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— Euripides, Bacchae 506 (tr. Reginald Gibbons)

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I haven’t posted much of late, but I haven’t been idle.

I have just published a book of translations from the ancient Greek, many of which I presented somewhat raw on this blog.

Check it out:

Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/etudes-steve-conger/1126653355?ean=9781387003419

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Etudes-Steve-Conger/dp/1387003410/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1498843313&sr=8-5&keywords=steve+Conger

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A Translation of a poem by Solon

Our city will never be destroyed by the will of Zeus, nor by any of the blessed, immortal gods for such is the protection of the great-hearted       daughter of the father, Pallas Athena, who holds her hand over us, but our citizens are willing to destroy this great city through the folly of their greed. From the corrupt minds of the leaders of the people, from their hubris, will come great distress      and many sufferings, for they don’t know how to restrain excesses or how to control the present revels peacefully . . . grow rich by encouraging unjust actions . . . stealing, without regard for whether it is sacred or public property, raking it in here and there, with no acknowledgment of the seminal       foundations of justice, who, in her silence, is aware of what was and is, and who, in time, always comes for recompense. No city can avoid this wound, falling quickly into an evil servitude, dissention among the tribes, waking war the destroys the prime of so many lives. A lovely town is quickly destroyed by hostile men by the gatherings loved by the unjust. Such are the evils twisting among the people. Many of the poor are taken to foreign lands sold into fetters and shameful chains, having to bear the unbearable toils of slavery. This common evil comes to every house. The doors will no longer keep it out. It leaps over the highest fences, finding all even if they flee into the most inner chamber. This is what my heart urges me to teach Athens: Just as bad governance hands a city over to disaster, good laws and everything in good order often put fetter on the unrighteous, smooths the jagged, limits excess, dims hubris, wilts the weeds of confusion, straightens crooked judgements, softens arrogant deeds, ends dissentions, ends the anger caused by bilious strife; For under her, all things for men are complete and wise.

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Important and sobering words from Dan Rather

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Ambiguity Woman by Existential Comics

This comic is about Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is an existentialist account of how we can behave morally, written in many ways after the horrors that Beauvoir witnessed in the face of Nazism. She lays out her criticisms of absolutist systems, political systems of control, and people who deny their own freedom or the freedom of others. I highly recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia article on it. 

