Emblem 82

Information and materials



The material is the English language; one starting-point being the excerpts garnered in the OED under the entry ‘translation, n.’ (Translation is the EMBLEM, if I must have one, of my poetics.) Other than that: a swap from Basil Bunting floated into my mind; there are obvious loans (o, all right, thefts) from other versions of Horace, Odes III. XXX – specifically by the Rev.H.P.Houghton, a former chief executive of Royal Doulton named Stuart Lyons, and a surprisingly poor version by Ezra Pound. There are some bad puns, and a couple of borrowings from R.G.M. Nisbet & Niall Rudd’s Commentary on Horace, Odes, Book III. I took a hint from Pushkin’s Russifying of the poem and lifted verbatim a line from Marx’s Capital, Vol.1, sat close by one of his many quotations from Horace.
The rest I just made up. (Ah! Inspiration…’)
The poem is for Gavin Selerie, lector.