LOVE POEMS OF ANCIENT EGYPT - TRANS. EZRA POUND & NOEL STOCK

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My reading has been slowed due to recent events. It’s hard to really get into a book when there’s all this stressful marching and occupying and all that going on. So I wanted to digest something smaller and easy so I decided to take on this short book of poems. It’s almost a chapbook, at only 33 pages, tho it’s very well bound and includes all of these photos of Egyptian sculpture. Those handsome photos are basically all of the background we get from this book. There’s a short intro, literally a paragraph, explaining that these poems are from various (unrelated) strips of papyrus and pottery that Boris de Rachewiltz translated into Italian in the 50’s. Despite being fragments, and originating from different sources ranging from 35000-3000+ years ago they’re presented as complete poems. Celebrity fascist Ezra Pound and Noel Stock (who I don’t know anything about) translated them from the Italian. The Ezra Pound thing is also somewhat misleading since he only translates the first poem in the book. I assume they wanted to use Pound’s name as a way to sell the book but his poem is the worst translation in the book. That maniac Pound translated part of it into Latin, which would be showing off if he actually could read hieroglyphics. The poems themselves are amazing. It’s hard to imagine 3,000+ years ago. It’s hard to imagine what people were like back then. It’s hard to imagine their lives and interests and ideas, especially the non-Pharaohs. We get lots of that here. It’s funny to imagine young Egyptians in love. Lots of the narrators of the poems seem to be young people in love. We hear about how hard love can be, the anguish. We hear about obsession and longing. I do wonder somewhat about the translation. For instance, the word “heart” is used as a symbol for love the way it is used in Western Culture broadly. I wonder if the original actually reads that way or if they were looking for a translation that made more poetic sense. Likewise, a character refers to a house covered in ivy, which I don’t believe grows in Egypt. There’s great stuff about being sad because your girlfriend parties too much and you’re jealous. Things from parents about their horny kids. It’s all wonderful and short and betrays a much different sexual ethic than we have here in modernity. Nice little break from reality. It needs more context but it was a good afternoon read. 60 strips of papyrus.