Ah, this season will be just death on me.
Fur thickens and hooves begin to toughen
In such days. So I expect that naught then
Will detain winter’s north wind hegemony:
In such a season, sisterly and cold,
Neither do I expect to find victims
Of my perfidious lusts and whims –
Abductions do not carry the same old
Weight in the recent world. The foreign market
Tries to avoid panic as their much, much too
Muchness – the scarcity of real “ado”
Will sell off profits for nothing and obviate
Death, that prolonged forbearance all must suffer
For sake of bread’s measly security.
Real estate’s lost perpetuity
Revises landed interests as epic buffer:
Old Hector was made a Trojan martyr
By warring for that Trojan whore – but I’ll
Be put out to pasture, a spectacle
Too cheaply bought and sold for a satyr.
If I understand one of JOB’s poems, does that mean that he’s slipping or that I am?
That was uncalled for.
You’re right. I’m sorry.
I hate when that happens.
I’ll just have to try harder next time.
JOB
I don’t understand it — if that makes you feel better.
I like it, though. Especially “Trojan whore”.
That right there is worth the price of admission.
In an earlier entry in this series, JOB indicated that this ‘The Real Estate of Arcadia’ sequence is a juvenalian artifact, however fondly he may regard it now. So perhaps it is not that JOB is slipping, but rather that, in the years since he wrote these particular poems, he’s built up traction.
I refuse to read any more JOB poems until I read them in Groundwork.
Sure – after all, Ἀνάγκη dictates as much…
JOB
And yet, calling Helen a “Trojan whore” seems a little out of line. Not because she didn’t avail herself of Trojans by the phalanx-full, but because she’s actually Greek. Millenia-old moniker notwithstanding. What I mean to say is that, “By warring for that Trojan whore” might be profitably amended to “Greek whore” or “Spartan whore” … even adds some tension in the final stanza, making Hector’s lost cause all the more poignant. Not to edit the editor … just a thought.
I thought about that very point – of course what get’s lost is the pun on “Trojan War.” Having recently reread the Iliad – Fagles translation – it’s clear that Helen is committed to seeing things out in Troy, that and her identity in Homer as “Helen of Troy” – Fagles translates it sometimes as “Helen the disTROYer” (whether that’s actually accurate play on the Greek I can’t say) wants me to dig in my nails on this point.
JOB
Ha! “desTROYer” is quite good. Helen did go back eventually, as detailed in the Odyssey, which I suppose can be cited in support of either choice.
I like the Fagles well enough for readability, and the Knox introduction is worth the price of the book itself. And it seems to have replaced the Fitzgerald for first readers everywhere … but when it comes to translations, I just can’t see how the Lattimore can be beat. It’s a real feat. Six of them, actually, which is quite an accomplishment in itself.
Well, I admit I know not whereof I speak … In Every Grain of Salt, like I said.
I’m back and forth whether to take the Iliad and the Odyssey as two parts of a whole or something else altogether. I know it’s obvious they should be – and many things discovered in the Odyssey (the fate of the heroes, etc.) is anticipated in the Iliad.
All the same, Helen is not Helen for the moment of Troy in the Iliad. She is absolutely identified with the city. I think Homer means us to understand that her own lust (and Paris’s) have sealed the deal for Troy.
I’m with you on the Lattimore, of course. But for sheer language, as you note, Fagles is Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse whereas Lattimore is a GNC outlet…
JOB
By the way, the Trojan whore could just as well be Aphrodite Herself, who showers Troy (and thereby Aeneas) with her blessings.
But then I wonder if Dionysus would provide a dispensation to George for his lack of reverence…
JOB
And here I thought it was a play on “Trojan Horse”
My mind immediately went to “Trojan Horse” too. And condoms.
You got me there – never crossed my mind – but I like it. Chalk up one for spontaneous somethingorother…
JOB
Well, what became of George?
I ask because, if it’s the case that George’s mother led a pack of her friends in frenziedly manually dismebering George, then it’s safe to say that the answer to your question is most likely ‘No’.
No, nothing so grandiose – rather, he’s a slightly pudgy 44-year-old gamer, who lives at home with his parents (or more likely his mother – his dad and mom are probably Splitsville), watches free porn (most of it with really bad production value), takes a biweekly walk down to the local Kwik Trip to grab a cube of Mountain Dew (no alcohol – makes him too drowsy to play “War Fuckers 4.0” into the grey areas of the dawn) and mostly keeps to himself – when he’s not updating his Pinterest gore/porn walls…
Another sorry SOB succumging to the violent-erotic after all…
JOB
Fwiw, I have no idea what in the Sam Hill is going on here either! So take anything I say with a grain of salt …
martyr / satyr is nice. We should remember that satyrs are martyrs … for Dionysus. Think about that for a while!
Jean Paul Sartre
Wasn’t anybody’s martyr
But just an old satyr
Scorning the Creator
Partying still harder
In the shadow of Montmartre
So Soren says.
‘Scorning the Creator’, indeed! For didn’t Sartre say that his atheism began, not as a mature, soberly-arrived-at intellectual conclusion, but as an act of will in childhood, when he rejected as intolerable the notion of an omniscient God watching him, which nonrational rejection arose in direct response to the guilt he felt when, playing with matches while home alone one day, he felt a horrible guilt for burning a hole in the rug, which guilt he could only assuage by refusing to believe that any supernatural being had witnessed his petty, solitary pyrotechnic transgression?
Or am I thinking of someone else?
Or… projecting?
Children should not play with matches. They run the risk of existential nausea.
Has JOB ever rhymed “martyr” with “barter”? Because he should.
I don’t think I’m alone in this, but often, when I’m trying to come up with a rhyme, I just start at the beginning of the alphabet and work my way to the end: arter, barter, carter, darter …
I know of a limerick that rhymes martyr and farter.
ding ding ding!!!
That’s your cue to recite … I mean, “recite” it.
Baby grand accompaniment not necessary.
http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiFARTER.html
I often do, too – but in this case the rhyme was as much – if not more – visual than it was aural.
JOB