Replacement rap
Blogdom,
On a Marxist reading, which I will use without believing, this age demands interchangeable parts, in which the rusty ones can be replaced by a newer model without affecting the harmony of the whole. Even in poetry. Therefore, I here take an outdated portion of a poetic discourse, the song "dollar, dollar bills y'all" which is as appropriate to these times as an enclosure movement in East Anglia or other quaint and curious episode in the history of industrial capitalism, and is dragging down the machine as a whole, and without having calculated the overall efficiency of replacing a part by a better one as stipulated by Amdahl's sometimes-accurate law, replace said part by something more a jour.
Euros, Euros, that I want
A Goofball bilingual edition with scholarly comment
Euro-fric, c'est chic Euro-cash is chic
Les dollars d'entemps Yesteryear's dollars
Se brulent au bic You burn with a bic
Plutot lentement. Rather slowly
On se marrera a la fin de leur crise erconomique. And we'll laugh in the end at
their economic crisis.
Euro-chic, Euro chic, avec du fric, Euro-chic, Euro-chic, with cash
Euro-fric, Euro fric, avec du chic. Euro-cash, Euro-cash, with chic.
Parfois sur les plaines d'Ameriques, Sometimes on American plains
Les Indigenes brulant leur bois The natives burning their wood
A vu d'hommes d'outre-Atlantique Seeing men from beyond the atlantic
Lanceres aux sceptres tendants doigts Threw to the ghosts tending fingers De l'argent inconnu des ingrants. Money unknown to these ingrates
Et alors regarderent bruler leurs toits. And then watched their roofs burn.
A jour cette economie esoterique And now this esoteric economy
Se perd dans les usines asiatiques. Is being lost in asian factories.
Euro-chic, Euro chic, avec du fric, Euro-chic, Euro-chic, with cash
Euro-fric, Euro-fric, avec du chic. Euro-cash, Euro-cash, with chic.
The scholarly comment:
The original rhymes. The author's own translation makes no effort at rhyme, because he believes the English language is unsuited to rhyme, and offers this poem as a sort of proof.
Attempting to condense partial volumes of several cultures into a single product of mind, which may be immodestly stated as not the object, but the poetic method, of this piece, ordinarily depends on an attempted one-on-one mapping of elements of the one into elements of the other, and the subsequent creation of a canonical function that represents both original cultures. The mapping in this sloppy piece of work, however, is ambiguous. It being supposedly spoken in one voice, it should find the 19th-century cultural equivalent of a gangster rapper if it is to include a nineteenth-century stanza. Rimbaud, who is obviously imitated in the long second stanza, cannot legitimately be expected to map to a gangster rapper in a set of associations, or super-poem whose other parts are left off the page. This invites the deconstructionist belief that there is nothing outside the text, in other words no super-poem, and the Bayesian belief that super-populations just might be folly to posit, no matter how elegant the neo-Liebnizian idea may seem.
In the end, the author may be attempting to succeed by virtue of the absurd. He liked to defend himself against charges of Kierkegaard-sympathies, with their stink of Tertulian (who wanted to ban some of the greatest activities in life from the face of the earth for reasons involving the worst logic ever recorded), by pointing that this was a big joke to him. And jokes are not the stuff that Kierkegaard is made of.
On a Marxist reading, which I will use without believing, this age demands interchangeable parts, in which the rusty ones can be replaced by a newer model without affecting the harmony of the whole. Even in poetry. Therefore, I here take an outdated portion of a poetic discourse, the song "dollar, dollar bills y'all" which is as appropriate to these times as an enclosure movement in East Anglia or other quaint and curious episode in the history of industrial capitalism, and is dragging down the machine as a whole, and without having calculated the overall efficiency of replacing a part by a better one as stipulated by Amdahl's sometimes-accurate law, replace said part by something more a jour.
Euros, Euros, that I want
A Goofball bilingual edition with scholarly comment
Euro-fric, c'est chic Euro-cash is chic
Les dollars d'entemps Yesteryear's dollars
Se brulent au bic You burn with a bic
Plutot lentement. Rather slowly
On se marrera a la fin de leur crise erconomique. And we'll laugh in the end at
their economic crisis.
Euro-chic, Euro chic, avec du fric, Euro-chic, Euro-chic, with cash
Euro-fric, Euro fric, avec du chic. Euro-cash, Euro-cash, with chic.
Parfois sur les plaines d'Ameriques, Sometimes on American plains
Les Indigenes brulant leur bois The natives burning their wood
A vu d'hommes d'outre-Atlantique Seeing men from beyond the atlantic
Lanceres aux sceptres tendants doigts Threw to the ghosts tending fingers De l'argent inconnu des ingrants. Money unknown to these ingrates
Et alors regarderent bruler leurs toits. And then watched their roofs burn.
A jour cette economie esoterique And now this esoteric economy
Se perd dans les usines asiatiques. Is being lost in asian factories.
Euro-chic, Euro chic, avec du fric, Euro-chic, Euro-chic, with cash
Euro-fric, Euro-fric, avec du chic. Euro-cash, Euro-cash, with chic.
The scholarly comment:
The original rhymes. The author's own translation makes no effort at rhyme, because he believes the English language is unsuited to rhyme, and offers this poem as a sort of proof.
Attempting to condense partial volumes of several cultures into a single product of mind, which may be immodestly stated as not the object, but the poetic method, of this piece, ordinarily depends on an attempted one-on-one mapping of elements of the one into elements of the other, and the subsequent creation of a canonical function that represents both original cultures. The mapping in this sloppy piece of work, however, is ambiguous. It being supposedly spoken in one voice, it should find the 19th-century cultural equivalent of a gangster rapper if it is to include a nineteenth-century stanza. Rimbaud, who is obviously imitated in the long second stanza, cannot legitimately be expected to map to a gangster rapper in a set of associations, or super-poem whose other parts are left off the page. This invites the deconstructionist belief that there is nothing outside the text, in other words no super-poem, and the Bayesian belief that super-populations just might be folly to posit, no matter how elegant the neo-Liebnizian idea may seem.
In the end, the author may be attempting to succeed by virtue of the absurd. He liked to defend himself against charges of Kierkegaard-sympathies, with their stink of Tertulian (who wanted to ban some of the greatest activities in life from the face of the earth for reasons involving the worst logic ever recorded), by pointing that this was a big joke to him. And jokes are not the stuff that Kierkegaard is made of.
posted by Goofball at 10:04 AM
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