Poem

Ancients and Moderns. September 17, Riverside Park South.

I wrote a true poem today, something that doesn't happen often, and I think I will do no more blogging for at least a significant number of hours. It's only a single couplet in translation, but from an incredibly gnarly language that I don't understand at all well, Latin—my first draft was a kind of command-and-control chart trying to establish the opaque relationships among all the individual words, not to mention sorting out the long and short vowels—and I think it really works.

The original is from the twitterbio of my Nova Scotian Tweep Jack Mitchell:

Me defles tua perraro bis tweetere verba? / Et tibi neglecto, Zoile, praesideo.

And the translation is as follows:

Do you deplore how rarely I retweet you?
Zoilus, I'm just afraid folks might mistreat you.