck you’re pathetic (softer than a hare’s hair
or goose-down or the dip of an earlobe
or a flaccid old cock or flimsy cobwebs) but
you take and take more than a twisting hurricane
(the god of thieves soon as everyone gets sleepy), well
i want my shit back: that cloak you were all over
and my nice napkins and my pretty portraits (which
you’re stupid enough to show off like they’re owed you) —
so part your claws now and give it all back, or you
might find your slight, soft sides and your delicate hands
inscribed (by a whip) with ugly scars — then you’ll
writhe (in a new way, for you) like a shitty little ship
at the mercy of a boundless sea, a mindless wind.

-

Postscript: this one gave me grief. Randomly picking out Catullus 25 so early in my campaign (I'm sorry, it's been so long I've forgotten who gave me the number) was a bit like falling into the deep end when you thought you were standing next to a kiddie pool. (Not that any of this is, like, easy.) It wasn't the excess of proper nouns — Catullus 4 knocked the fear of god into me on that front — but the tone. Obviously in Latin it's all very rude, but the language is rich with imagery, and it's hard to translate that into English without getting a bit pretty. This crude language in the original — cinaedus, pene, inepte (you can guess those ones) — made me pretty hell-bent on dropping an f-bomb in the translation. (I actually had more at various stages of drafting, but I took them all out and then stuck the one at the beginning last-minute.) I also let myself be colloquial elsewhere, such as translating minuta (tiny) as "shitty little." The trick, I found, was balancing this crude, conversational tone with moments of genuinely beautiful language (I'm particularly proud of the last line), which captures that shifting tone.

There's an undercurrent which I found that most translations don't push far enough: this poem is horny. This can be folded into some of the descriptive language, but I didn't want it to feel tacked on. I wanted the opening to set the tone. Catullus opens by (somewhat hypocritically) calling out his frenemy Thallus for being a cinaedus, or sodomite — so I challenged myself to carry through that feeling while turning the focus of the insult away from Thallus' sexuality. I ended up calling him "pathetic," which brings "pathic" to mind (thus keeping that connection) and, I feel, modernises the insult nicely. It also provides a solid link to the next section, which is Catullus itemising the ways in which Thallus is "soft." So: "fuck you're pathetic" — an opening which draws on the sexual insult in the Latin, and conveys a sense of frustration, as I'm sure anyone would feel if someone they're fucking was also stealing their prized possessions at dinner parties. (I'm also pretty happy with how I made the line about writhing beneath a whip horny. Like... sometimes you just have to go there.)

But beyond all of this, the biggest problem I had with Catullus 25 is that there are some words missing. Well, there's a line with two words in contention, marked by what I think of as the graveyard sign, for where the original meaning goes to die: cum diva †mulier aries† ostendit oscitantes. It is not an exaggeration to say I spent literally months thinking about this, wondering which of the many transcriptions and translations I consulted would best act as my guide. At times I considered throwing caution to the wind and making up my own translation around the nonsensical mulier aries. Then I was like: wait a second, I can do whatever I want, I can just make something up! I wanted to keep the meaning of the words we're certain about — cum to give immediacy, the goddess diva, sleepy oscitantes — while giving the line as a whole a new meaning that makes it feel like a bridge to the rest of the poem. (A lot of the extant translations get a little "sentence fragment" around here.) So we get this line about Thallus as the "god of thieves," which makes his actions pretty explicit, in a way that it's hard to do by implication with all the other thievery words in this poem. It's conjecture, but I like to think Catullus would approve.

In the end, my experimentation with tone and language led to experimentation with format: I haven't been so strict as I usually am about keeping all the words on their same lines as in the Latin, and I've played around with punctuation a bit. As a result, this looks a little different to my other No-Namedrop Catullus poems so far, and to the other translations of 25 I've studied. But sometimes a good fall in the deep end is just what you need: my confidence with this project is at an all-time high, and you can bet it's only going to get weirder from here.

this is a found poem resulting from a playthrough of my game THELMA, a Hamlet soliloquy generator which helps you grab random lines from the play to form into something new. I've done some slight editorialising to make it make sense, but other than that these are all lines straight out of Hamlet, in the random order generated for me by THELMA. (the only line I discarded was one right from the beginning of the play: "Barnardo?")

I've decided that this soliloquy belongs to Horatio, speaking to Ophelia's grave while Hamlet is still at sea. he's haunted by thoughts of Hamlet's madness, of his aimless pursuit of Claudius, of his growing vitriol towards his mother. it's with mixed feelings that he bears his soul to the earth that holds Ophelia; in many ways, this speaks to some prescience, that Horatio sees Hamlet's trajectory in hers.

