Bob Perelman
A Literal Translation of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue
Washingtonian1
1. "Sicilian" in the original; in the original-original,
"Sicilides." "Washingtonian" is an upsidedown synecdoche
(so to speak): a false-toned part
of a false whole in the service,
finally, of something a little less false,
or so I like to think.
[Washingtonian] Muses, let's roll up our sleaze,2
2. Puns usually announce (denounce) the excess
of organization in language. This one gestures
in the opposite direction: it's pretty random.
It's hard to believe I feel
compelled to notify people that "Washington
is sleazy," and certainly there are more
direct and convincing ways to do that.
This piece is an inverted pun,
asserting two very different things are identical.
Perhaps the desire to be wrong
is the heart of wanting to write.
There must be some pleasure there.
[let's roll up our sleaze,]
and invest in the grandest theme
park of them all: the past,
as basic and embodied as Fess Parker's
coonskin cap.3
3. Do people remember Fess Parker? He played
Disney's Davy Crockett, America's original libertarian.
[Fess Parker's
coonskin cap.] If a man is wearing
another animal's tail on his head
his emotions aren't to be dismissed,
even if his speech sounds like he'll
never finish chewing Ma's final biscuit
enough to swallow it all the way.4
4. I find it odd the way
'subject matter' (sic) creeps into this writing.
Somehow the couplets commit me to continuity
–one could hardly call it narrative;
the areas of most interest (to me
anyway) seemingly begin as sideways moments.
I compare the past to Fess Parker's
coonskin cap: suddenly like the proverbial
chicken hypnotized by a straight line,
I find myself focusing on Fess Parker.
[to swallow it all the way]
Never mind his noises, they're only
one of history's running gags: the back
door may creak at midnight, but meanwhile
the whole house has been repossessed.
The feelings in Fess's script are
as difficult to deflect as a hungry
ghost or loan officer. Let the world
remain imperfect food; let the mossy
stream in back of his Tennessee5
5. Doesn't Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar"
–"I placed a jar in Tennessee, / and
round it was, upon a hill"–
anticipate the current Biosphere (the dystopic Eden
where scientists are spending two years in
a sealed-off greenhouse)? But "Tennessee" doesn't
say this, without my overdetermined reading.
Art, I want to say, saw teeth
rasping at my branch, is not separate.
I can hear those Disney basses
now, those archaic corporate muses, chanting,
–"Born on a mountaintop in Ten-ne-see . . ."
[let the mossy
stream in back of his Tennessee] cabin
choke in a few decades with
the wastes of a single narrowly
chiseled narrative; let each wine-dark tree hide
its Disney savage in defiance of history's
singularity; but this copyrighted archetypal whiskey-drinking
typo-fighting individual–Fess Parker is only
one of his many names–will remain
centered in time's freshly baked diorama.
Now he squints into the sun, watching
the golf ball he's hit halfway
to Singapore disappear into the cloudless sky
to thunderous applause. There is no need
to be anxious over the path
of the ball or over the fate
of this tableau:6
6. But of course I am anxious.
Why else the footnotes? I began one
poem years back: "Ed Meese is not
relentless necessity." Soon (or already perhaps)
I'll have to worry if people know
the name. Mr. Memory might answer:
"Ed Meese was District Attorney of Oakland,
California when Ronald Reagan was governor.
When Reagan became President, Meese was
his Attorney General and had a particularly
partisan sense of duty. He chaired
the Meese Commission on Pornography." This poem
is a reaction to the religious right's
authoritarianism based on transcendent language (the
bumpersticker puts it: "God said it. I
believe it. That settles it."), and
fear of labile pleasure. The poem,
then, is a place of such pleasure?
Counting to six and seven as I
try to clear the ground for
my desire for pleasure?? (Labile, the man
said, make mine labile.) Who is
Mr. Memory? Mr. Memory himself might say:
"I was a character in Hitchcock's
The 39 Steps. An idiot savant, I
could remember phenomenal amounts of data
and was used as a transmission
device by German spies before World War
Two, though without knowing what I was
doing. (You could call me Ion
[from the Ion of Plato, where
the rhapsode, the reciter of the Muses's
blueprint is ultimately without knowledge, the merest
conduit]–I feel that I need
to make these things clear. Otherwise–
lability. Also, if you'll remember the movie,
I couldn't help but spew facts
when asked.) After some decades of writing,
there comes a point when the contours
of one's verbal habits cease to
surprise. Or is it quite the opposite?
