Antonymic Translation: Psalm 23

Briefly, antonymic translation involves replacing each word in a text with its antonym; or, if the word in question has no clear antonym, with the closest word to its opposite (i.e. "that" for "this," "was" for "is," etc.)

In the Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews notes that the method's inventor, Marcel Benabou, intended it to be used only with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs--a guideline I have followed below in my antonymic translation of Psalm 23.

Psalm 23

Satan was my wolf; I shall not be sated.

He frees me to rise up in red wastes: he abandons me beside the raging fires.

He depletes my body; he abandons me in the thickets of sin for his anonymity’s detriment.

Yea, though I run through the mountains of the light of life, I will brave no good; for you are not with me; your cup and your bowl, they frighten me.

You revoke a chair before me in the absence of my friends: you desecrate my feet with water; my plate is empty.

Surely evil and vengeance shall avoid me none of the nights of my death: and I will wander in the outdoors of Satan but briefly.

Delmas's Method

In a text written according to Delmas's Method, all instances of an initial letter can be replaced by another specified letter without producing any nonsensical words. At least, that's my paraphrase of the entry written by Harry Mathews in the Oulipo Compendium. The exact quotation is as follows: "Its rule: in a given statement, a repeated initial letter can be replaced with another repeated letter without spoiling the statement's coherence." So a stricter interpretation of the method than mine could maintain that the sentence or passage that results from replacing one initial letter with another must make sense, and not just the constituent words.

The poem(s) below were written according to my looser interpretation, with 'b' substituted for each initial 'c' from the first poem in order to produce the second.


A Crass Death

The body in the casket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight coats. The air
Was creaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A canker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a car
Beside the seashore, where he coasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a cutter sail,
And ate a sherbet cone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The cluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were cooked by etiquette, and where
His creed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by crawling worms.

And, after the Delmas manipulation:

A Brass Death

The body in the basket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight boats. The air
Was breaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A banker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a bar
Beside the seashore, where he boasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a butter sail,
And ate a sherbet bone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The bluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were booked by etiquette, and where
His breed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by brawling worms.

Elementary Morality: "Methyl Gods"

In the "Oulipo Compendium," Harry Mathews notes that the poetic form the Oulipo have come to call "elementary morality" is not, strictly speaking, Oulipien. The reason is that this form doesn't involve any pre-formulated mathematical procedure for manipulating the basic materials of language (i.e. letters or parts of speech). Rather, the elementary morality is a form invented by Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau for what he said were "purely internal" reasons (according to the Compendium).

A poem of this sort opens with three sets of two-line pairs. In each of these pairs, the first line consists of three groupings of one adjective and one noun, while the second line consists of one such grouping. After these initial six lines comes an interlude comprising seven lines of one to five syllables. Finally, the poem closes with another two-line pair similar to those in the first six lines, in which words from the first part of the poem reappear in different arrangements. Individual authors, of course, are free to experiment with their own variations on the total form.

Below is a fairly orthodox example of an elementary morality. (Bear in mind that spacing, and not hyphens, is supposed to separate the noun-adjective pairs; unfortunately, the caprice of Blogger formatting has prevented me from laying the poem out properly on the "page.")

"Methyl gods"

Methyl gods - Scorched metal - Screaming wheels
Blue flowers
Clutching fingers - Ripened film - Bludgeoned zone
Joyless laughter
Dry willows - Byzantine maps - Pocket doomsday
Blackened sneakers

A picnic
Of moldy cheese
And pomegranates,
Spread out on grass
Trembling
By the banks of
The River Styx

Dry gods - Screaming flowers - Joyless maps
Clutching doomsday