PRE-ELECTION JITTERS: CALM DOWN WITH A HORATIAN ODE

Art Beck (Dennis Dybeck) has given me permission to reprint his excellent translation of this ode by Horace. This might help us keep perspective as we await the momentous election. Art's latest book of essays A Treacherous Art, about translating poetry, is highly recommended! In this ode, I like how he renders "Carpe Diem" at the end.

*****************************

Horace, Odes Book I, 11

Leuci - please, bright mind - don’t ask -

we’re not supposed to know

how it’s going to end - not me,

not you. Don’t listen to fortunetellers.

Believe me, it’s better

to take whatever comes,

as it comes. Whether there’s more,

godwilling, whether this is our last winter

shattering the Etruscan Sea on those crumbling

rocks across: be wise.

Decant the wine, trim your endless

yearnings to fit the short hours.

While we’re talking, jealous time’s

running out - on us. Grab today. Believe

as little as possible in tomorrow.

translated by Art Beck

Zoom Replay: San Francisco's Bird & Beckett! Denise Low, Art Beck, Art Goodtimes--June 8, 2023

Here is the link for the replay on the Bird & Beckett YouTube channel.

June 8, 2023- 7 pm,                              Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate emerita, has won a Red Mountain Press award, NEH grants, and other recognition for her writings and research. She was president of the Associated Writing Programs board and is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. Her memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival is from the University of Nebraska Press. She has articles and reviews in Unpapered: Native Writers on Identity; PostIndian Aesthetics; and Marsh Hawk Press’s Chapter One series. She has a close relationship to jackalopes and sighted Bigfoot with her husband.

 Art Beck’s Opera Omnia Luxorius, a Duet for Sitar and Trombone  won the 2013 Northern California Book Award for poetry in translation. His Mea Roma, a “meditative sampling” of Martial epigrams was a runner up in the American Literary Translators Association 2018 Cliff Becker Book Prize. His Etudes, a Rilke Recital was a finalist in the 2021 NCBA. He will be reading from his 2022 volume, Angel Rain, Poems 1977-2020.

 Art Goodtimes retired in 2016 after five terms as Colorado’s only Green Party county commissioner. He co-directs the Telluride Institute’s Talking Gourds poetry project, is poetry editor for Fungi Magazine , and co-hosts the Sage Green Journal online anthology. He founded the Institute’s Prospect Basin Fen Project and its Ute Reconciliation and Indigenous Peoples Day projects and remains on their advisory boards. His poetry books include As If the World Really Mattered (La Alameda Press) and Looking South to Lone Cone (Western Eye Press). He was co-editor of the anthology MycoEpithalamia: Mushroom Wedding Poems (Fungi Press). Art’s latest book is Dancing on Edge: The McRedeye Poems (Lithic Press, Fruita, CO, 2019). A widower and a grandpa, Art lives alone on Wrights Mesa near Norwood. His oldest daughter Iris Willow and his granddaughter

 BIRD & BECKETT EVENTS (google.com) Bird & Beckett 653 Chenery Street San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood. 415-586-3733 www.birdbeckett.com birdbeckett@yahoo.com