After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat, Translated into Latin — Jacob Glover

Nov 082010
 

DG realizes that this may be a stretch for some of you. A couple of weeks ago NC published Jacob’s poem “After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat” which has proved amazingly popular, partly because it’s a witty poem and partly because it gets a certain number of hits every day from people searching “dead rats” on Google (who would have thought this was an underground hot topic?). DG took off the “rat” tag, but that hasn’t stopped the deluge. In any case, this is neither here nor there to Jacob who wrote the poem for fun and who has since translated it into Latin for fun. The fact that he has a mind for this is a continual delight to his father.

dg

After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat

Vidi id in bestiolam via
Secundo die autumno
Bestiola, quae bestiolae fuit, sed
Nunc nihil non fuit, sed
Aliqua non Ens
Bestiola habuerat, sed nunc
Tenebras firigidas rigidarumque habet.
In via, secondo die autumno
Enti cinctus est, in Ente,
Idquod bestiola, non iam ens, fuit
Olim, Ens in Bestiola fuit
Olim Ens fuit hac bestiola, quando ea
Fuit ens.
Sed nunc, Ens nihil non est, abfuit,
Ex hac bestiola, utique, ergo abisset.
—Jacob Glover

On literary translation and brothels

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