To Sepulus, the SuperstitiousRelated post: A New Creed.
You wonder why I don't murmur prayers
in church grinding my teeth.
This is the reason: the powers in heaven
hear also the silent prayers within me.
You wonder why but rarely you see me
shuffle my feet about in temples.
God lives in us, so I don't have to stare
at him in the pictures of painted idols.
You wonder why I prefer to go
into fields with running brooks and sunshine.
Here appears the Almighty to me in his splendor
and here his temples tower around me.
The Muses, too, love the woods, but hostile
to poets are cities and raging mobs.
So go and make fun of my faith with your stupid
prattle, Sepulus, fool that you are.
Ad Sepulum disidaemonem
Miraris nullis templis mea labra moveri
murmure dentifrago.
est ratio, taciti quia cernunt pectoris ora
numina magna poli.
miraris videas raris me templa deorum
passibus obterere.
est deus in nobis, non est quod numina pictis
aedibus intuear.
miraris campos liquidos Phoebumque calentem
me cupidum expetere.
hic mihi magna Iovis subit omnipotentis imago,
templaque summa dei.
silva placet musis, urbs est inimica poetis,
et male sana cohors.
i nunc, et stolidis deride numina verbis
nostra procax Sepule.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, July 21, 2012
An Ode by Conrad Celtis
Conrad Celtis (1459-1508), Odes 1.16 (tr. Reinhard P. Becker)