May 112013
 

David Helwig

David Helwig, author of over 35 books, who has contributed translations, poems, and fiction to NC over the years, an insistent and constant recidivist in other words, herewith changes genre and turns photographer, offering a collection of graffiti art he has discovered, mostly in Canada but as far away as China and Venice. Graffiti art is folk art, hybrid art, amateur art, uneasy art — rebellious, dramatic, inappropriate (often), underground, illegal (sometimes), piratical, dangerous (how do they do those highway overpasses?), a sign of life.

dg

Venice12 040Venice 2012

Trip OttTor 020Gatineau 2011

Trip OttTor 019Gatineau 2010

  Toronto Wall art 09-04-2010 11-34-38 AMSan Francisco 2010

Toronto Wall art 09-04-2010 11-06-18 AMSan Francisco 2010

TO 067Toronto 2011

SnaFran 014-2San Francisco 2010

87210015Toronto 2009

87190006Toronto 2011

55120086Montreal 1993

55120062Montreal 1993

53040102Montreal 1994

53040021Montreal 1993

15490008China 1987

2010-12-45Toronto 2010

2010-12-34Toronto 2010

 —David Helwig

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David Helwig is the author of more than 35 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction including, most recently, About Love, 3 Stories by Chekhov (Biblioasis) and The Year One (Gaspereau Press), Duet and his autobiography The Name of Things (Porcupine’s Quill). The founder of the Best Canadian Short Story Series, he has edited more than 25 books for Oberon Press. His avocation, however, is not writing but vocal music. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and has sung with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and Mozart’s Requiem. He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

Mar 242010
 

The world of literary translation knows no boundaries. David Helwig sent me the following, a piece of graffiti found on the wall of a brothel in Pompeii.

Arphocras hic cum Drauca bene futuit denario.

I looked it up on the web. The more or less accepted translation goes like this: Here Harpocras has had a good fuck with Drauca for a denarius.

But I sent the line to Jacob to see what he thought. He wrote back: Something along the lines of…Here Arphocras laid well with Drauca (my dictionary says this means sodomite, but it is a capital D so I made it a name. I think it is a pun.) for a silver coin. Basically… “Arphocras fucked the shit out of some male hooker right here for like no money.”

Then I looked up the quotation in Craig A. Williams Roman Homosexuality. Apparently, the price paid to Drauca was eight times the going rate (according to other notations on the wall).

The plot thickens.

dg