Monthly Archives: July 2014

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Erotic French poetry translated without a dictionary

Con large comme un estuaire

Con large comme un estuaire
Où meurt mon amoureux reflux
Tu as la saveur poissonnière
l’odeur de la bite et du cul
La fraîche odeur trouduculière
Femme ô vagin inépuisable
Dont le souvenir fait bander
Tes nichons distribuent la manne
Tes cuisses quelle volupté
même tes menstrues sanglantes
Sont une liqueur violente
La rose-thé de ton prepuce
Auprès de moi s’épanouit
On dirait d’un vieux boyard russe
Le chibre sanguin et bouffi
Lorsqu’au plus fort de la partouse
Ma bouche à ton noeud fait ventouse.

–Guillaume Apollinaire

Vagina Large Like an Estuary

Vagina large like an estuary
Where my sperm goes to die
You taste like fish
The odor of the butt
The fresh scent of holes
Oh woman with the uncrushable vagina
That I can’t forget
Your niches distribute the sauce
Your voluptuous thighs
Even your menstrual period
Is bloody and violent
The pink tea of your pubes
Makes me faint
A person might say it smells like an old Russian drunk
The buffered and happy place
When my mouth inhales your nest
With more power than a vacuum cleaner.

–Guillaume Apollinaire

MignonneMignonne, sais-tu qu’on me blame
De t’aimer comme je le fais ?
On dit que cela, sur mon âme !
Aura de singuliers effets;
Que tu n’es pas une duchesse,
Et que ton cul fait ta richesse,
Qu’en ce monde, ou rien n’est certain,
On peut affirmer une chose:
C’est que ton con vivant et rose
N’est que le con d’une putain !
Qu’est-ce que cela peut foutre ?
Lorsqu’on tient ces vains propos,
Je les méprise, et je passe outre,
Alerte, gaillard et dispo !
Je sais que près de toi je bande
Vertement, et je n’appréhende
Aucun malheur, sinon de voir,
Entre mes cuisses engourdies,
Ma pine flasque et molle choir !…

–Stéphane Mallarmé

Hey CutieHey cutie, do you know that people blame me
For loving you like I do?
Swear on my soul people say that!
It’s so weird that
You’re not a duchess
And yet your butt makes you rich
It’s also weird that in this world
Where nothing is certain
We can be sure of one thing
That your rosy and spirited vagina
Is only the vagina of a prostitute!
Now you’ve done something terrible to my penis
And I don’t like you anymore.

–Stéphane Mallarmé

Les bijoux

La très-chère était nue, et, connaissant mon coeur,
Elle n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores,
Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l’air vainqueur
Qu’ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Maures.
Quand il jette en dansant son bruit vif et moqueur,
Ce monde rayonnant de métal et de Pierre
Me ravit en extase, et j’aime à la fureur
Les choses où le son se mêle à la lumière.
Elle était donc couchée et se laissait aimer,
Et du haut du divan elle souriait d’aise
A mon amour profond et doux comme la mer,
Qui vers elle montait comme vers sa falaise.
Les yeux fixés sur moi, comme un tigre dompté,
D’un air vague et rêveur elle essayait des poses,
Et la candeur unie à la lubricité
Donnait un charme neuf à ses métamorphoses ;
Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins,
Polis comme de l’huile, onduleux comme un cygne,
Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins ;
Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne,
S’avançaient, plus câlins que les Anges du mal,
Pour troubler le repos où mon âme était mise,
Et pour la déranger du rocher de cristal
Où, calme et solitaire, elle s’était assise.
Je croyais voir unis par un nouveau dessin
Les hanches de l’Antiope au buste d’un imberbe,
Tant sa taille faisait ressortir son basin.
Sur ce teint fauve et brun, le fard était superbe !
Et la lampe s’étant résignée à mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre,
Chaque fois qu’il poussait un flamboyant soupir,
Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d’ambre !

–Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal

The Bangle Bracelets

My sweetie-pie was naked, knowing my heart.
She was only wearing jewels of some sort,
Which made her look like a conqueror
That owned Mauritian slaves back in the day.
When the conqueror shouts a lot of things while sexy-dancing,
This world shiny with metal and rocks,
Making me ecstatic, and I love to a furious pitch
The things where the sound gets mixed up with the light.
All of that wore her out and allowed me to do her.
And from the height of the couch where she smiled with no problem
At my love deep and gentle like the sea
That mounts her like she’s a boulder,
Her eyes staring at me, like a male tiger.
With a vague and dreamy expression she tried out some poses
And her candor made her wet
Giving a new charm to her metamorphosis.
And her arm and her leg, and her thigh and her kidneys,
Polished like oil, undulating like a swan,
Passing before my calm and all-seeing eyes.
And her stomach and her chest, her grapes of my vine,
Advanced, more callous than nasty angels,
To trouble my reposing soul
And to disturb my crystal rock
Where she sat down calmly by herself.
I thought I saw the haunches of an antelope
united to the boobs of an umbrella
Which her body was sorting out.
On these brown colors, the farts were superb!
And the lamp was okay with being turned off
Because the room was lit from the lobby
And every time a breath of light came in
It drowned the antelope’s skin in blood.

–Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal

One-paragraph heterosexual marriages

He studies geology. She has butt implants. When they go to the grocery store together, they try to fit everything into two baskets because they like to hold hands when they shop. If they need to buy a lot of heavy items like jumbo margarita mix and Thanksgiving turkeys, they reluctantly enlist a metal cart. She likes to stand on the cart and be pushed, but it’s awkward because her bottom is so big. In the produce aisle, many fruits remind him of her contours, especially the watermelons. One summer afternoon they start feeling frisky during checkout, then immediately have to go make love in the backseat of her car in the grocery store parking lot. All their ice cream melts, but the bananas are okay. Shortly thereafter the butt implants begin to sag, and with them the woman’s love. She files for divorce. The man now wanders alone through the grocery store, unable to find enough appealing food to fill his basket even halfway. “Why,” he asks himself as he squeezes a grapefruit in his forsaken hand, “didn’t I secure a more top-heavy bride?”

She runs an organic vegetable co-op. He works for a moving company, but would prefer to be a crocodile hunter. The woman’s gardening ventures yield very little income, then they start yielding dramatically less income when an objective party tests her soil and finds it to be full of lead. The man has been breaking his back all day moving someone’s entire wardrobe collection into a box truck. When he comes home to hear that his wife has been inadvertently poisoning middle-class urban children for years by selling their parents spinach grown on what amounts to a toxic landfill, he briskly loads a van with all his things and flees the townhouse. The wife declines to file for divorce on the grounds of desertion, and instead waits to hear that her husband has been killed by a crocodile, because then she can move on with her life. At night, alone in her marital bed, she dreams of harvesting freshwater prawns.

He has loved her since they were both eighteen. She grew to love him after an aggressive courtship on the space shuttle. Now they’re each 200 years old, napping in the twin beds that they, with some help from their robot, pushed together long ago. The woman wakes up first and is struck by the pattern of wrinkles on her husband’s forehead. They form a circuitboard while his age spots form a constellation. She rouses him with a freshly-baked cupcake smell, one of several thousand she’s formulated her skin to emit. He opens his eyes and says, “I love that you’re so old-fashioned.” They smooch on the lips. That night they die a natural death, meaning their souls are uploaded to a martian computer and their worn-out bods are shot into space.

This article has everything I look for in an article

I grew up next to a funeral home in Easton, Maryland. At least once a week a white truck lumbered down the alley, pulled into our neighbor’s rear parking area, and left with mysterious boxes labeled BIOHAZARD and INFECTIOUS WASTE. Because I was a kid, I usually watched these proceedings from a tree limb or a swing or a bicycle seat, and I didn’t think too much about the cargo’s hazardous contents. But I was vaguely aware that the boxes issued directly from the garage that doubled as a mortuary, the place where the hearse delivered all the bodies. And I assumed that strange things happened in there that probably had to do with bloodletting. Eventually every dead body that arrived at my neighbor’s house was disassembled into the tidy corpse that would be displayed at the front of the home and the remains that would be shuttled out the back.

This Atlantic article by Saira Khan, “Smelling Death: On the Job with New York’s Crime-Scene Cleaners,” was so grim and unnerving that it brought back my whole childhood. (Kidding, Mom. Sort of.) For me, a red plastic bag full of carnage is like Proust’s petite madeleine. So I’m reading along, just savoring my heartwarming memories of the morgue next door disgorging body parts to men in hazmat suits, when I hit this passage:

Anything that gives personality to the dead affects crime-scene cleaners—things like a neatly folded jacket hanging over a chair, a Victoria’s Secret bag from a recent shopping trip, a pot of macaroni and cheese with the wooden spoon still in it. “It’s like someone literally hit the pause button on someone’s life,” says Baruchin. “It’s actually one of the most serene things you could see, a preserved moment in someone’s life, but when you think about the death part of it, it can get upsetting.”

