Read all previous posts in Asymptote’s “Mimes” translation project here.
Mime XXI. The awaited shade
The little guardian of the Temple of Persephone has laid out honey cakes sprinkled with poppy seeds in the baskets. For a long time now she has known that the goddess never so much as tastes them, for she watches from behind the pilasters. The Good Goddess remains unmoved and sups beneath the earth. And if she were to eat of our foods, she would rather bread rubbed with garlic and vinegar; for the bees of Hades produce a honey flavored of myrrh and the women who walk in the violet meadows there-below rattle black poppies without end. Thus the bread of the shades is dipped in honey that smells of embalmment and the seeds scattered upon it come with a desire for sleep. And thus why Homer said that the dead, governed by Odysseus’ broadsword, came by the ruck to drink the black blood of sheep in a square trench dug into the soil. And only this once did the dead partake of blood, in order to regain their life: customarily they repast on funereal honey and dark poppies, and the liquid that flows through their veins is the very water of the Lethe. The shades dine on sleep and drink of oblivion.
For this reason and none other has man destined these oblations for Persephone; but they do not concern her, for she is well-satiated with forgetting and replete with sleep.
The little guardian of the Temple of Persephone awaits a single shade who will come perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps never. If the shades maintain loving hearts like the maidens above, this shade has been unable to forget for the solemn waters of oblivion’s stream, nor find her rest for the sad poppies of sleep’s pastures.
But without a doubt she wants to forget, following the desiring of earthly hearts. So will she come some evening, when the pink moon is high in the sky, and she will stand among Persephone’s baskets. With the little guardian of the temple she will break the honey cakes sprinkled with poppy seeds and carry her a dram of the Lethe’s dreary water in her palm. The shade will taste Earth’s poppies and the young girl will slake her thirst with Hades’ water; then will they kiss each other on the forehead and the shade will be contented amongst the shades and the young girl will be contented amongst her fellow man.
***
Kit Schluter is the translator of Marcel Schwob’s The Book of Monelle, available from Wakefield Press here. He has brought into English works by Pierre Alferi, Amandine André, Ghérasim Luca, Jaime Saenz, and Alice Sant’Anna, among others. Recent personal writing of his can be found in Boston Review and BOMB. Forthcoming from Wakefield is his translation of Schwob’s The King in the Golden Mask, excerpts of which have appeared in Weird Fiction Review.