My poem "Lucan in Averno" is now online at ChiZine as part of their fundraising SuperGod Mega-Isssue, which is not overconfidently named. (There are five installments to date. Read them all and donate!)
It comes out of my longstanding and possibly perverse love for the Pharsalia, also known as the Bellum Civile, the pitch-black brilliant splatterpunk anti-epic Marcus Annaeus Lucanus completed ten books of before he was obliged to commit suicide in 65 CE for conspiring to assassinate Nero. There is nothing else like it in Latin of any age and barely at all until the twentieth century; I would rave at the internet at large to read it except that there isn't a single translation I like well enough to recommend. For the time being, you could try combining Jane Wilson Joyce and Susan H. Braund and avoiding Robert Graves at all costs. I am translating the poem in bits and pieces, but not as quickly or as consistently as I would like. In any case, "Lucan in Averno" was written partly in answer to a question I asked in my journal this summer: "If Vergil was Dante's psychopomp, who did Lucan guide and through what kind of hell?" To which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eredien responded, "I think the text might answer itself on this one. Himself, obviously; and the hell was Rome." I thought this was very sound. Its other major antecedent is Pharsalia 6.564—569, the necromancy of the witch Erictho:
Even at a kinsman's funeral, the dread Thessalian
has often lain over beloved limbs, pinning with kisses
the head she lops, whose locked mouth she undoes
with her teeth, snips out the dry throat's clinging
tongue, and pouring whispers between the icy lips
entrusts a secret blasphemy to the Stygian shades.
And the simple idea of speaking for a historical figure, which is no less appropriative for their being dead. Of course, the Pharsalia itself is a work of historical fiction, the civil war of its alternate title being the three-way rack of Caesar, Pompey, and Cato in 49—45 BCE that signaled the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the imperial dynasty that Lucan would at first prosper under and eventually, fatally rebel against; it is full of calling up ghosts, putting the future into their mouths. I'm not surprised that Erictho's scenes are the tour de force of the poem: the witch's art is also the poet's. Tot rerum vox una fuit, he says of her: of so many things was hers the sole voice. But he's among the dead now and vulnerable, at the mercy of anyone who knows the same trick.
My poem is not as good as Book 6 of the Pharsalia. But you should go read it anyway.
It comes out of my longstanding and possibly perverse love for the Pharsalia, also known as the Bellum Civile, the pitch-black brilliant splatterpunk anti-epic Marcus Annaeus Lucanus completed ten books of before he was obliged to commit suicide in 65 CE for conspiring to assassinate Nero. There is nothing else like it in Latin of any age and barely at all until the twentieth century; I would rave at the internet at large to read it except that there isn't a single translation I like well enough to recommend. For the time being, you could try combining Jane Wilson Joyce and Susan H. Braund and avoiding Robert Graves at all costs. I am translating the poem in bits and pieces, but not as quickly or as consistently as I would like. In any case, "Lucan in Averno" was written partly in answer to a question I asked in my journal this summer: "If Vergil was Dante's psychopomp, who did Lucan guide and through what kind of hell?" To which
eredien responded, "I think the text might answer itself on this one. Himself, obviously; and the hell was Rome." I thought this was very sound. Its other major antecedent is Pharsalia 6.564—569, the necromancy of the witch Erictho:Even at a kinsman's funeral, the dread Thessalian
has often lain over beloved limbs, pinning with kisses
the head she lops, whose locked mouth she undoes
with her teeth, snips out the dry throat's clinging
tongue, and pouring whispers between the icy lips
entrusts a secret blasphemy to the Stygian shades.
And the simple idea of speaking for a historical figure, which is no less appropriative for their being dead. Of course, the Pharsalia itself is a work of historical fiction, the civil war of its alternate title being the three-way rack of Caesar, Pompey, and Cato in 49—45 BCE that signaled the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the imperial dynasty that Lucan would at first prosper under and eventually, fatally rebel against; it is full of calling up ghosts, putting the future into their mouths. I'm not surprised that Erictho's scenes are the tour de force of the poem: the witch's art is also the poet's. Tot rerum vox una fuit, he says of her: of so many things was hers the sole voice. But he's among the dead now and vulnerable, at the mercy of anyone who knows the same trick.
My poem is not as good as Book 6 of the Pharsalia. But you should go read it anyway.
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