Three Trios: Poems

translated by Judith Hall
by J II

Northwestern University Press, 2007
Cloth: 978-0-8101-5179-6 | Paper: 978-0-8101-5180-2 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-6694-3
Library of Congress Classification PS3558.A3695T49 2007
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Three Trios brings together, for the first time, translations of two ancient texts. The Apocryphal Book of Judith may be the more familiar one--the tale of a widow as warrior-savior. Less familiar may be the possibility that hidden within this narrative is another older sequence, a pagan one. The ritual that initiated a woman into the Dionysian also licensed her to leave her community. That ceremony, for all the running and blood-letting, helped the cultivated woman cultivate her individuation out of a morass of femininity. The "Mysteries" were widely practiced, and yet to preserve their secrecy, any documentary evidence was surely hidden, coded, or bowdlerized. It is possible that the Book of Judith was such a disguised book of common pagan prayer. Three Trios is composed out of this audacious possibility.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

J II (? - 561? B.C.E.) is the name given to the author of the Apocryphal Book of Judith. Until the discoveries of 1897, many readers attributed to J II the glories of her heroine: her incredible eloquence, intelligence, and the kind of charisma reserved for a god. They did not, for reasons lost to us, go on to attribute to J II her beautiful young heroine's military success: that she entered a wilderness, that she killed her enemy, that she defended her city and saved her people. Centuries after Judith was removed from the Bible, J II was still revered as the maker of this woman, this symbol of Israel. Once the second scroll was found in 1932, her "identity," beyond the simple fact of a woman writing, seemed less certain. Her most beloved poems are probably not the private yearnings of a solitaire but part of a ceremony for cultivated women.

Judith Hall is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts, 2006), and The Promised Folly (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern, 2003). Her translations of J II are as vivid and imaginative as the poet is imaginary. She serves as poetry editor of The Antioch Review and teaches at California Institute of Technology and with the MFA in Poetry Program at New England College.

REVIEWS

"Each book of Judith Hall's has been a happy discovery for me. Each one has been astonishing, the writing like that of no one else; elegant, resonant, a bright surfacing from the depths of language, experience, and imagination, all conveyed with a sure, original artistry. <i>Three Trios</i> continues the promise of her earlier books and expands her range." --W. S. Merwin

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Foreword; or, Ancilla 000
Introduction to the Poet and the Poems 000
part one
Ancilla to What Follows in the First Part 000
Apocrypha 000
The God That Took the Place of Pleasure 000
Psalm 000
Apocrypha 000
Hymn 63 000
A Late Book Left Open 000
Lament 000
Apocrypha 000
In Anticipation of an Audience 000
Apocrypha 000
Garments of Gladness in a Mime of Terror 000
Prayer 000
part two
Ancilla to What Follows in the Second Part 000
Rumors of the Bathless Wife 000
Sweetest the Unexpected Sweet 000
After Absence 000
The Nine Intimacies 000
A Book Cut and Left in the Forest 000
Rumors of the Bathless Wife 000
The One Playlet for Public Consumption 000
The Cave in the Desert, the Desert in the Psalm 000
"There He Was . . ." 000
The Banquet of Sense 000
Where I Live 000
Rumors of the Bathless Wife 000
part three</SC
Ancilla to What Follows in the Third Part 000
A Merry River Being Better than a Weary Meadow 000
Into Water Into 000
Gather Archaic Thanks 000
Three Trios 000
Fiction 63 000
Juju, the Musical 000
A Book Hidden Away 000
So 000
The Ceremony 000
Translator's Note 000

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