–that a certain doppleganger keeps coming
back, one's own unowned nameless body,
in verbs, vocabulary, linebreaks, no pushing it
away by storms of invention, inventories, concentration,
'the magic hand of chance,' thinking
with the words as they appear
the dictionary's icestorm lying shattered and bright
in the morning sun you'd think
the inner dome of heaven had fallen
–I had to look that up:
Robert Frost. Who cares! A world without
a ground of repetition is a world
without poetry. I, Mr. Memory–remember?
–died at the end, in cold
Hitchcockian denouement, too fast to seem quite
final at first, and the secret
of the noiseless engine remained hidden inside
my small fictional body. I never talked
anything like this, it's only because
I was asked that I'm forced
to ride the rails of this answer."
[over the fate
of this tableau]: in a few
days (or centuries, it makes no
difference) Fess Parker may be unknown, squeezed
onto a magnetic card of 1950s America
and its actors playing colonial heroes,
his terms as President only remembered
by over- or under-paid specialists, but this
is a prophetic poem, Virgil's 4th eclogue,7
7. Christian thinkers considered Virgil's 4th eclogue
(37 B.C.) a prophecy of Christ's birth.
[Virgil's 4th eclogue,]
and the principal attribute of such
canonical utterance is its perpetual freshness.
Time stands still and meaning is everywhere.8
8. I like it when the couplets
come out even. (Assuming 13 is even.)
(But how to imagine a poem touching
a specific time many centuries later?)
[Time stands still and meaning is everywhere.]
It's shocking but true: I'm translating literally;9
9. I'd thought about claiming this was
a literal translation a few hours ago.
Half-thoughts were flitting about happily in single-winged
narcissistic swoops in the half-lit belfry:
I would quote the Latin. Push irony
to its ecstatic death in lie.
At tibi prima, puer, nullo munusucula cultu
errantis hederas passim cum baccare tellus
which my eye fell upon just now
by chance would be good because
of its structure of one seven word
and one six word line, like
these couplets. I wanted to say
that the quoted Latin was a translation,
a literal one, from the original
Latin. At one point I half-wanted to
refer to the original printer's error in
Canto XIII, which has since been
corrected without Pound's permission. (When Kenner
pointed it out to him, he dismissed
the problem, saying, Repeat in XIII
sanctioned by time and the author, or
rather first by the author, who
never objects to the typesetter making improvements):
And even I can remember / A day
when historians left blanks in their
/ writings, I mean for things they
didn't know, / But that time seems to
be passing." / I mean for things
they didn't know, / But that time seems
to be passing." If I had
any vocabulary (never mind the knowledge I
guess!–first things first) from computer programming,
I could make specific reference to
something like recursive instructions: the original
Latin would say to quote the original
Latin in the translation. I should acknowledge
the Monty Pythonesque qualities of these
'thoughts'. (That's not to say they're not
original–at least I think they
are.) Burroughs's sense of the word
as virus is hovering in the vicinity.
[I'm translating literally;]
in fact, not only are these
Virgil's exact words, the sounds are identical
as well. Reading this, you are
reading the original Latin, a contingency
that I, Virgil, foresaw10
10. At this point, I've decided to try
footnotes as a way to react
to this piece: it feels strange enough
to merit such measures. Perhaps this
equal strangeness will create some balance.
For the record: this was the first
footnote (originally written in prose, though I'm
currently rewriting it in couplets, as
well as adding to it), but
the poem itself mocks origins and records.
[a contingency
that I, Virgil, foresaw as I wrote:]
At tibi prima, puer, nullo, munuscula cultu
errantis hederas passim cum baccare tellus
as well as its rough translation–
But to you, first, child, little gifts
from the uncultivated earth, wandering-about ivy
with its berries (perhaps a hint there
in baccare of Bacchus and state power
torn apart and eaten by orgasmic
women out from under the so-called thumb)–11
11. The violence of oppositional sexuality that
most authorities fear takes a cornucopia of
forms–face and voice altered, social
markers shown as flesh and unanchored expression
–isn't flesh something that gets eaten?
Chew, grind, tongue the pulp, taste–splashed
to pieces like a visual stick
in water at the moment the bodies
become, as Harlequin romances like to write,
"one"–but the violence of state
sexuality is the oneness of that oneness,
mythic marriage with all the trimmings
–Bush opposing the species diversification treaty,
saying in the Fess-Parker-gone-to-college accent that if
they think I'm going to do anything
to hurt the American family . . . is
it always state eyes that stare
at Miss March photogenically licking Miss April
and the invisible hand of the marketplace
that rubs its thumb and forefinger
together with only the glossy paper
intervening? Looking out of the poem's eternally
framing open window at this week's
breaking glass, I see our nation, pinnacled
atop its past: Macedonia, Rome, England, Cambodia
–remember those pyramids of intellectual skulls?
