Zara Yacob

Moral Letters to Lucilius // a poem

A translation of a poem of mine.


My dear Lucilius.
Once again I encourage you to ponder
The virtues of temperance
And tranquillity.
My dear Lucilius.
Long have I written to you incessantly,
And told you tales of brave souls
That you might copy them.
We are both making great progress.
My dear Lucilius.
Our friends tell me
That in your party nights you pass by my house
And sing just a bit lower
So as not to wake me up.
I have indeed a light sleep,
Though not from cares,
But from the light electric the gods
Planted inside me,
In my spirit,
And that keeps me up at night
While I write to you.
My dear Lucilius.
Tell me news. Some say
That every night you sing
Until your lips stiffen and numb.
I have trouble believing this.
You do not sing, you pray.
Always have you kept the two apart.
And be that as it may I do not think you could sing
Without me there to give you the tone.
This is true,
Is it not?
My dear Lucilius.
Once again I ask that you direct your body
To just deeds, that you conform your soul
To the super-celestial gods.
If I repeat myself, if I search for you,
If I insist and see myself in you,
That is because I know that God that spins everything
Spins us both in unison,
If I take your hand He
Takes mine in turn,
And with the other He takes yours.
My dear Lucilius.
Try to dull your love.
Dull it and smoothen it,
The love for people,
The love for the beautiful statues in your palaces,
Dull the love for philosophy,
The love for music,
The love for the gods of Love and the others.
Love instead the dulling itself.
But even that in a way that's tame and faint.
Let it dry and gather it once more the following Summer.
Thin it until it fits,
Like a papyrus sheet,
Between the closed beak of an ibis.
My dear Lucilius.
Once again I encourage you to ponder
The virtues of temperance and resignation.

Imagem: Jusepe de Ribera. Seneca (?), 1625-1650 @ Londres.

Oswald von Wolkenstein

franzoisch, mörisch, katlonisch und kastilian,

teutsch, latein, windisch, lampertisch, reuschisch und roman,

die zehen sprach hab ich gebraucht, wenn mir zerran;

auch kund ich fidlen, trummen, paugken, pfeiffen!

Darkness Visible

W. R. Johnson. Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's Aeneid. University of California Press: 1976.

The insubstantiality that has been warded off throughout [the Aeneid], though it seems to be about to vanish for good, now returns in full force. Reality dwindles to dream, and the nightmare from which we have been fighting free throughout the poem (velle videmur - for at this moment Vergil includes his readers in his poem) has become the reality. No homeric lucidities or articulations here, for the laws of time and space - like the human capacities for motion, action, and speech - themselves have become void. Action, truth, and their images drain away to nothingness. It is the perfect flowering of the Vergilian imagination, this perfect representation of the monstrous and unreasoning night. The via negativa is now, against all likelihood, as reliable and as expressive a mode of mimesis as the via positiva that Homer's art had brought, in Western poetry, to its great perfection. This formulation and perfection of the negative image go beyond the inwardness or subjectivity or elaborations of the potentialities of poetic mood and poetic music; they rather involve an exploration of the relentless, impenetrable darkness inside us and outside us. The lyricism is sometimes tender and fragile, but it is also sometimes ferocious and unyielding in its search for our real weaknesses and real enemies as well as for the lies and myths we tell ourselves about them. After Vergil, not only the grand desolations of Dante and Milton but also the smaller desolations of Tennyson will be possible:

But, ever after, the small violence done
Rankled in him and ruffled all his heart,
As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long
A little bitter pool about a stone
On the bare coast.

The darkness without and within, the big darkness and the small - Vergil has found ways of imagining them; darkness, all kinds of darkness, is finally made visible. And the boundaries of poetry are extended immeasurably.

Theocritus

Theocritus XVI.106-109

ἄκλητος μὲν ἔγωγε μένοιμί κεν, ἐς δὲ καλεύντων
θαρσήσας Μοίσαισι σὺν ἁμετέραισιν ἴοιμ’ ἄν.
καλλείψω δ’ οὐδ’ ὔμμε· τί γὰρ Χαρίτων ἀγαπητόν
ἀνθρώποις ἀπάνευθεν; ἀεὶ Χαρίτεσσιν ἅμ’ εἴην. 

Why Jerusalem?

Why Jerusalem, why me?
Why not another city? Why not another man?
One time I stood at the Western Wall
When suddenly - a flock of birds.
They cried and flapped their wings like notes scribbled with wishes
Set free from the massive heavy stones,
Flying to the distance.

Yehuda Amichai.
Tradução minha, com a ajuda e guia da Shim.

?למה ירושלים, למה אני

?למה לא עיר אחרת? למה לא אדם אחר

פעם עמדתי לפני הכותל המערבי

ופתאום, להקת ציפורים עלתה למעלה

בקריאות ובמשק כנפיים, כמו פתקות בקשה

שהשתחררו מבין האבנים הגדולות והכבדות

ועפו אל על

יהודה עמיחי

Imagem @

بالأندلس

a chuva bate quando a chuva cai,
hora de chegar e amar na Andalusia!

جادك الغيث إذا الغيث همى

يا زمان الوصل بالأندلس

Ibn al-Khatib 1313-1374
Texto completo

quales sumus talia sunt tempora

הלל אומר: במקום שאין אנשים השתדל להיות איש

Ó Stôr!

Clive Holes. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, Varieties (2004)

The only indigenous attempt - and a schematic one at that - at simplifying the complex rules of Classical Arabic was Anis Furayḥa's نحو عربية ميسرة [Towards a Simplified Arabic], published in 1955. There is a presumably apocryphal story that when some of Furayḥa's academic colleagues who earned their living teaching Classical Arabic saw the title of his book, they protested, يا استاذ شلينا نعيس - liberally translated, "Oh Professor, please don't take away our livelihood!"

Werewolf Orderlies (1984) Yevgeny Yufit