\u201cOur first mover, who relates to another in a
\nWay mirroring the relationship of father and child,
\nLiving as resident in the revolving spherical<\/p>\n
Shells in which, according to ancient
\nAstronomy, the celestial bodies are set,
\nNot forced by imposed stricture there to live<\/p>\n
But freely choosing so to reside because of your
\nUndying affection for your first creation, those spiritual
\nBeings usually depicted as being winged,<\/p>\n
Venerated be the phrase designating your person,
\nVenerated the authority and influence you have
\nOver others, by all created beings, for it is<\/p>\n
Appropriate to the situation to make an expression
\nOf gratitude to your animating principle
\nInducing that one of the four basic taste sensations<\/p>\n
Typically triggered by sucrose. Let the state
\nOf tranquillity of the sphere in which you hold a
\nPre-eminent position move towards us, for we<\/p>\n
Cannot reach it by motion, growth or effort of our own,
\nIf it does not move towards us, even with all the
\nMental and physical resources at our disposal.<\/p>\n
As those spiritual beings usually depicted as
\nBeing winged give up or lose the mental powers by
\nWhich they control their wishes and intentions to you,<\/p>\n
Uttering Hosannas in musical notes with
\nInflections and modulations, so let the members
\nOf the family of biped primate mammals anatomically<\/p>\n
Related to the apes but distinguished by
\nGreater brain development and capacity for
\nArticulated speech and abstract thought give up theirs.<\/p>\n
Give us on this solar day of twenty-four hours
\nBeginning at midnight our daily sustenance \u2013 as you
\nMiraculously gave it to the Israelites in their journey<\/p>\n
Through the wilderness, without which in this unduly
\nExacting region uninhabited by members of the family
\nOf biped primate mammals anatomically<\/p>\n
Related to the apes but distinguished by
\nGreater brain development and capacity for thought,
\nHe goes backwards who most strives to advance.<\/p>\n
And as we cease to resent all others for the
\nActs causing discomfort or offence that we have
\nBeen forced to endure, do you cease to resent<\/p>\n
Us in a manner showing devotion and tenderness,
\nAnd do not regard too closely our undeserving
\nMoral or personal merit or demerit. Our capacity for exertion<\/p>\n
Or endurance, which is conquered and brought into
\nSubjection without difficulty, do not entice to evil
\nBy promise of pleasure or gain from the ancient adversary,<\/p>\n
But set it at liberty from this ancient one who
\nWould turn us from the right path by pricking us with
\nSharp pointed metal accoutrements usually<\/p>\n
Used to encourage the forwards and rapid movements
\nOf domesticated quadruped equine mammals.
\nThis last petition to your being, oh dear one who has<\/p>\n
Power and authority over others, we do not make
\nFor our own individual selves, since there is no need,
\nBut for those beings who have stayed or remained to our rear.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, praying for their wellbeing and for ours,
\nThose souls moved slowly beneath the weight of their
\nWashing machines, like creatures we might meet in a dream,<\/p>\n
Or in a painting by Hieronomous Bosch reworked by
\nMagritte. They were not equally tormented by their loads,
\nFor while some lugged Bosch Titans and Hotpoints<\/p>\n
Others carried smaller machines, Zanussi Compacts
\nAnd Candy Aquas, going around and around on the
\nFirst ledge, washing away the filth of the world.<\/p>\n
If these souls, up here, pray so zealously for our good,
\nThink what we down here can do for them,
\nIf we only think of them from time to time.<\/p>\n
We ought, indeed, to help them wash away the stains
\nAnd the dirt they have picked up here on earth,
\nLike careless children playing in the mud, so that they<\/p>\n
May emerge in blue whiteness amidst the wheeling stars.
\n\u201cI\u2019ve seen showroom scrambles on Black Friday,\u201d
\nSaid Berrigan, my guide, \u201cbut this is something else.<\/p>\n
Where\u2019s the manager here? If the customer\u2019s still got
\nAny rights at all, someone should take pity on you
\nAnd free you from your loads, so you can stand up<\/p>\n
And give us a hand. Can someone here show us the way
\nTo reach the stairs, and if there are several paths,
\nTell us which one is the shortest and the least steep?<\/p>\n
This man who travels at my side bears his own weight \u2013
\nHe still carries the body he was born with on earth
\nAnd so, against his will, is slow to climb.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few words were muttered in response to Berrigan\u2019s
\nBantering \u2013 I\u2019m not sure they all appreciated his jokes \u2013
\nBut it was unclear to me who spoke them.<\/p>\n
Then someone piped up, saying: \u201cCome with us,
\nAlong this bank to the right, and you will find
\nA path a living person can easily climb.<\/p>\n
If I were not weighed down by this Bosch
\nThat presses down on my proud neck, so that
\nI must keep my eyes glued to the ground,<\/p>\n
I would look up at this unnamed man
\nWho is still living, and see if he recognises my face
\nSo that he may take pity on my burdened back.<\/p>\n
I was born in Edinburgh, where I was adopted
\nAt four months by Labour supporters from Aberdeen.
