VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview, bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)
Seta and Sporophyte
If this were Ovid, Seta would have been
A slim bright girl, whose bead of blood
One day ran down her inner thigh, a seed
Threaded across the warp of veins
Vermilion on cream and blue. He took
Such pleasure in the colour that he slew
Her just to satisfy himself and draw the skein
Of red from her rotting body; a damp, fine
And part translucent sort of stem, though not
To bear a flower, but his tensed pouch, the Sporophyte.
(Seta and sporophyte are terms referring to parts of moss. I had in mind particularly a common moss in which the sporophyte – spore-bearing structure – is formed of a stem-like seta, bright red and standing straight up from the main body of the moss, bearing dark red capsules. None of the transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses refer to moss, but I was struck by the coincidence of the technical term Seta and the Sita of Indian mythology.)
Three poems from The Sanskrit
The Subhasitaratnakosha is a huge 11th century anthology of Sanskrit verse and verse quotations. It was compiled by a Buddhist monk but most of the contents are not (or not obviously) Buddhist, and date from several centuries earlier. It includes some poetry attributed to women.
Subhasitaratnakosha no. 999
As the grime and caustic iron
Of North Sea water, somehow laid
Precisely in the spotless scoop
Of shell is filtered by a cloud
And turns to pearl as sweet and clear
As April rain: so can you raise
The warm and grubby coins of envy
To the gold of praise.
no. 998
Your glory in this world and the next, it is
The ribcage of that royal bird, the soul:
The waters of the seven seas
Fill, like a skull, his little drinking bowl.
Lokāloka is the name of a mountain which is both in and out of the world (loka and aloka), marking the boundary between death and life. The Raghuvamsha by Kālidāsa is a long Sanskrit poem about the lineage of Raghu, and at this point in the poem it is concerned with a difficulty in conceiving a child. Kālidāsa is often considered to have been the greatest poet and playwright of ancient India.
Lokāloka (Raghuvamsha 1.68)
The clouds in Calvi steam on the mountain top:
From the pool we watch them teeter, stir, disperse.
My father has just died
But unbeknownst to me somewhere inside
Dividing cells will in a few months reassemble
His closed eyes.
Two versions of Horace
After Horace, Odes 1.30 O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique
Mary, queen of Walsingham, forget
Your darling Norfolk; turn to hear
In Lowestoft and Dartmouth Park, the thrum
Of womens’ prayer.
Come with a child, the blazing boy, and bring
The Muses, skirts up to dance; allow
Also the elderly to attend your train;
And Christ your son.
After Horace, Odes 3.22
The only baby in all of Horace (Odes 3.22)
Lady of the hills and woods
Hear me when my time is come
Preserve me from all dangers and
Heed too your son.
Above my house a pine-tree looms
And every day that passes I
Pray that one day my baby shall
Stand as high.
Spare me then the staggered blows
Of a slow labour, or
A dead child. Bring us torn but
Safe to shore.
Two Translations of Casimir Sarbiewski
Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640) was a Polish Jesuit poet who wrote in Latin. His poetry was an enormous success across Europe in the seventeenth century, with a particularly enthusiastic readership in England.
After Sarbiewski – ‘De divino amore’
Last week I watched Love mending his nets
(Very dextrous he is too)
His gear was all gold: hooks and line
The bait, the flies, even the worm.
He was golden himself: but for all his gleam he could find
No waters to fish in. He asked
“Where then can I cast?”
Pass your nets, boy, to the fisher of men:
In his sea
Packed and wriggling you’ll catch
Men and women like me.
De puero Iesu nato
— Is anything more precious than this child of mine?
Whose mouth with running honey wells and fills again,
As balsam flows unstained in streams that do not fail,
And nectar runs in rivers, free and unconstrained.
In his still curls the stars themselves are bound and borne
And on his nape the locks of heaven turn in light.
Could any mother comb such dazzling weight by hand,
Of he who has been born from shiver of starlight?
— His birth is of the royal line, but royalty is obsolete;
And soonest born he’s lain in filth of foreign town,
His right hand grasps at straw, and clings to scraps of hay,
A baby swaddled only by the chill of snow.
Is anything worth less to us than such a child today?
VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview, bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)