Medulla (Ill Meat): A Translingual Erasure

“One Saturday afternoon, while pacing my apartment, I ran over, for the umpteenth time, two of my favourite lines by Catullus: ‘Ille mi par esse deo videtur / Ille, si fas est, superare deos.’ These lines open Catullus 51, itself a translation of Sappho 31. Both are sublime poems that speak of a lover’s envy for their beloved’s beau. My brain, clearly tired of entertaining these lines literally, came up with an erasure for them on the spot: Ill… m… e… a… t. Ill meat, I thought. What a great metaphor for a love gone wrong. I later added the Latin noun medulla (‘marrow’) to the title.
 Medulla (Ill Meat) is an erasure and an imitation (neither a translation nor a paraphrase): I use Catullus’s poems in the original Latin to compose new poems in English that re-tell Catullus’s love affair with a woman he calls “Lesbia” (the name thought to be an homage to Sappho, the poet from Lesbos). Section I contains 25 poems in Catullus’s voice. Section II contains 25 poems in Lesbia’s (or Clodia’s) voice, each of which was written using the same material as the corresponding poem from the first section (e.g., I.vi and II.vi erase the same lines from Catullus but do so differently).
 Given the constraints of the Latin alphabet, I allowed certain typographically and phonetically informed substitutions and additions of letters (e.g., Latin I can function as English Y, the letter Y not being part of the Latin alphabet alphabet). These substitutions and additions are italicized.”