Nimrod in HellMy father was a healer and a hunter. Is it any surprise that I became a poet and a translator? We don''t escape our filiations: we only stand more revealed, as the territories shift, as the hunt closes in. In an early work I spoke of St. Hubertus, patron saint and protector of hunters, bishop of Liege, who is also invoked against rabies. While hunting on Good Friday, he had been converted to Christianity when he saw a stag with a light cross between its antlers-this was supposed to have happened in the dark woods of the Ardennes, i.e., just north of where Arthur Rimbaud was born, and in a space he measured out in long walks.But in Hubertus, or behind that too easily christianized hunter, lay already an earlier hunter: not a saint, though an even more biblical figure: Nimrod, "the first mighty man on earth"-a hunter, a mighty hunter before or against God (depending on the translation).

The Old Testament associates this giant and mighty hunter with the project of Babel (his kingdom comprising Bavel in the land of Shinar, where the Tower will be built) and thus with the question of language and translation. And not surprisingly, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us, Dante has Nimrod in his hell (Inferno XXXI, pp 46-81) with the loss of meaningful language as his punishment. So that what the giant speaks in the Commedia is neither the lingua franca of Latin nor the new Vulgar Tongue. Dante gives us one verse of Nemrod''s ranting: " Raphel mai amecche zabi almi." Commentators from Benvenuto to Buti, or more recently, Singleton, are certain that these words are meaningless. A few, such as Landino, suggest that the words could be Chaldean, others that they may be Arabic, Hebrew, Greek. But the problem may not be there at all: The words Dante puts into Nimrod''s mouth are fitting, are accurate in their intention on language. Their meaning, in that sense, is absolutely clear: they mean to be ununderstandable, to be the babble of Bavel, the language that is untranslatable into any language-and that therefore, we know, must be translated.

And yet-the lingo of Babel was the single language that all humanity understood, that a jealous commander-in-chief then shattered as punishment for the early humans'' communality; "divide et regna" already the essence of YHWH''s political science. So that Nimrod either remembers the first, unified language of the human race which we no longer know, or he speaks in one of the post-Babelian lingos, which are what makes translation possible. But his words, no matter which language or nonlanguage they are in, are fitting in a further sense: they are babble, thus a babelian bavel, and thus connect to bave, Fr. for drool, spittle. A false etymology-but are any etymologies really "false"? Aren''t they the engine whose misfirings, rather than smooth transparent linguistic runs, drive poetry forward? A false etymology, then, possibly, but one that brings in that much despised excretion without which we would have no language. And now, looking up the etymology of "bave" it turns out that the word goes back to pop. Latin "baba", an "onomatopoeia that expresses the babble [le babil] of children." Or of giants.

Or of the single universal language all humans once spoke in their lingo-genetic childhood. Now this bave, this spittle, this active saliva (doesn''t the word "alive" hide somewhere in "saliva"?), as George Bataille''s Encyclopedia Acephalica teaches us, is "the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement." For spittle accompanies breath, "which can exit the mouth only when permeated with it." Because "breath is soul, so much so that certain peoples have the notion of ''the soul before the face.''" Without spittle, no breath, no soul, no language-it is the lubricant that immanentizes the pneuma. But it is also, the EA goes on, that which "casts the mouth in one fell swoop down to the last rung of the organic ladder, lending it a function of ejection even more repugnant than its role as gate through which one stuffs food." And its sexual connotations and erotic manifestations allow it to befuddle any hierarchical classification of organs. The EA again: "Like the sexual act carried out in broad daylight, it is scandal itself, for it lowers the mouth-which is the visible sign of intelligence-to the level of the most shameful organs.

" The scandal of children and giants speaking in a language comprehensible (or incomprehensible) to all, like spitting in public. Neither YHWH nor Dante can let this happen. The one shatters the single language, the other gathers the now incomprehensible words of the giant hunter Nimrod but makes them, has to make them fit into his language, wiped clean of spittle.For Nimrod''s languaged anguish cannot, and does not exceed the Dantean world, it fits exactly into the cosmotopography of his lyric epic. It is metrically exact and accurately rimes with "palmi" two lines above and "salmi" two lines below. Gentle giant, speaking nonsense in comely divine words. Not surprisingly the prissy Latin poet wants worse from Nimrod, telling him "Stupid soul, keep to your horn," and dismissing him thus: "Let us leave him alone and not speak in vain, for every language is to him as his is to others, which is known to none." Yet Nimrod in rage hunts still-for meaning, and he says his meaning.

Poet, translator: meme combat! We keep hunting among stones, Dante hunts down language in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, where he tells us: "let us hunt after a more fitting language.so that our hunt may have a practicable path, let''s first cast the tangled bushes & brambles out of the wood." (Ronald Duncan''s translation, modified). But the selva will always be oscura, mutters Rimbaud in the Ardennes, stumbling through Hubert''s hunting grounds, escaping mother and her tongue (is that why he gives up writing poetry?) and he stubs a toe, goes to Africa, travels the desert, the open space, no selva oscura, no guide needed, he has learned the languages, this nomad poet who knew that "living in the same place [he] would always find wretched," to go on trafficking in the unknown, master of "la chasse spirituelle," a hunt that will not let up. Homophonically this morning I hear Dante/Nimrod''s line as: "Rough hell may enmesh ease, a be-all me.".