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Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

13/11/2024

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Picture
​(trans, Eric Mosbacher)

The master started looking more and more often at his watch; and the boys started looking at their watches more and more often too… Oh, the endless repetition, the excruciating boredom… the pupils at their desks suffering from an acute sense of… boredom, boredom, boredom!
 
 
That’s the way it goes, Reader
jus’ dustin up the ol chalk bored rust
 
And you say, whoa, doan be droppin
those ’od·damn, ’od·awful Gee’s
you break ’em you
flush ’em, right?
— they’s aint the only ’host
you’ve swallowed whole
 
You need to Calm down again, pls
(gag w/ Maga too, fer dumb luck)
 
Get yr self back to old school Rules
(tedium di’dum, dolor o’rama’dam)
 
Get back copyin blah·board scribblin’s
— it were ever So Got Schooled
flyin drip wet spit wads crisscrossin
blow-’n-release rubbers zig-zaggin…
 
And someone said, Ferdydurke, you
have been written by a masterpiecer…
There’s a new day a’dawnin’
By ‘n’ By    [sic]…           Ick, zee said
 
And we wuz watchin thud y’all spitball
trails oozin down walls in sum
excited states of esoterica [1]
 


[1] Second stanza reprised from SongBu®st, p.87; So Got Schooled (a memoir): penmanship, spitwads, rubbers; a hint of Theodore Roethke’s “Dolor”; italicized quotes are verbatim from a previous owner’s marginalia in our first edition Grove Evergreen reprint (1968); was hoping on two more G’s (Robert Grudin & Pierre Guyotat) but couldn’t find anything readily riffable
Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 26 books in print (from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, & others). His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is StephenBett.com
 
Website: StephenBett.com  

Image by Robert McGowan
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