Renner adds, “It can be very surreal, or freaky, kind of like a snapshot because you can actually picture what the person was doing right before they were killed or died.” Both men say they prefer to know as little as possible about the victims.

I guess I never thought about a crime scene as capturing a moment. Detectives do this with a specific objective in mind: they’re trying to decipher the etiology of a homicide. But when the body is gone and there’s only the immediate aftermath to contend with—those frozen objects all around—it’s tempting to imagine what the dead were doing, seeing, and generally experiencing at the moment their lives were cut short. Like right now I’m sitting at my desk with an empty bowl of watermelon (at least her last meal was one of her favorite foods), an empty glass of water (a shame that she was thirsty though), a to-do list with many open items (this delay on buying a bicycle helmet proves that she was courting death), and photos of my loved ones (man, she’s gonna miss them). Unfortunately one of the prostitutes living in the illegal strip club/brothel across the street has pointed a rifle through my window and shot me through the ears. Does this moment of dying represent me? Do these scattered, splattered objects on my desk tell a story? Can they communicate a life to a cleaning crew? If I just step away for a moment, can I ever come back?

Maybe we should treat all moments in time and objects in space with the delicacy and absorbing interest we’d grant those that belonged to the dead. I can hold up my sticky fork that once pierced a watermelon. What if this is my last fork? What do its little tines tell me about the life that I’ve lived? I can smile back at my nephew as he grins up at me from a photograph. Where did you come from, you little goof? And where are you going? I can contemplate the tree through my window before the prostitute’s bullet tears through its leaves. It would be nice to be a kid perched in that tree, heedless of the worlds that are drained from people when they die. These surroundings may not form a crime scene (yet—for now I’m still in the whore’s good graces), but they are worthy of attention. And it’s indeed criminal that one day they will all disappear.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. (Proust, Remembrance of Things Past)

A review of Want Not by Jonathan Miles

My older brother and his wife are both doctors. (I know, I know. Less about them, more about me.) This means that they receive a lot of text messages from me and M containing photos of our body parts. At 2 in the morning M will be craning around in the bathroom mirror, trying to get a good angle on his back. “Would you please send your brother a picture of this mole? I think it might be cancerous.” If one of us sprains an ankle or might need stitches, we immediately get out our iPhones and start shooting. If we didn’t do this, we might jump to conclusions that reflect our art school, not our medical school, degrees. For instance last night before bed I was concerned about a little scab on my clavicle. “Do you think I was bitten by a bat?” “Don’t be silly,” said M. “That is the mark of a king cobra.” This morning the wound looks even smaller so I guess my superior immune system fought the venom and I won’t have to text my brother.

Regrettably, filial telemedicine has its limits. Two months ago when I came down with acute pyelonephritis, I couldn’t exactly call it in. I had to go to a Brooklyn emergency room and receive intravenous fluids, painkillers, antibiotics, anti-nausea meds, a CT scan, a roommate who wouldn’t stop farting, etc. Then I had to lie there shaking uncontrollably for five hours, getting my blood pressure checked every 30 minutes, bemoaning the fact that we couldn’t just take care of this over the phone. But because I was an ER virgin, everything felt new and exciting, and though I was sick to the point where I felt sure I was going to die and be buried in Potter’s Field on Hart Island because my family physician lives so far away, I kept counting my blessings because depression is worse. (The physical and mental illness combo is the cruelest, however. With this double whammy the patient feels deathly ill while also convincing herself that all her caretakers would secretly prefer she be dead, and might in fact be trying to kill her, and that would probably be for the best.)

I originally started this post because I wanted to write about introducing scorpions before surgery, but then I went somewhere else with it, so I’m sorry. I think I really just needed to open up about my traumatic experience in the hospital.

One day I would like to reciprocate my brother and sister-in-law’s cell phone ministrations, but I’m not sure what form that would take. If they ever go on safari in Africa they could text me pictures of animals and I could help identify them. “That is a giraffe,” I could say. Or, “That is probably an elephant.” If they are ever reading The New England Journal of Medicine and don’t know what part of speech a word is, I could probably say with some certainty, “That is a noun” or “No, that seems more like a verb.” My assistance might be less dramatic than responding to a selfie with, “Yup, that’s cancer. You have two months to live.” But it’s something. I work with what I have. And right now I have a headache that mimics a hangover but is caused not by a bottle of Albarino, but by the bite of a stealthy nocturnal tarantula.

You should read Want Not by Jonathan Miles. It was good and I liked it.*

*I’ll stop doing this soon because it’s so misleading, but man do I love driving a joke into the ground.