I’ve recently come across two really gorgeous examples of texts being repurposed.
The first is poet Anne Carson’s messing about in Latin lexicography. From her collection Nox, reviewed in The New Yorker this week:
[AEQUUS] a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain; inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of night? the surface of the sea especially as considered as calm and flat, a part of the sea, a sea; per aperta volans aequora soaring over the open sea; the waters of a river, lake, sea; tibi rident aequora ponti the waters of the sea laugh up at you.
It seems more than natural for the personal to interrupt and complement the official here; how else do we weave new concepts into meaning and keep them there?
Something else striking I’ve read lately is ‘Birds and Seals’, a poem by Nandi Chinna in the latest harvest magazine:
Killed 13 seals, mostly young ones,
this appears to be breeding time.
Got some young penguin and I shot a bird like a partridge.
Killed 7 gannet, a fine large bird, very handsome
but not good to eat.
Chinna created the poem by quoting directly from the 1929 diary of Captain Charles Fremantle. It’s fantastic: so few words are needed to convey the killer’s sense of entitlement and satisfaction. The word ‘killed’ appears in the poem twelve times – at least once in almost every stanza. It’s a catalogue of death, with the acquisitions counted on fingers.