\nGove is my name, perhaps you\u2019ve heard it before?<\/p>\n
I started off in the state sector, but quickly won
\nA scholarship to Robert Gordon College, then read English,
\nWhen it was still English, at Lady Margaret Hall.<\/p>\n
My achievements, I confess it here, made me arrogant,
\nAnd I held all men, and women actually, in such disdain that
\nI became incapable of listening to anyone but myself.<\/p>\n
Many suffered because of my decisions in
\nOffice, as any child in a state school in England
\nCould tell you. I took pride in taking soft subjects<\/p>\n
Off the curriculum and replacing them with Grammar.
\nI took pride in the part I played in sending pupils back to school
\nPrematurely during the pandemic. Pride didn\u2019t just ruin me,<\/p>\n
But the whole of my party, dragging them with
\nIt from calamity to calamity until we delivered Brexit.
\nAnd once we\u2019d achieved this calamitous goal we were<\/p>\n
So wrapped up in our success that we didn\u2019t even notice we
\nWere in the epicentre of a global pandemic until it was too late.
\nThe weight which I refused to bear when alive<\/p>\n
I am now forced to bear among the dead
\nUntil my back has felt the pain it inflicted
\nOn others down on earth \u2013 I\u2019m here for the long haul.\u201d<\/p>\n
I had my head bent down to the ground, to hear his
\nGrating words, when someone \u2013 not he who spoke \u2013
\nTwisted around beneath a Siemens Avantgarde,<\/p>\n
And seeming to recognise my face, he called out to me,
\nStraining against the weight of his machine to keep
\nHis eyes on me, as I walked bent down amidst those souls.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh my God!\u201d I said, \u201caren\u2019t you Damien Hirst,
\nPride of Bristol, who did the shark in formaldehyde,
\nAnd reinvented the art of spin painting?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe works that Rachel Whiteread casts,\u201d
\nHe said, \u201cshine more radiantly now;
\nHers is the honour today \u2013 mine is far less.<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t have been so generous to her,
\nI must admit, while I was still down on earth,
\nThat would have been career suicide \u2013<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t rise to pre-eminence in the art world
\nBy promoting your competitors. But for such
\nArrogance the price is paid here \u2013 I\u2019ve swapped<\/p>\n
My spin paintings for this spinning drum I carry.
\nI wouldn\u2019t even be here, were it not that,
\nWhile I still had the means, I set up a charity,<\/p>\n
Strummerville, to help young musicians,
\nAfter the death of Joe Strummer in 2002.
\nHow up themselves people are in the art world,<\/p>\n
It makes me sick, and how short a time fame lasts,
\nUnless some generation of fuckwits follows!
\nOnce Emin held centre stage in the<\/p>\n
Media; Perry now is all the rage,
\nDimming the lustre of the other\u2019s fame.
\nSo, in the book world, one Gilbert Adair<\/p>\n
Takes pre-eminence from the other,
\nOne Smith wins the prizes while the other
\nGoes out of fashion; and already making a splash<\/p>\n
At the book fairs is a young gun who\u2019ll drive
\nAll of these writers out of the limelight.
\nCommercial success is just a gust of wind,<\/p>\n
It blows about, now here now there, and as
\nIt changes direction it changes name.
\nWere you to reach a ripe old age like Beckett,<\/p>\n
Or die screaming in your crib like Chatterton,
\nWould it make any difference a thousand years from now?
\nAnd what are ten centuries to eternity?<\/p>\n
Less than the blinking of an eye in the You see that soul ahead crawling along under Now it\u2019s hardly whispered in London, where he But, now, become as venal as a pimp. Chemicals that make it grow from the soil Me of what Lyotard says about postmodernism, \u201cThat\u2019s Boris Johnson,\u201d he replied, \u201cand he is here Without stopping for a moment to think. So puffed up with And from that moment one calamity was quickly followed Quickly enough for it to have any meaningful effect, failed to Inaugurating a national free-for-all culminating in half a million So he crawls around and has crawled since his soul died, And I: \u201cIf it is true that any soul Then how come he\u2019s got up here so fast?\u201d He\u2019s a liar, an opportunist and a serial And then he was the worst Foreign Secretary To be shut up in Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison. His pride stopped him, for he is a man who And yet, in the fight against Covid-19, It was this act that sped him here.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n DANTE\u2019S PURGATORIO: CANTO XI<\/p>\n In 2014 I published a version of Dante\u2019s Inferno with Carcanet. Among other translations it was unusual, if not eccentric, in that it relocated the action of Dante\u2019s poem to modern day Essex and Ireland. This may seem a strange approach at first sight, but it is one which enables Dante to become more readable, as his now forgotten contemporaries can be substituted for our own, and it is not without precedent in the history of translation. Back in the fourteenth century, in Dante\u2019s time, as Matthew Reynolds notes in his study The Poetry of Translation, we find in the Wycliffe Bible that Solomon \u201ctranslatide\u201d Pharoah\u2019s daughter from the city of David to the house he had prepared for her. One of the earliest recorded meanings of the word \u201ctranslate\u201d, then, is to shift places, and in shifting Dante\u2019s action from Tuscany to Essex and Ireland, this version pays homage to this now forgotten sense of the word. The translation from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to the present, on the other hand, is inspired, at least in part, by the Oulipo (the French Ouvroir de Litt\u00e9rature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), specifically the method \u201cup to date\u201d which was first developed by Harry Mathews in his volume of poetry Trial Impressions, first published in 1977, where he updates and otherwise metamorphoses stanzas from John Dowland\u2019s Second Booke of Ayres. Dowland\u2019s poem, declaring undying fidelity in love, begins: \u201cDeare, if you change, Ile never chuse againe,\u201d which Mathews changes to: \u201cIf you break our breakfast date, I\u2019ll go begging in Bangkok\u201d.