Ninth Night.
Incantation.
My hardships and my blood determine my career;
My blood speaks to me, to me, ’tis my blood that I hear:
I do not think, me, I have sensations,
And my simple desires merit my passions!
Victor Escousse.
To his palace abhorred beneath boulders deep-bored,
Itobal comes alone; underneath the low lintel,
He snatches up his gun and his bronze-tinted sword;
Then, on a bed of rushes, branch dead and brittle,
His spent height allows to tumble soil-ward.
But in vain this throatslicer,[1] whom fatigue so exceeds,
Ceasing three days of marching and bloodspattered fight,
Seeks slumber here within his cavern’s frigid bite:
Profound vertigo on his obsession feeds.
– A thousand curses! quoth he behind his bite:
There, close upon my ear, a swarm musters and roils;
My spasming muscles convulse, my lifeblood boils;
You would think I was on rageous[2] anthracite!
I know not which cruel sprite is so spitefully frantic
To thus strip an old wolf of the slumber he’s won:
So what? Do I not own an arcane magic,
To souse my senses with a balm lethargic,
For three entire reigns of night and of the sun? . . .
– Hey there! Do you stir, dull and vacant skulls
Of all the craven viles[3] whom my knife-hand has splayed!
Skulls, who slumber longside broad well-trampled ways,
In the water of wells, in the forests baleful,
Bring it on! Bring it on! Upon the winds take wing.
Profit then from the dark, in your advent aerial;
Then, alongside faint screams, with wheezings funereal,
Around my bedside valence dance, dance madly circling![4]
He’d scarcely dared to issue these demonic bulls,
Than, through the cloven rocks, boistrously in there bound,
Upon amber rays, a cortege of skulls,
By whom swiftly the bloodspattered bedside is crowned.
The dance tightens round, tis convulsed and whirled amiss;
And beguiled, mesmerised by the arhythmic course
Of psalms that the ball is buzzing in its bliss,
Fervently our highwayman to slumber deep is forced.
Yo! all you moralists, what’s that about remorse?
–trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
NOTES:
[1] égorgeur. A neologism when O’Neddy used it, the word has only rarely appeared since then, hence I’ve chosen a less familiar phrase than the common English “cutthroat”
[2] ardens in the original, a distortion of ardents, raging.
[3] O’Neddy is employing an adjective, vils, as a noun. His love for such grammatical disruptions and transpositions was a large part of the reason that his verse remained nearly unpublishable even in sympathetic Romanticist publications. (His only collection was self-published.)
[4] en rond, i.e., in a ring. In frenetic Romanticist circles, this was understood to refer to the dionysian rond de sabbat, or witches’ dance – which in turn was related to the Infernal Gallop, the favourite dance of the frenetics, which was essentially the same as contemporary punk circle-pits, and in which dancers who tripped were routinely trampled.