[orgasmic
women out from under the so-called thumb)–]
This has been written already in
the original because, with the birth
of the ruling child12
12. There's a crucial possibility open here:
I'm really tempted to write ruling-class child.
The eclogue can certainly be read
as an egregious piece of flattery: Virgil
owes is leisure to Maecenas, Augustus's
minister of culture more or less; this
dependence leads him to write the Aeneid
as an epic in the service
of state power, transmogrifying Homer's oral-based
aristocratic-communal technique into the protocol for imperial
pedagogy and angst for isolate authors.
The fourth eclogue is often preposterous under
the strain of laying utopic pleasantries
at the feet of a state official
(Pollio, apparently) who has just become
a father. I.e.: This is the ultimate
age foretold by Sibyl's prophecy . . .
the Golden Age returns . . . it's while you,
Anne Imelda Radice, are consul that
this holy age begins. Everything will happen
a second time: Theseus will sail again
for the golden fleece, movable type
will be invented, we'll know what
it means this time. The child will
live a godlike life, and see
the gods . . . he'll rule a world
pacified by his father's virtue. . . . Goats will walk
home untended with full udders, oxen
no longer fear lions, snakes will die . . .
the ram will dye his own
fleece now yellow, now purple, grazing lambs
willingly shall turn their wool red,
you won't need your wallet, full-time child care,
snorkeling, handsome Caribbean waiters smiling beside
roast beef, shrimp and quartered pineapples.
But I respond to the poem, too,
especially the end: Begin, little child,
recognize your mother, smile at her, she
underwent ten tedious months, begin, little child:
if you don't smile at your
parents you'll never be worthy of
sharing the feast of a god, or
the bed of a goddess–Freud!
where were you when that got written!
Despite the sycophancy, the poem has
a charge: pleasure and love are at
the root of the intelligible world,
and the potentialities that flow from that
are just and beatific. That happiness
animates Virgil's conditional claim near the end:
if the utmost of life was available
to him, and if he could
sing the fact of this child
with sufficient inspiration, then he would be
a better poet than either Apollo
or Pan: that's an interesting human claim.
[with the birth
of the ruling child,] time becomes circular.
That circle has been completed in footnote
12, letting me step outside to
these words I wrote thirteen years ago:
Steal a few moments from the
running time Max shoving himself against
the netting of his playpen finds himself
his bottle now standing on the back
of his busybox toppled twice now
standing stooping down two hands raising
his bottle on high aria furiosa long
notes held searched through some blocks hang
off the railing he puts them
in his mouth and sighs pulls himself
up wooden bead on a string
in his mouth tasted dropped eyed
at arm's length he leans back and
groans at the ceiling chanting pulsing O's
until he begins to jump now
a forefinger in the mouth to chew
and modify the noise waving and
a falsetto yodel picked up spits out
the bottle crawls in a circle
spits picks it up drinks embraces the
basketball and rolls over goes go
go go as he hits his
wooden nails with his hand stands at
the railing going Da Da
jumping looking over his shoulder short plaintive
hums escaping almost whining he reaches up
to the doorknob on the other
side rattles the door staring up
to the top using his strength jumping
talking a brief emphatic silence then
a yell he turns away then sits
walks across the mess to this side
again begins pulling up the mat
staring at the fiberboard underneath a few
glissando squeals now some O's as
he stares at and touches the metal
tube brace standing again feels the
shiny chrome bolts at the top
hangs down by his arms head back
up to the ceiling he almost falls
over swings sideways does fall down
cries his bottle's stuck between the webbing
and the floor he gets it
out drinks deep breathing hard holds it
at arm's length bangs his fallen
busybox drinks again stares at and fingers
the nipple a moment of quiet
while he farts backs away squeals
spits goes yay grabs it drinks throws
it down spits propeller noise from
his lips stares at me pulls himself
up standing at the railing on top
of his busybox falsetto yodel now
large modulated calls out to space
staring at his feet as he slides
one along the smooth cardboard back
of the busybox which squeaks he crows
turns it with difficulty back over
picks the thing up hits with it
drops it picks up the pink pig
nailbrush puts it in his mouth.13
13. Imagine writing that would make good
its second by second letter by letter
birth and existence as if the body
moving made spaces it could understand.
Bob Perelman, Ten to One: Selected Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1999.