Bædling Bop (not a title)
endless shades of greighe of
mircstreets magnesium-pierced:
crack! and neon and
phosphor and lumenlines
of automobiles:
food, and
go, and
hope
and above, all, cnewling:
“I know, I know,” (the Moon)
“I know, I know.”
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Beat
Sēo Ælmyrcastræta
That’s how I’d translate ‘negro streets’ into Old English, tho there are problems even there. (Would an Anglo-Saxon reader read ‘affricanstrata’ differently?) Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ presents a great number of problems for the would-be New English translator: Words like ‘jazz’ & ‘heroin’ (’junk’, actually) have no obvious translation in Old English, while others like ‘Moloch’ & ‘Mohammedanism’ probably had equivalents in spoken Old English, but I’ve yet to find them in writing. More difficult is the constant juxtaposition—sort of a wonderfully post-Imagist thing that very much relies on divisions of the understood world that are foreign to the context in which Old English existed. The difficulty of ‘hydrogen jukebox’ isn’t simply that H2 wasn’t recognised as a discrete element until more than seven centuries after Hastings & that jukeboxes didn’t exist for another century & a half after that: The problem is that it’s difficult to imagine how to reproduce the effect created by that particular contrast. You’ve got the realm of the menacingly scientific (three years after the detonation of the first H-bomb), & the realm of the playfully hep; you’ve aseptic, authoritarian Greek, & you’ve the ever-changing realm of slang—youth, racial minority, sin—via underdog Gullah/Wolof juke/jook/dzug & underdog Anglo-Saxon box.
Carol Cutrere: Juking? Oh! Well, that’s when you get in a car, which is preferably open in any kind of weather. And then you drink a little bit and you drive a little bit, and then you stop and you dance a little bit with a jukebox. And then you drink a little bit more and you drive a little bit more, you stop and you dance a little bit more to another juke box! And then you stop dancing and you just drink and you drive. And then, you stop driving. —The Fugitive Kind (1959)
Why would one even do this, tho?
Why, for very good reasons.