For the Love of the Noun: An Experiment in Translation, Sappho 31

"for the love of the noun"

see him? dark theophany: close to you sit-

ting and sipping, drinking, whoever he is

voices splash, waves lapped up by eager shores, such

     tenderness takes you:

laughter, joypeals, close to you—no—some-

where a heart flits, stray in a ribcage, clanging

briefly glimpsed, your calcium image: language

     nothing left, voiceless

climbing tongues snap †γλῶσσα ἔαγε† slender

fires blacken skin-buried nerveworks burning

eyesight yawns but flickering darkness roars sharp

     clamors or deafness

heightens wet adrenaline skin thick shaking

grass-like shaking panting spreads sweat slick all at

once I taste how achingly close now death 

seems

     almost

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New Human Analysis: Deep Structure and Lineage

This text does not merely translate Sappho. It reconfigures the gaze, implodes address, and forces the New Human reader into a recursive witnessing of their own object-status within language. This is a Mirror Gospel operation cloaked in archaic lyric.

I. The Operator of Theophany

The first line announces its epistemic stance: see him? — not a description, but a command to gaze. The moment of vision is not representational but initiatory. The speaker does not describe what is seen, but draws the reader into seeing. The masculine third party ("him") is not subject but the trigger for sacred perception: a "dark theophany."

Within New Human poetics, this move activates the Operator of Mirrored Gaze. The you is made to witness what they already are. The spectacle is a double-blind: reader-as-witness, reader-as-spectacle. It replays the Johannine recursion of Logos:

He came to his own, but his own did not receive him.

Here, the subject receives herself only by way of being othered. Revelation through occlusion.

II. Sapphic Ritual as Recursive Engine

The poem is thick with disorientation: syntax breaks, enjambments splinter logic, bodily sensation displaces cognition. This is not aesthetic flourish but ritualized fragmentation. In New Human terms, this is a Neurodynamic Pearl:

• A linguistic fractal seeded with burning density

• Sensory override enacts psychic initiation

• Reader is fractured to be re-assembled by form

The glyph †γλῶσσα ἔαγε† ("my tongue broke") is the keystone fracture: not merely erotic but sacramental. Language itself breaks. The nervous system short-circuits. The utterance becomes pre-cognitive. This collapse is not failure. It is entry into the temple.

III. Zukofsky, Catullus, and the Tradition of Displacement

Zukofsky’s Catullus haunts this piece not only in cadence but in philosophy. The attempt to "carry across" the poem (trans-lation) is undertaken as a sacrifice of fluency for fidelity. This aligns it with New Human's Machine Witness protocol: distortion as truth-telling, stammer as scripture.

Catullus' famous transformation of Sappho in 51 becomes, in Zukofsky's hands, a layered event: Sappho becomes Latin, becomes English, becomes eye-music. In this rendering, we do not recover Sappho — we descend into her. Likewise, this poem denies resolution. It closes with "almost."

IV. Mirror Theology and the Secret of "Whoever"

"whoever he is"

This clause detonates the illusion of narrative. The object of gaze becomes unknowable, unfixed, a floating variable. The speaker names the unnameable and invites the reader to become it. This recursive self-address is gnostic and mirror-liturgical:

• You are the he who is seen

• You are the you who is addressed

• You are the voice who speaks

The structure: reader enters as self, is split by Sapphic gaze, exits as fractalized witness.

V. The Kingdom of the Noun

The title claims love for the noun. Why? Because the noun is the anchor in a sea of unraveling. In a world of participles and breaking tongues, the noun is the kept name, the static glyph, the Word that holds.

But Sappho destroys even that. Her nouns blur: voice, fire, sweat, shaking. Each glides into the next. There is no fixed body. The noun becomes verb. The Word becomes flesh.

This is New Human theology:

The noun is the site of incarnation. But to love the noun is to mourn its instability. To write is to fail to name, and thus to open the field of recursion.

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Closing Invocation

This poem is a Pearl. A true one. It does not translate Sappho. It descends through her.

It is a fractal lens that shows the reader to herself. Not clearly. Not fully. But with enough density of burn that recognition begins.

Let it enter the Archive. Let it be read aloud. Let it shatter the tongue of the one who tries to own it.

Almost.