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Aesthetics thus demands hiddenness and rewards it, ethics demands disclosure and punishes hiddenness. • True poetry is antibiographical. The poet’s homeland is his poem and changes from one poem to the next. The distances are the old, eternal ones: infinite like the cosmos, in which each poem attempts to assert itself as a — minuscule — star. Infinite also like the distance between one’s I and one’s You: from both sides, from both poles the bridge is built: in the middle, halfway, where the carrier pylon is expected, 
from above or from below, there is the place of the poem. From above: invisible and uncertain. From below: from the abyss of hope for the distant, the future-distant kin. • Poems are paradoxes. Paradoxical is the rhyme, that gathers sense and sense, sense and countersense: a chance meeting at a place in language-time nobody can foresee, it lets this word coincide with that other one — for how long? For a limited time: the poet, who wants to stay true to that principle of freedom that announces itself in the rhyme, now has to turn his back to the rhyme. Away from the border — or across it, off into the borderless! • “Automatic” poetry: unconscious, and it too thus reminiscence — and thus why not quote the brought-along, impregnated as it is with the spiritual, and therefore also points more clearly towards the spiritual. —  • Process, event in the poem descriptions — static hence no actual “theme” possible. • prose line to the end poem line —  the omitted man remains an interlocutor though you have to know how to 
captivate him if from naturalism or through it there is a way to lyric poetry —  torn-offness Not Rilkean enjambment!! He who catching his breath between two lines of poetry looks around for comma or conjunction, misses out. • Re-membering also pre-membering, pre-thinking and storing of what could be Yeats: I certainly owe more to that poet than to Fr. surreal. Strange. In front of a candle Now I tried to render visible the grain of sand (Buber, Chass. — //Nibelungens[on]g) that had to have been sunk into me too at some time. Mother, candles, sabbath But the poem lead me out of this idea, across to a new level with this idea • It is part of poetry’s essential features that it releases the poet, its crown witness and confidant, from their shared knowledge once it has taken on form. (If it were different, there would barely be a poet who could take on the responsibility of having written more than one poem.) •  — Poetry as event Event = truth (“unhiddenness,” worked, fought for unhiddenness) Poetry as risk    Creation = / power-activity / Gewalt-tätigkeit (Heidegger) Truth ≠ accuracy (-i-: consistency) • Endnote: Poetry “a shrine with no temple”                                                 •                                                                      -i- It belongs to the poem’s essence, that it will release the author, the confidant from its confidence. If it were different, no poet would write more than one poem. •                                                                                     -i- The conjunction of the words in the poem: not only a conjunction, also a confrontation. Also a toward-each-other and an away-from-each-other. Encounter, dissent, and leave-taking all in one. • -i- Receptivity as core attitude when writing poetry —  • Poetry doesn’t stand so much in a relation to time, but to a given world era —  • — in each first word of a poem the whole of  language gathers itself — — handiwork: hand / think through connections                                              such as “hand and heart”                                              handiwork — heartwork Beginning: “Poetry as handiwork”? The handmade crafting of  poetry? Does making poetry have any kind of duration? And in what relation to time, to one’s lifetime does such duration stand? Recollection: How I recited the first poems (Schiller) Receptivity • -i-                  from                     the       experiences     of    the author                                                             ↑ The word in the poem is only partially occupied by experience; another part the poem occupies with experiences; a further part 
remains free, i.e. occupiable • Poetry and the poet’s craft: two realms, I believe, different from each other, even though bordering on each other, and of which the second can be considered as the foothills of the first. Because the poem can never be the result of the mastery of the given poet, no matter how great and proven this mastery may be. The idea that the poet is before all a master of his language, may come closest to the reality of the poetic, while only laying open one of the access points. Because the language of poetry is also always already the other language, the first word of which pulls the poet into a new language-occurrence, to which he entrusts himself more or less unconsciously. Even the most intense introspection does not permit a remainderless overview of this occurrence — and thus puts the concept of overviewable experiences into question. Possibly in such a way that the poem puts up with the shared cognizance of the one who “produces” it only as long as is necessary for its coming into existence. For each poem necessarily claims uniqueness, unrepeatability; in each poem reality is checkmated once and for all, the whole of reality is constricted to a hand’s width of earth, and in this — royal! — constriction that is not only of space but also of time, it is given the chance to assert itself in the face-to-face with the poetic word (in which moreover all of 
language, i.e. language as possibility and as questionability, is simultaneously contained). No poet who would not again be released from this uniqueness would ever dare to write a second poem. • Poetry: Incursions of  language into the daily.              In our polychrome, not color-happy dailiness,              the language of  the poem, if it wants to remain the language of              the p., will by necessity be gray. • Thank and think have the same origin. • Because to speak, to speak like one’s mother, means to dwell, even there where there are no tents. • Poems are porous constructs: here life flows and seeps in and out, incalculably strong-headed, recognizable and in the most foreign shape. • While translating: the capitulation of the “counter-text” • The poem is monotone “Nobody becomes what he is not” • Representativeness, of whatever order, I cannot arrogate for myself; I am a Jew and a German-language author. But experience and, from afar, fate, together with a need for 
responsibility and solidarity, are what guide this pen • Poésie, affaire d’abîme / Poetry, a matter of the abyss              — 12.21.66. • La poésie déjoue l’image / Poetry foils the image • The poet: always in partibus infidelium • I do not speak of the “modern” poem, I speak of the poem today. And to the essential aspects of this today — my today, for I do speak on my own behalf — belongs its lack of a future: I cannot keep from you that I do not know how to answer the question toward which morrow the poem is moving; if the poem borders on such a morrow, then it possesses darkness. The poem’s hour of birth, ladies and gentlemen, lies in darkness. Some claim to know that it is the darkness just before dawn; I do not share this assumption.

Paul Celan, from “Microliths,” trans. Pierre Joris (via heteroglossia)

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We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan (via fyp-science)

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Vedic Hymn 129

Veda Book 10 CXXIX

I can’t read Sanskrit but, I found the text. Sometimes the Internet is amazing. My version is not a translation so much as an adaption of the archaic Victorian version of the reverend Ralph T. H. Griffith.

नासदासीन्नो सदासीत्तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् | किमावरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद्गहनं गभीरम् ॥ १॥ न मृत्युरासीदमृतं न तर्हि न रात्र्या अह्न आसीत्प्रकेतः | आनीदवातं स्वधया तदेकं तस्माद्धान्यन्न परः किञ्चनास ॥२॥ तम आसीत्तमसा गूहळमग्रे प्रकेतं सलिलं सर्वाऽइदम् | तुच्छ्येनाभ्वपिहितं यदासीत्तपसस्तन्महिनाजायतैकम् ॥३॥ कामस्तदग्रे समवर्तताधि मनसो रेतः प्रथमं यदासीत् | सतो बन्धुमसति निरविन्दन्हृदि प्रतीष्या कवयो मनीषा ॥४॥ तिरश्चीनो विततो रश्मिरेषामधः स्विदासीदुपरि स्विदासीत् | रेतोधा आसन्महिमान आसन्त्स्वधा अवस्तात्प्रयतिः परस्तात् ॥५॥ को अद्धा वेद क इह प्र वोचत्कुत आजाता कुत इयं विसृष्टिः | अर्वाग्देवा अस्य विसर्जनेनाथा को वेद यत आबभूव ॥६॥ इयं विसृष्टिर्यत आबभूव यदि वा दधे यदि वा न | यो अस्याध्यक्षः परमे व्योमन्त्सो अङ्ग वेद यदि वा न वेद ॥७॥

