AUG 30/ 2024

Speaking of translations, heres an old translation-of-a-translation of a Boris Rhyzy poem. Alot are in English translation already but this one was in French only. I sort of like the telephone game of translating translations, Im not sure why since it probably degrades the original form a bit. Maybe thats why its so exciting, debasing the original sensibility... I probably did cross-check the russian though.

Anyway. Heres the French (by Jean-Baptiste Para) and the English:

Mettons-nous d’accord : quand je
serai mort,
tu planteras une croix sur ma tombe.
Elle sera pareille à toutes les croix,
mais nous deux, mon ami, nous saurons
qu’il s’agit en fait d’une signature:
de même qu’un illettré inscrit une
marque sur le papier,
je voudrais laisser une croix dans ce monde.
C’est une croix que je veux laisser.
Je m’accordais mal
avec la grammaire de la vie.
J’ai lu mon destin et n’ai rien compris.
Je n’ai connu que les coups, j’en ai
pris l’habitude. C’est pourquoi les lettres
tombent de ma bouche comme des dents.
Avec une odeur de sang.



Let us be in accord: when I am dead,
You’ll put a cross on my tomb.
It will seem the same as every other cross,
but us two, my friend, we’ll know
its in fact a painting:
the same as the illiterate inscribes a mark on the paper,
id like to leave the cross in this world.

Its a cross I want to leave.
For I’m in ill accord with the grammar of life.
I read my destiny, and understood none of it.
I only know of the blows in my habit,
And thats why from blows the letters
fall from my mouth like teeth,
with an odour of blood.

Its definitely one of the more striking poems of his I think. Most of his writing is bleak, living with a tender membrane connecting to others in a world ever-shifting. This one is just a bit sad and defeated, yet underlined with a smiling resistance, that mark of being after death he keeps as an in joke. He killed himself pretty young so I wonder if this poem was realized in some fashion. Anyway if you want to read more most of his work is here.

Aug 25/ 2024

One thing about me is that while I am always thinking about writing I never do it. The blog/journal/personal write is the apex of a catch-22 that pervades my artistic life. On one hand, artistic fulfillment comes from in part acknowledgement, interaction and communication: art meant to be seen and enjoyed. The other is that a journal is expressively personal and usually secretive: a form that emerges to the public with coy entitlement and personal self importance only. Journals after all belong to important people, and to show it to others suggests that. This is probably not a rational belief of mine. I never have the intrinsic need to put my thoughts to paper like the born-journaler and instead overcomplicate forms in my head. For every minute not spent pen to paper is one where the idea of doing so becomes weightier and scaffolds, a sort of Jacobs latter of word obligation.

I faced this issue with drawing, but ive gotten OK (better) with that over the years. I have a sort of mental block in art that makes being perceived in the act of it excruciating. A lot of people online who do art and are ND can probably relate. My sense of autonomy relies on a set of parameters ive predetermined and others throw a bit of a wrench into the vague-yet-over-planned modus operandi. Never exposing myself to others and being totally un interactive is my preferred state anyway. I am ok with drawing and showing what I draw, mostly I just struggle to actually put to fruition what I'm thinking into visual form, instead becoming some gratuitous vaguery. When that moves to the written it becomes even worse, since not only am I unexperienced, It is also hard to interpret written word over visual for me, and soon it seems every word comes absent of either meaning or aesthetics, becoming noise.

In order to remedy this issue of mine, Ive passively resolute to putting thought to word, even if its only fragments, to nurse me out of this frankly silly state. So consider this the first of probably infrequent posts. I might post some translation fragments too, since I should be getting back into practice for that ( I was working on Sappho 1 but the dialect is pretty hard to parse since ive only learned Attic conventions). I thought about translating some of Agamemnon since the way Kassandra speaks is interesting in Carsons translation.