Horace, as imagined by the nineteenth-century Italian painter Giacomo di Chirico.
AUTHOR’S NOTE. The following “transcreations,” or “translucinations,” are from a longer series engaging Horace, which I composed and shared on my Facebook page in May and June of 2022. Others of them were recently published as a chap by Longhouse Publishers, and the full run is forthcoming as part of a larger collection later this year. They are in no way meant to be translations proper, except in a desire to bring over a sense of the Horatian “tone.” Which they perhaps do in parts, and in other parts don’t.
[N.B. Based on nouns drawn by systematic chance from poems by Gloria Gervitz and Cecilia Vicuña and freely recomposed here by Jerome Rothenberg. The original poems to appear next year in Rothenberg and Taboada, A Book of Americas.]
Poems and poetics