TRANSLEXICALIA

TLex

The Journal of the Institute for Lexical Ecology (ILE)
An organ of ISOCPHYS.

Founded in 1992 by a “sestina of polylexical exiles.”

Translexicalia X (Année 10º)
Ionis Astra, Patrolius’s fluid transmutation of a knotty narration of Norlian customs into limpid Ityalian quatrains by way of provisional transcriptions in a tachygraphic patois of Pahlavi, Poldavian, Sanskrit, Chagatai, Lydian, and Latin found in a calf-bound in-folio manuscript containing Gallo-Frankish variants dating from 1809 and 1813 of parts (long thought lost) of Potocki’s Manuscript found at Saragossa. Transcription, translation and annotation of coblas 7–9 by Ouida Willoughby Johnson.
Patrolius — Ionis Astra — Fifth Canto plus Two
Ionis Astra
by
Patrolius

Fifth Canto plus Two

Este os tiliar ad ulna as est ene nene no Nirusa
od Yerisoa sagradu lupanares or idea ammine lacuna
sarprostium œnyutuyliium enkylistse tradine oru
ad vineslimosa in bantu Dudu nines girtablullu
From this vulvular cup — Drink! As you’d from virginal Ishtar’s

Holy ravishing in our lupanar among pan-piping

Rim pot stop words and black mirrors of obsidian magic:

Drink, Dudu, our fruit’s luscious syrup, portal scorpion–stung!

In this ludict, I’m proposing to jump straight into Patrolius’s icy, squirming pool (or pond or tank, according to translator’s whim) of an archaic world (shot through, for him too, with things of a dark and mystical import), swim about among all that schizomythical action and ritual-bound lingo, and shoot back up with a victorious mouthful (no hands!) of humanity I can call my own. All without drowning! I should add that what for Patrolius was a mystical “mirror of Solomon” (jāmi jahānnumā) is for us simply a star chart (both astronomical and astrological) and that Patrolius, languishing in his soul’s infatuation, lards — as I could but won’t or might but wouldn’t — his fanciful analysis with puns on Nirusa, such as nīrū naurī nisā’ — “burning blossoms of woman(inity).” I should also add that nūrī ilāhī — “divinity’s light” — and in particular its Malaysian corruption, Norlia — has nothing to do with our Norlia (though it is probably not for lack of trying that nūrā hints at both stuff for uprooting a coy crinoidal patch and also what flows or follows from that patch’s blushing lack of floss). Am I putting it too plainly if I say it again? Atta, as you know, is Ishtar’s pluricopular avatar, and ktar-cup stands for vulva. Why do I find writing this ludict so difficult? This is my blood. According to Nirusa, ktar-drunk Dudu in canto two sings of sacral group carnality such as Atta goads us lupan-bound Norlian girls born at altar’s pivot and push into transacting with six strong strumming Norlian bards concomitantly on particularly auspicious conjunctions of moon and sun. In Rumi’s dusky lowland of Babylonia, though, such plural joys simply cannot occur, for Rumi’s god is singular, strict, and taciturn, not manifold, mild, and tacit as is ours. Any Norlian man, in addition, is always a warrior, always a bard and shaman (sāman), and always, thus, has warrant to gratify his lust with any Norlian woman who wants to satisfy it. Similarly, any Norlian woman, who is always a sibyl, also knows how to hunt and fight, and so on, and what many a Norlian woman was hungry for during this particular lustration was a Sogdianian warrior, if you catch my drift. This is all far from shocking. What is shocking — that is, was shocking to Patrolius — is this: Among Sogdianian survivors of Norlian ambush and lust, a rumor was rampant that your Chorasmian bāsīra of spiritualistic basura was in fact born in high Hamiltonia’s most schizomythic city, Norlia, and that his cult of mystical twirling and gnostic bibulosity was a variant of our all too sociophysiologically spiral dancing and agonistic ktar-drinking!
Patrolius — Ionis Astra — Sixth Canto plus Two

Sixth Canto plus Two

Ipsi oa anti Iagip Aseli aster nopo Attaalæ
nopo Oria ostiose ceder et sgoi cri burrasca tiliar
nopo Ostiesa emir po eiop ad depreccata Nirusa
od Yerisoa ipsilares lupanares listapsi vineslimosa
Flap again your slow bright wings, holy star Io, plump moanzy

Dancing drunk and languorous across Atta’s ravishing sky —

Thick with rainbow snail blood, six rising suns strum through young Ishtar’s

Downy floss: raw pulp of that lupanar fruit sticks in my fangs.