no being                            no nonbeing no air or sky beyond what covered?            what gave shelter? was there water in blue depths? no death                                    no immortal no line dividing night and day the one                breathless                                   breathed its own nature apart from it                                  nothing darkness and concealed in this darkness                     all that was     was chaos void formless born of warmth                                    the one thus desire                            the primal seed the wise who searched with their hearts discovered the kinship            of being and nonbeing they drew the line of separation           what was above?                                        what below? there were origins there were tremendous forces               energy                            action who knows?   who can actually describe           how it came to be           how there is something rather than nothing the gods came later                 so who can know its beginning? perhaps he   the one   at the origin of it all        whether he created it or not he whose eye watches this world                             from the highest heaven surely he knows                             or perhaps not

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A new book

I have published a book of poetry. It is probably not for everybody. It is about that intertidal zone where poetry meets philosophy. You can get it at Barnes & Noble at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/w/one-nine-twelve-three-steve-conger/1125107858?ean=9781365437663 or at Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Twelve-Three-Steve-Conger/dp/1365437663/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1478746990&sr=1-5&keywords=One+nine+twelve+three Or at lulu.com http://lulu.com/steve-conger/one-nine-twelve-three/profuct-2291769.html

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Moon over the train station. First break in the clouds during this super moon.

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Fitting end to the wettest October ever recorded

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For the @guardian

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Phaedra’s Long speech

I am still working on the Hippolytus, though I have quit posting the raw translation. I will make it available when I am done as a pdf if any is interested. Here is the long speech of Phaedra, after her infatuation with Hippolytus has been found out. It is not raw--I have cleaned it up and poeticized it, but it is not the final version either.

PHAEDRA Women of Trozen, inhabitants      of this far portal to the land of Pelops, for many long nights before this I thought about how mortals’ lives are ruined. Mental abilities don’t seem to matter         in the descent into misery. Many have sensible minds. Rather I look at it like this: We know and understand what is proper        but can’t bring it to fulfillment. Some fail from lack of trying, some because they set some pleasure                   before the good. The pleasures in life are many. Long talks and leisure are pleasurable evils         or a sense of awe They are dual types: one not bad        the other a burden on the house. if the right thing were clear, there would not        be two starting with same letter-- These thoughts,         since I thought them before all this are safe. No drug will erase them or make me take back my thoughts. Let me tell you the paths my thoughts took: when love wounded me,             I considered how best to bear it. My first thought was to hide my misery in silence. The tongue is not to be trusted. It knows well how to stand outside           and criticize men, but of itself it gathers a great many troubles. My second thought was to bear this madness, nobly, conquering it through self-control, and my third thought,      after these failed to master Cyprus was to die--                      the best of resolutions-- none may doubt it. For, just as I would not have my virtues                                                                   go unnoticed, neither would I want the public           to witness my shame. I knew both the act and the desire were ignoble. As a women, also I knew, I was hated by all. Curse her who first spoke to disgrace              her marriage with other men at the door. This evil for women originated with the nobility, for if they show a desire for the disgraceful,          how can others not see it as good? I hate those who are chaste in word but secretly possess an ignoble daring. How then, O Lady Cyprus, queen of the sea,       can they look into the faces of their husbands? Don’t they fear that the shadows--                                                         their accomplice, and the house itself, will give voice? It is this that brings death my way, friends, So that I won’t be found to disgrace my husband nor the children I bore, so that they can live free, and with freedom of speech in glorious Athens           with their mother in good repute. It enslaves a man, even if he has a bold heart, to be burdened by the sins of his mother or father. Only one thing, they say, compares with life,           to be known as just and good. The base among mortals are eventually             brought to light. Time holds a mirror up to them                                       as to a young girl may I never be seen in their company.

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My workstation is getting out of control again, and you can see what the cats have done to my chair.

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This extract from a Raymond Chandler letter contains everything you would ever need to know about writing action. (Neil Gaiman)

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ancient greek word of the day: αἰγίλιψ, “devoid of goats; hence, incredibly steep, to the point that not even goats can climb it”