---

As level as the cannon to his blank,
so please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet —

Elsinore,
your skill shall, like a star i’ th’ darkest night,
show his grief. Let her be round with him;
howe’er my haps, my joys were ne’er begun.
“A villain kills my father; and for that,
boarded them on the instant they got clear of our ship.” So I —

Who is’t that can inform me?
Demanded of a sponge, what replication should be made by the son?
E’en so, my lord,
but yet to me they are strong. The Queen his mother
is but variable service — two dishes, but to one table. That’s the —

Believe what?
That for a fantasy and trick of fame,
of general assault,
do you see nothing there?

I hop’d thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife.

This personal essay was featured in OURS - A Food Zine, a collection of childhood food memories. The zine has recently shipped to purchasers, so we're allowed to post our work online - be sure to check out the zine's twitter for more art and articles! Here's mine: a meditation on youth, identity, and soup.

---

It’s early evening, a chill in the air and the setting sun tinting the world red, and Esau is on his way home. He’s been out on the fields since that same sun rose over the Levant. The timing is just right that Esau arrives as his twin brother Jacob is preparing himself some red lentil pottage for dinner.

“Brother,” says Esau, the firstborn son by a technicality of seconds, “may I have some? I have been hard at work. I’d do anything for some food.”

Jacob, who longs to be his father’s heir, looks up from his crockpot at his starving brother and says, “Anything?”

This is a familiar feeling; you don’t need to be labouring on the land to understand desperate hunger. Esau traded his birthright, his status as his father’s heir and the future that came with it, for a bowl of lentils. I think, given the circumstances, I probably would have done the same.
The tale of Esau and Jacob is biblical, recorded in the Book of Genesis. Before Genesis entered the greater public conscience as part of the Old Testament, it was the first book of the Torah, the Jewish Bible. I never read the Torah growing up. I was raised an atheist and I have never been observant, but I am Jewish enough to know that, in a culturally Christian society, I am other. Some Jewish kids went to Shul. I, with almost religious fervour, watched and rewatched the Rugrats Chanukah and Passover specials on VHS. Though these stories are far removed from the biblical texts that inspired them, they are inescapably Jewish — and, after all, the Jewish history is one of displacement.

As a kid, I connected to my heritage not through stories, but through something more tangible. Because being Jewish is an ethnicity and a culture as well as a religion, we are well versed in the kinds of tradition that passes down through generations. Food is no exception.

My parents came to Australia as immigrants before I was born. Growing up in an cultural minority leads to a hyperawareness of your own culture, and food is so integral an ingredient of cultural identity. The Australian culinary landscape — sausage rolls, fairy bread, and all that — is innately familiar to me. But to be a first generation Australian with roots outside the British colonial project is to lead a double life: the food you eat at home is not the food you see at the homes of your school friends whose families have been here for a century or more.

Some of these differences are small. In the homes of my white Australian school friends, their parents might put out batons of raw carrot and celery, sometimes accompanied by peanut butter. At my grandma’s house, a snack before lunch was chopped chicken liver and egg salad on challah. One of those words — challah, a braided bread — isn’t even English. But these are minor differences, in the scheme of things: on the playground I was another white kid, and I privileged from the benefit of the doubt that kids from celery stick families would extend to people who looked like them.

There are more drastic differences. I tried pork for the first time at the age of 24. Though my family doesn’t keep kosher, I have always eaten things like bacon, salami, and prosciutto — but these are easy to prepare. Pork, for the uninitiated, is not. I can remember many occasions throughout my childhood where my parents would talk about how much they loved pork, and how it was something I should add to my diet, yet it was never on the menu at home. If you don’t grow up with something as part of your experiences at home, you don’t pass that onto your kids, your kids don’t think of it as an option, and then your kids get to explain to their laughing friends, “No, really! I’ve never eaten it, not even once!”

The point is not that my parents have failed at some unspoken test by excluding something from the majority culture out of my diet — it is that society at large fails to consider these cultural peculiarities as an expression of diversity. And that is, after all, one of the joys of growing up somewhere like Australia: there are people from every corner of the world here, and any number of dishes to try at your friends’ homes.

When I think of food that resonates with my childhood, I struggle to paint a cohesive picture. My childhood home has shelves devoted to cookbooks, and the food I ate was similarly cobbled together from all over the place. The things that stand out are the ones I can connect to a story. What’s my favourite meal? I don’t really know. But I can tell you which meals come from which parts of my past, and all the associations I have with them.

The story of Esau and Jacob can be interpreted in many ways. Jacob is worthy of the title because of his clever trick; or he is immoral because he gained power through deception. Esau is unworthy because he was so willing to give it all away on an impulse.

