a new chapbook of tsvetaeva translations

i have finally finished my translation of tsvetaeva's new year's letter! that means i'm making a few chapbooks of all my tsvetaeva translations together.
they will eventually be published by whale and star press, along with the work of several other translators, as a selected poems, so my chapbook is homemade and unofficial/unauthorized.
if anyone wants a copy, drop me a line, i'll only charge as much as it cost me to make, and most of the copies will be sent out soon to friends and family (it's only an edition of ten!)

or, i can e-mail it as a word file, free of charge.

persephone, come back from the fall

coming, on, the, souther, wind, like, a, swallow, with, a, babe, in, bunting...
o, frabjous, day, calloo, callay!!

as the war rages on...

the war in gaza and israel has a lot of people reacting with horror and vitriol towards both sides of the conflict.
i've been reading philip metres' blog (behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com), and don't know how to react sometimes, except to think about the people in all different parts of the world who've never known anything but violence. evil is a rule, i notice it in myself when i'm tired and only functioning on an animal level AND when i'm most focused. most of us would never act on it, but we carry it around w/o relief, and overcoming it is the burden of being human.
anyway, i wish the war would stop, but i have my doubts, and it is only one war...

i think it is ironic, to put it as mildly as possible, that the western world explicitly and ill-advisedly planted the seed for this endless mauling and enmity by planting a zion-israel in a zealous colonial goodwill effort, and also as an attempt to pawn off our own virulent anti-semitism on the muslim world (notice how often we talk about muslim fundamentalism as the root problem of the religious non-compromise in israel, or of israel's zeal for defense, because we've doubly extracted ourselves from our own prejudice). the three religions involved are all of a piece--judao-islamo-christian beliefs, or political mantras, for a conflict that has not been resolved for thousands of years and has expanded from a power struggle in rome and the middle east to encompass all of europe, most of africa and the americas and asia.
i often contend that while we in the u.s. have enjoyed a long post-colonial pax americana, that we are complicit for more of the misery in the world than ever before (and that's saying a lot, for the country that was already the main stage for the cruelest, largest genocide in the history of the planet (remember, manifest destiny was u.s. federal policy from day one, and still is)), through market manipulation, consumer rapine, fomenting wars on foreign soil in a hundred different ways. on another not-quite-related note, the u.s. is the most tolerant nation i've ever known or known of, relatively--but we are an intolerant species.

there's no way to hope for better things from ourselves without visiting the constituent parts of our nature. the basic part of any justification of life, or the sanctity of it, has to start there.

upon being mistaken about chapman's (and pope's) homer

i’m more ignorant than i have any right to be. how could i not know that pope’s homer rhymes? and in couplets? does chapman’s? yes, it does.

richmond lattimore's (the version i own) doesn’t. he used a free six-beat line for the iliad. robert fagles (rest his soul) didn't rhyme, and didn't even keep to a meter as loose as lattimore's.

For Auld Lang Syne: Part 3

ot eight was all sowing and seedlings, and ended with a blanket of snow. and in the morning it was ot nine. i felt like a little boy, sitting solo-blotto in a corner with a bottle of j--- d---, singing sotto-voce 'seas between us braid hae roar'd sin auld lang syne,' and missing a good fiere who's fighting abroad.

utterly desolate, white, gravid hills stretch across the arboretum. but, i'm optimistic, and through january's backdoor they look to me like elephants. my son's away in russia, cooing at his great-grandma's fresh grave with his fresh face, and my wife's there with him, stirring the ivanovo twilight for kut'ya. tom is putting down his gun and taking the slow train out of baghdad--kuwait, kentucky, and (hopefully) home. my brother's engaged, sitting on a china bus o'er manhattan bridge. my sister has a new ring, too.

in the days of twenty and nine i'll be counting the months and eating chicken soup with rice, working hard on my first book, waiting for the mail (alec baldwin's snobby nightmare of insignificance!) by the telik, and trying to get the fuck out of dodge.

and to get whoever might be reading this out of the dodge of the closing year, here's a preface i wrote to tsvetaeva's new year's letter (see the unfinished translation here) and an elegy of my own that i've added to the orphic daisy chain...
.
.
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preface to an unfinished elegy

already january, and the fruit flies
just like me
are surviving generation by generation
in open bottles of whiskey

a sonless, sunless new year’s
and new england’s protean precipitation
has alienated the out of doors
again…and again

with squall and hoar, warm rain
vertical wind
ice and aster storm
and blind horizons

expired calendar
irresolute
half-empty bottle watered down
with dew

and this new year’s letter
to the stars—
stillborn, scattered
weatherstained endeavor
.
.
.
elegy for another year

as if this new year without you
made its music
in that empty aeolian tower
rising from the farthest reaches
—on the back face of beyond—
where wind whistles through
forgotten eyes,
yesterday a bag of birdcalls
—like letters sent out impossibly
to sea—
was stolen from the skies

and now silent songs
or ghosts of that extinguished longing
have flown the winter road
leading to spring
—when you delivered them
you were the seasons—
and if i believed
each year was year returning,
it was only until this new year…
january faces are doubly stranger

they captured you in a silver laugh
forever starting out at high c
but now you’re the night
with permanent fingers
you can play the distant tower
until morning light
—a center inside creation,
will within c, erection on the water,
pattern to reason—
organum silentium