Swans Commentary » swans.com June 19, 2006  

 

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by Guido Monte

 

Poetry

 

IV Bucolica, fragments fractured and translated by Guido Monte and Liliana Lo Giudice

 

 

(Swans - June 19, 2006)  
Here is the last era of human prophecy
Here is the great order,
the cycle of ages.
Here are the Virgin and the reign of Saturn
                                                       appearing.

Be clement, pure Light, to the child
now coming into the world...
Now is the iron age ceasing
now is the golden age enveloping the world.

Child, for you
the earth spontaneously generates
small delicate gifts:
clinging ivy, helicrysum, lotus and
smiling acanthus. Turgid milky dugs
the goats bring back to the fold
and no feared the big lions are to be any more.

The snake disappears and
no reason for existence has
the deceitful poisonous grass.

When the time has made you a man,
the helmsman, withdrawn from the sea
his pinewood ship,
leaves the trade routes,
each land capable to produce the necessities
                                                           by itself.

Speed up these times
whispered the Parcae
in step with the firm will of fate.

Look at the world,
the earth, the sea, the deep sky,
everything relieved by the newborn time.

 

 

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About the Author

Guido Monte teaches Italian and Latin literature in Palermo, Italy. He blends living and dead languages, and ancient and modern poets, in search of deeper relations between different people and cultures. He was born in 1962. You can find more creative writing of his own on happano.org, Words Without Borders, Segue, the multilingual magazine Litterae, and on BlazeVox (PDF file), an online journal of voice. Liliana Lo Giudice was born in Palermo; she is a High School language teacher who occasionally works with Guido Monte in his multilingual experiments (see Segue, volume 4 issue 2, fall 2005, p. 52).

 

Legalese

Please, feel free to insert a link to this work on your Web site or to disseminate its URL on your favorite lists, quoting the first paragraph or providing a summary. However, please DO NOT steal, scavenge, or repost this work on the Web or any electronic media. Inlining, mirroring, and framing are expressly prohibited. Pulp re-publishing is welcome -- please contact the publisher. This material is copyrighted, © Guido Monte 2006. All rights reserved.

 

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