Translating Breeder Lit

Translating Breeder Lit
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But how to translate
Bourgeois breeder lit?
Ah, there’s the Rub…
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To Be Gay or Not To Be Gay

“Traditional narrative is at once
heterosexual and heterosexualizing”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus:
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

To be gay, or not to be gay,
Surely that’s the question, my dears.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous str8ts

Or to take arms against unruly rough trade
And by opposing them, translate them?

“The seductions and delights of telling
a story, unimpeded by historical knowledge,
threaten to supersede the study of poetry…”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

To write—to translate str8t literature
That great heart-ache of moiling heterosexuals

Their inarticulate flesh consuming us
Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know the routine

Perchance to translate, aye, there's the rub
For in that translation what dreams may come

“Even when the specific poems under
consideration operate steadfastly to
thwart the reader’s narrative satisfactions”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

When we have shuffled off this str8t coil,
Must give us pause—our lack of respect

Haven’t we born the whips & scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, those proud pricks

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, the homophobia

“Novelistic fantasy, with its characteristic
Fetishization of closure, is inimical to the
eroticism of the Illuminations.”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

That patient merit we th'unworthy make,
Our gay quietus but a mere ballpoint bodkin?

What burdens we’ve born, swishing, lisping
Mincing our way under a herero-regeime?

What about the dread of something after str8ts,
The undiscovere'd country of the gay new world?

“If normative sexuality is end-haunted,
all for its end, then rimbaud’s open-ended
homoerotic writing constitutes a
double threat to the dominant
representational economy”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

No gay traveller returns yet from there,
Puzzling our will, makes wonder what to do?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And the gay hue of resolution is sicklied o'er

And enterprises of gay pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry

“The biography of Rimbaud, ultimately
a product of the heterosexual
imagination functions not only as
fantasy, but also defense. It would
affix a definitive ending to a writing
that bears little resemblance to story.”
—Merrill Cole, The Other Orpheus
A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality

And lose the name of action because our gay
Writers didn’t translate the str9ts in time?