Dilige, et quod vis fac

I first read this poem in a draft manuscript sent to me by Galina Rymbu. The manuscript contained her selections for New Russian Feminist Poetry, an anthology that is being prepared for release in October 2020 by Common Era Books. I was to help with the translations: finding the right translators for the poets and checking the versions for accuracy. But there were two aspects of Agamalova’s poem that made me keep it for myself to translate. One was its incredible drive, the way it pours from one line into the next. The other was its application of classical philosophy to daily experience, a technique that in English may be associated with Metaphysical poetry of the early seventeenth century, and for me with John Donne’s longer poems, such as the Anniversaries in particular (“one might almost say, her body thought,” says Donne in the First Anniversary, composed in 1611, of his dead teenage protagonist). Like Donne, Agamalova is working with Christian philosophy inflected with Neoplatonism, a tradition of thought that stands in something like a Buridan’s ass relation between the sexual body and the devout soul, in that it aims to allegorize sexuality into nonexistence but winds up sexualizing spirituality. The title of Agamalova’s poem is a quotation from Saint Augustine, a North African Christian philosopher from the period when the Roman Empire was falling apart, and it is given in the original Latin: Dilige, et quod vis fac, which means “Love, and do what you will.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, thinks it means that if you love God, you may sail beyond the bounds of conventional morality. But interpreters who read it in its original context, that of an Easter sermon delivered in 407, believe it has almost the contrary meaning, and has to do with enforcing discipline: love the sinner and therefore give him a good beating, because it’s for his own good (also goes with “her”). But Agamalova approaches from yet another angle by running the Latin fac, an imperative (“do!”), through its English homophone. It parallels her other, more conventional pun, the substitution of celestial love by terrestrial love, or of agape by eros. There is a lot of other ecstatic punning and pointing in the poem—Soraya, by the way, is from the Iranian film The Stoning of Soraya M.—but I also love the handling of the whole garden-of-sex thing, which of course also sits in the shade of Genesis 3. Anyway, Ainsley Morse, esteemed translator of Russian experimental prose and poetry, who too is editing the translations of The New Russian Feminist Poetry anthology, kindly consented to co-translate the piece with me, and there it is––translated top to bottom, like in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.