I cannot help but sympathise with Esau. What is birthright when your people have been scattered by centuries of persecution? What do you inherit, when you grow up in the diaspora? Though this was not Esau’s story, the rejection of birthright for Earthly pleasures resonates with my experience growing up Jewish in Australia. In the absence of a country of origin, I have maintained my own connection to my Jewishness through fiction, friends, and — of course — food. Esau may have lost his birthright, but he had a taste of something that would endure through millennia as part of the Jewish cultural consciousness. And a damn good meal, too.

The version of Esau’s red lentil pottage I’ve grown up eating is not particularly tethered to my own Jewish heritage. Pottage can refer to a thick soup or a stew; mine settles definitively on the side of soup, and the red lentils have been augmented with the flavour of lemons in the Middle Eastern tradition, though my family is European. When I asked my dad for the recipe, he couldn’t remember where he’d first found it, but he made a point of telling me that the lemons are the key to the dish. Fresh lemons, not overripe. My mum misheard, and wondered why the soup was named after Aesop. She may as well have been right — the story of Esau and Jacob is no more a part of my family history than Aesop’s Fables, and certainly nowhere near as much as the soup itself. I cooked it for myself, but it was not quite right; to aim for a precise reconstruction of the past is an impossible endeavour. I would encourage you to try, though, to seek out your own recipe and build your own tradition. To find lentils, and lemons, and to decide for yourself: what would you give up for this?

Writing this is one way
to keep myself awake. If
I am awake now (nearly
3am destination time)
Then I will pull through
having passed the all-nighter
threshhold [sic]. I will remain
awake for almost two full
waking days then I will
crash the last 9 hrs in my
window seat and we may
hope that time “flies” by.

I am awake now to see the
sun rise over the middle east
horizon but writing in the
dark out of some misguided
politeness not to turn on my
light — not sure why as
everyone else on this plane is
an asshole, from the guy in
front of me whose seat is
all the way back to the
toddler whose foot is now
mercifully no longer entirely
on my leg, just kicking it —
so I write by the ever-
changing display of the
flight map.

If the sun could
rise higher I might
dim my window but yet
continue to stay awake
by the glare.
The cities below are
Sparkling and I see
the engine flashing red
periodically but these [illegible - lights?]
are no help to my
predicament of writing
in the darkness while
being kicked by a toddler.

To set the scene: it’s 2016, high summer in the northern hemisphere, and I’m on my way back from my first international conference as the miniature of an academic. I’m schlepping a poster tube to and from the other side of the world—I really had travelled to roughly where I would be if I drilled a hole straight through the earth from my hometown—and now it’s an encumbrance in the departure lounge. I am also deeply, excruciatingly sick. It’s the common cold, but I am, in constitution, more Anne De Burgh than Lizzie Bennett, and even the common cold is vicious when you’re about ten hours early for your connecting flight. I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language and there are few English books on sale to keep me company—which is fine, because I had been planning on reading Wolf Hall for a while, anyway.

Of course, I got about seventy pages into it before passing out for both legs of my flight—the airport in the middle is a smudge on my memory—and when I landed I didn’t pick it back up.

This turned out to be a grievous error, as I finally realised long before I finished reading Wolf Hall a week or so ago. Though, I am glad I started again from the beginning. There was so much I had forgotten. The reason I tell this story is not because it was one of the five stories I rehearsed in case of small talk while I was carrying the book about my person, but because it has the best last line of perhaps any book I’ve ever read. (Related: I am not particularly creative in the blog post title department.)

A couple of friends and I were chatting about the amount of importance we put on last lines, and first lines, but I’ll get to those in a moment. The question posed forced me to confront the fact that, despite what everyone has told me in good faith, I place far more import on last lines than first. This could be a subjective thing: I, personally, struggle so much with last lines that I dread the act of finishing a story more than I fear asking a waiter for a thing of water for the table. But then again, would I loathe last lines so much if I didn’t feel they were so key to the story? What you take from the last line is the last thing you get. A bad last line can leave you with an itch at best; at worst, it can tinge the whole story a different shade in hindsight.

So what of the first line? Most people will tell you that the first line needs to be the hook, the thing that gets people into the story. I once heard it said that your reader ought to be invested from the very first word. This is good advice, insofar as it reminds me to check that the first word of everything I write isn’t “the” or “it.” I think the importance of the first line is overstated. The first line’s key purpose is not to convince you to read something (you have probably already decided to do that!) but to tell you what kind of story you’re reading. The first line sets tone, atmosphere, and expectations: it situates you in the world of the story, which is necessary in order for any further exploration or subversion to occur. Of course, this ought to proliferate the first scene, and to an extent the rest of the story, but I think the force of the atmosphere’s presence should be particularly strong in the opening line. The first line of Wolf Hall is ‘So now get up.’ It’s good, but it’s still arguably part of an overall atmosphere-setting effect. I feel that, as a line taken on its own, the last holds much more power than the first.

Something to think about.