<\/p>\n When it came to translating Dante\u2019s Purgatorio in the same way, things became more difficult. At once I realised that while it was relatively easy to find contemporary equivalents for the villains inhabiting the Inferno, the more positive emphasis of the Purgatorio, where Dante begins to imagine a better world, was more of a challenge \u2013 we live in a culture more at home with dystopias than utopias. Another challenge, as my version was set in Essex, was the inescapable fact that the island of Purgatory was a mountain, and Essex is flat. I resolved this by setting the action on Mersea Island \u2013 at least Essex has its islands \u2013 in a parallel world, where climate artists have constructed a mountain on Mersea out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS), and the island has metamorphosed into a kind of nature park, with a visitors\u2019 centre and walks of varying difficulty. Canto XI from this work-in-progress, where we encounter the punishment of those who were proud, is presented below. In Dante, these figures labour under the weight of huge slabs of stone \u2013 here they carry washing machines on their backs, and Dante’s boastful Oderisi (famed for his illuminated manuscripts) is replaced by Damien Hirst and his spin paintings (he carries a Siemens “Avant-Garde”).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Philip Terry was born in Belfast, and is a poet and translator. His poetry and experimental translations include Oulipoems<\/em>, Quennets<\/em>, Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>, and Dictator<\/em>, a version of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Globish. He is currently translating Ice Age signs from the caves at Lascaux. The Penguin Book of Oulipo<\/em>, which he edited, was published in Penguin Modern Classics in 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cOur first mover, who relates to another in a Way mirroring the relationship of father and child, Living as resident in the revolving spherical Shells in which, according to ancient Astronomy, the celestial bodies are set, Not forced by imposed stricture there to live But freely choosing so to reside because of your Undying affection […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[62,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/images-2.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1MR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6873"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7513,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6873\/revisions\/7513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nContext of the geological
\ntime span of the planet.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nThe weight of that giant twin-tub? All the
\nTV channels once resounded with his name,<\/p>\n
\nWas once Mayor, before his mad ambition
\nMade him turn Brexiteer \u2013 once so proud,<\/p>\n
\nYour earthly fame is like the green grass
\nOn a fairway; it comes and goes, and the<\/p>\n
\nAre the same ones that make it wither and fade.\u201d
\nAnd I to him: \u201cYour words ring true, friend, they remind<\/p>\n
\nAnd they make me wonder about my own ambitions, too,
\nBut tell me, who\u2019s the one you spoke about just now?\u201d<\/p>\n
\nBecause he treated Brexit and moving into number 10
\nlike nothing more than his next career opportunities,<\/p>\n
\nPride was he when he was elected into office that he
\nDismissed the threat of Covid-19 with a swish of his hand,<\/p>\n
\nBy another: he locked down too late, failed to protect care homes,
\nFailed to supply PPE to the NHS, failed to introduce testing<\/p>\n
\nIntroduce an effective system of track and trace, and failed to
\nDismiss his Chief Advisor when he broke lockdown rules,<\/p>\n
\nPeople descending on Bournemouth beach, which helped ensure
\nThe UK had more deaths per capita than any other nation on earth.<\/p>\n
\nKnowing no rest. Such coin is paid up here
\nBy those who were up themselves down there.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nWho has put off good deeds till the very end
\nMust wait down below before they can ascend,<\/p>\n
\n\u201cYou may well ask,\u201d he said, \u201cnot
\nMuch good can be said of this man.<\/p>\n
\nAdulterer, he fucked us over with Brexit,
\nAnd messed up on Covid-19, as I\u2019ve said,<\/p>\n
\nIn living memory: it was his careless words
\nThat caused Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe<\/p>\n
\nAnd when he had a chance to right the wrong
\nHe had done in Iran, he said nothing.<\/p>\n
\nCan never admit he has made a mistake,
\nA sorry inheritance from his father.<\/p>\n
\nAmidst his serial blunders, he did one good thing,
\nIn backing then rolling out the vaccine.<\/p>\nClick here to go back to:\u00a0Contributors and Links to Pages 1 – 4<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"