Dilige, et quod vis fac
in the garden of phallic regalia
garden of addictions
you know, where the head bloom
blooms with overweening letters,
as I write you letters, hiding out in the thick gardens
I love your bronze bones
I love your navel blooming with dry
roots facing off, intertwined in the likeness
of organic pre-discursive and single-sex fucking
I love your moles furling into a tongue
slitting the tongue in the twilight of the forgotten tongue
into lesbian type and the toothy punch of braille
I love your pubes suggesting
prospective fucking in the semantic rye
and massive beetles under teeth sheets
rooting in gold roots for gold things
everything in this world makes me think of fucking
“N wakes up, gazes at the ceiling
and everything in this world makes N think of fucking
sometime she goes out in the world of pure
knowledge, pure substance,
but more often
even the reading of Plotinus, Porphyry, or Proclus,
makes her think of fucking.”
everything in this world makes me think of fucking
I look up at the ceiling awakening addled and we
plants intertwining addictively
in the heart of a lexical readymade from the pornhubs
in this small half-bourgeois life
not hidden behind the leaky ontology
of all open fan fictions, closed-off literatures
close to rat phantasms
gnawing open the febrile bellies
of juvenile suckers
everything in this world makes me think of fucking
when your orgasmic cry seemed to be that very cry
slitting open the night, slitting open the night of discursivity
where rat phantasms devour themselves and reproduce
to the cries and creeping critiques of atomizing violence
it’s fine that the spread of that night is wind-chapped
a long time now, in blood clods, dried lube
your lips blue either from cold or wine
my cunt as if eaten away on the inside by mold
what would it be like
if out on the street they didn’t tender you sperm
instead of water, when your throat seizes with poverty
you refuse tactfully and remember
as in silky sainthoods of phantasmic fire, salt witch
in the bonfire of Russian radio waves
divested by masturbation of all the tongues she ever mastered
as we do battle with black triangles
and scorched tongues
as I lick you out transubstantiating into a great tongue
a new great tongue of the liquefaction of bitter lava
as the garden of addictions falls silent, then comes apart
like scorched earths before the fertilizer of sperm blood
as I coming apart is seized
in the liquefaction of messianic libidinal gall
smacking slurping squelching beyond the beyond-tongues,
in a de-e—ee-ep d-yke
in narrows and straights trod upon by translucent crutches
breathe out hic, I speak with hands like a church father:
everything that has ever been spoken in truth, this is ours
slit the throats of the rest, stone it with stones, give it Soraya’s sorrow
Dilige, et quod vis fac, my love, my dear
Dilige, et quod vis fac
Lolita Agamalova
translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Ainsley Morse
This particular poem will be included in the forthcoming anthology: F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu (isolarii, October 2020).
Listen to the original read by the poet:
I first read this poem in a draft manuscript sent to me by Galina Rymbu. The manuscript contained her selections for New Russian Feminist Poetry, an anthology that is being prepared for release in October 2020 by Common Era Books. I was to help with the translations: finding the right translators for the poets and checking the versions for accuracy. But there were two aspects of Agamalova’s poem that made me keep it for myself to translate. One was its incredible drive, the way it pours from one line into the next. The other was its application of classical philosophy to daily experience, a technique that in English may be associated with Metaphysical poetry of the early seventeenth century, and for me with John Donne’s longer poems, such as the Anniversaries in particular (“one might almost say, her body thought,” says Donne in the First Anniversary, composed in 1611, of his dead teenage protagonist). Like Donne, Agamalova is working with Christian philosophy inflected with Neoplatonism, a tradition of thought that stands in something like a Buridan’s ass relation between the sexual body and the devout soul, in that it aims to allegorize sexuality into nonexistence but winds up sexualizing spirituality. The title of Agamalova’s poem is a quotation from Saint Augustine, a North African Christian philosopher from the period when the Roman Empire was falling apart, and it is given in the original Latin: Dilige, et quod vis fac, which means “Love, and do what you will.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, thinks it means that if you love God, you may sail beyond the bounds of conventional morality. But interpreters who read it in its original context, that of an Easter sermon delivered in 407, believe it has almost the contrary meaning, and has to do with enforcing discipline: love the sinner and therefore give him a good beating, because it’s for his own good (also goes with “her”). But Agamalova approaches from yet another angle by running the Latin fac, an imperative (“do!”), through its English homophone. It parallels her other, more conventional pun, the substitution of celestial love by terrestrial love, or of agape by eros. There is a lot of other ecstatic punning and pointing in the poem—Soraya, by the way, is from the Iranian film The Stoning of Soraya M.—but I also love the handling of the whole garden-of-sex thing, which of course also sits in the shade of Genesis 3. Anyway, Ainsley Morse, esteemed translator of Russian experimental prose and poetry, who too is editing the translations of The New Russian Feminist Poetry anthology, kindly consented to co-translate the piece with me, and there it is––translated top to bottom, like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Lolita Agamalova was born in 1997 in Grozny, Chechnya. A radical anarcho-feminist and lesbian activist, she came to Moscow as a teenager and is currently a doctoral student in philosophy. Her poems, says Galina Rymbu, “combine poststructuralist terminological networks, concepts from feminist theory, and determinedly transgressive and symbolic images.” She was long-listed for the 2019 Dragomoshchenko Prize. This particular poem will be included in the forthcoming anthology: F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu (Common Era Books, October 2020).
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad but grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His many translations include Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions, 2022). He is also the author of several books of poetry, including The Feeling Sonnets (NYRB, 2022), sections of which appeared in Asymptote here and here.
Ainsley Morse teaches at Dartmouth College and translates Russian and former Yugoslav literatures. In addition to contemporary Russian poetry, she has translated a collection of theoretical essays by the Formalist critic Yuri Tynianov, Andrei Egunov-Nikolev's "Soviet pastoral” novel Beyond Tula, and collections of poetry by postwar Soviet poets Igor Kholin and Vsevolod Nekrasov.
