I spend an hour translating
(four times as long as the author
spent writing his sonnet)
a poem I already translated
two years and more ago,
and finishing the new and finding
the old noticed one might get one
decent out of them, a third.
I left that Frankenstein's monster
to be assembled on an another day,
and took something untranslatable,
years of depression forced into
sonnet's corset, and fought with itlike the poet with his sexuality
under the shadow of his religion,
and wrought something legible,
with passing resemblance to the original.
The sour taste of two Leigh Hunts,
mocking by the visage of Ozymandias,
were washed away with bitter
Gerard Manley Hopkins,
hour and more of hacking and sculpting,
and all that time I could have
been posting about the bleeding
nations of the Earth, the people
who suffer not out of choice
like Gerard, wounded by his
Oxford puppy love turned into
pointless shame, but oppressed
and slaughtered people for whom
Leigh Hunt would have shouted
leaving fifteen minutes for his losing
sonnet. But I'm no Hunt.
01.-02.11.2025
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