Having rambunctiously thrust his capricious and lyrical snout into our hoary (oh my! how long your tradition is, and strong!) shack of communal sacrality (‘lupanar;’ third canto), our syrinx-clutching holy bard’ Dudu succumbs timorously to our promiscuous invitation (fifth canto plus two). A most (and so moist!) alluring vision now confronts his virgin imagination (which vision, in both bards’ imaginations (author’s rhyming with author’s animal’s, natch), schizomythically mimics a moaning grammar-school girl’s sublunary point of initiatory pulsation in that hut of haptic truth. This sultry harlot’s custom follows orgasm’s grammar. Lay is law and law is lay and all that shit. Moonmad sprawl of quaking thighs. Don’t pardon your hard-on, man, put it in, put it in! Plump my waist pops. Pronominal shift from ‘our’ to ‘my’ limns a structural hint: Dudu’s contrapuntal soliloquy (Cantos 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10) follows our far-from-virginal corybantic chorus (Cantos 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9) until final, or last, (11th) canto rings (sings?) a codal (caudal?) harmony (astronomy?) of tonic (chthonic?) unison. Put it in, I say, put it in! Put it into our conid world’s contraction, our vacuous pupil’s dilation (wink, wink!). Finish by writing it all down again? Start by taking it all in up to my wrist-thin hilt! Giddyap, boy, giddyap! My book, sir — as if you didn’t know by now — is an oral book. Oral contract (and oral contact!). Oral commission (and oral transmission (and oral intromission!)). Any quick thrust will fill it. Gosh, but your thing’s almost as thick as it! My waist, sir, my waist. Dusky splay of wood-strong hands parts a glossy calyx. Limpid sap drips. Milky sap rips a gash in that orchid. Ivory and pink, tawny and ruby, mahogany and coal. Craft-avid lips suck a lucky girl’s soft buds into mouthlush points of hot horn. Damply panting atop and among and amidst oh how many sprightly giggling sticky (‘thick with rainbow snail blood’) ritualistically squirming young things in that musky gloom, his autonomous passion throbbing convincingly, Dudu digs in. Mais nonobstant how culturally contrary Ionis Astra is or was to Poldavian traditions, how stylistically at odds this work is to Poldavia’s conformist canons of dithyrambic composition, to its quaint schools of didactic prosody and its positivistic forms of dramatic dicta dictating how Poldavian skalds must string in dot-to-dot fashion distich to stanza, stanza to canto, canto to chorus, and chorus to play’s act — notwithstanding this conspicuous contrast pourtant to anything so distinctly antinomian to it in form as all of Patrolius’s thousands of known distichs in Poldavian and stanzas in Ityalian — but not, I must insist, to how his own annotations and allusions in his partially burnt Afghan journals function and confirm — notwithstanding, in short, this triarchically functioning strata of dissimilarity affirming a substratum of similarity (Tria juncta in uno), a grim handful of dim nihilists still indignantly maintains that Ionis Astra is a fraud, a fantasy, a fabrication as fictional as your aristocratic Poldavian lady’s habit of giving birth in a mountain-top calidarium with only a bar of hyssop and almond oil soap, a faithful dragon, and a dutiful husband for company, cathartic, and combustion, and, as a corollary, that i) no scholar calmly consulting this foxy folio and scanning its cryptic scribblings on a dull autumn morning in that august National Library on Calmbrood Road, Paris, should put nary a guṇa nor sūcī of faith in its dusty words. From this infamous furrow of disappointing illogic it follows, thus, that ii) my Appalachian translation of Patrolius’s Ityalian lyricization of his multilingual transcriptions of Nirusa’s Norlian narration is no proof a) of Norlia’s mythic truth nor b) of Nirusa’s hypaxial past for which many a child of Ishtar is always mourning (similar to how this four-ply husk of youthful strata consisting of stanzas 3 [Johnson 1999], 4 [Johnson 2000], 8, and 9 (infra) simply bursts on occasion into an inconsolably sobbing nostalgia for a long lost Norlia of old. I’m old, I’m not old, that harsh autumn sky, you say, sticks in my throat). Absurd! Against that pack of wrathful anarchists I hold that faith’s possibility is as form-fitting and patulous as my conviction’s position, and that simply by falling back on it with a pouting purring moaning sigh, I’ll display practically all you’ll want to know it by.
Patrolius — Ionis Astra — Ninth Canto

Ninth Canto

Or manna sagradu os aster Io tulpuyauor testa unict
testa ludict assotoloste equilibrium id sarprostium
sisti lacuna arathusea non erat es trealæ
tseridzoi od tlaatlata nines Eros ipsi Aseliæ
Dart now back into your hut — that human-munching bird swoops down,

Drawn by Io’s holy star — dart back out now: with your arrow’s

Liquid music, and your taboo-obscuring chant, hunt that bird

Which slows not, nor shows gravid Ishtar’s front, nor births acrid wood.

Our mouth-lush, craft-avid young corybants, in a word, having found gratuitous gratification by swaying, thrusting, pivoting, and straddling Dudu with two or four or six narrow girlish hips to satisfaction’s satiation in this lupanar, oh holy star Io, now command him with a doubly or triply moral injunction: Go forth now and hunt to pay for your fucking and sucking us, for our fucking and sucking you! Go forth now and hunt, not just any fish, fowl, or fawn, but only, upon pain of turning into human carrion bound and thrown into a Moanzy roosting pit, that fast-flying lazy oa, stormy auk, soaring high in our distant mountain land! Tufa or tuff, a crumbly brown rock. This timorous girl’s first communion. Pour soothing oil upon your foot and thigh. Harmoniously striking against that rocky path. And by stoning, rub raw this calm chorion. In Patrolius’s transcription of that sticky Norlian notion, sarprostium may scan as ‘rim pot stop word’ (as my translations of prior cantos put it), but limns, in this canto, as ‘taboo-obscuring.’ Abstract fiction of wild animals. That much said, that much told. To hunt that magical bird, our bard Dudu must sing, and, by singing, attract it, not into involuntary submission, but into a sacrificial act of willfully colliding with his arrow’s sting (‘liquid music’ again). This canto also warns Dudu (and, thus, any Norlian man, for whom Dudu is a schizomythic stand-in, or formulaic notch, to mark what is and is not taboo) not to kill any Moanzy displaying signs of torpor and anthropomimicry (“hunt that bird/Which slows not, nor shows gravid Ishtar’s front”). And is it so difficult, I ask, to wring signification from this canto’s final sutric mantra? I wrap my shrug in it, and shroud it with my shawl. If you don’t know, I don’t know what to say. Watch him drool.