So I’m poking around in the bilingual digital edition of Joyce Mansour’s Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems, translated by Emilie Moorhouse, who notes that Mansour “was known within Surrealist circles because André Breton was a champion of her work, but beyond those circles, she was ignored. Her use of irony mixed with the erotic macabre shares similarities with the work of much more renowned French poets: She is a Baudelaire minus the shame or a George Bataille au feminin.” High praise, indeed.  

As I peruse the book, I come across a short poem with one long line in the middle that really catches the eye: “Among the hard-boiled eggs, the violins, the enemas.” How perfectly Mad Love/Mad Libs!  It has been noted in Poetry that, “What’s both interesting and disappointing about how Mansour has so far been studied is . . . an insistence to read her erotic references so literally. . . . How can the esoteric be described in any language? Isn’t this the highest form of surrealism? Isn’t it why many of us write? To try to find out how close we can get.” And so it is with BTR! At any rate, here’s the full English translation:

Dance with me, little cello 
On the magic purple grass  
During nights of the full moon. 
Dance with me, little music note  
Among the hard-boiled eggs, the violins, the enemas.  
Sing with me, little witch  
For the stones go in circles  
Around the soup bowls  
Where drowns the music  
Of streetlights. 

Since I had the French handy to copy, I ran it through Bing Translate for its English version. It exactly nailed the key “enema” line, but introduced some wood in the form of “soup tureens” for “soup bowls,” and some other minor missteps not worth noting, because intuition says there’s an urgent need to run the poem through BTR. This will be done based on an English-translation “first letter of words in the first line” conceit, which yields DWMLC, to be followed by a French palate cleansing, if you will, before finally disgorging a new English poem. The DWMLC was chosen semi-automatically, the eye pouncing on the first language that fits the bill when quick-scrolling the Bing list. This resulted in a sequence of Dogri (native to India-Pakistan), Welsh, Maltese, Latin, Czech, French, and English. 

Jump with me, young man,  
The magic cello under the full moon on the grass.  
Jump with me, young man,  
A musical note in the balls with a pig, violins, an enema.   
Take me with you,   
Go with the circle of servants to the little people,   
Where the bright music surrounded the cheese soup. 

This has to be hand-lineated, of course; Bing spits out a run-on block, and it also added some punctuation, which has been retained. But the poem is arguably a remarkable success. To be honest, as everyone likes to say, as if not being honest is the default position, if I ran across this in Mansour’s selected poems, I wouldn’t bat an eye. I’d take it to be a suicide poem about jumping off a cliff or a roof. Doomed lovers, a May-December thing, Mansour and her college-boy fling. The Oz-like little people and their naughty cheese soup add a perfect note of erotic macabre; perhaps the unfortunate pair are supposed to jump into the cheese soup, as if it’s the Giant Tureen of the Absolute. And “a musical note in the balls with a pig” takes the whole violins-and-enemas idea to a spankin’ new intimate level, screw the hard-boiled eggs, they’re too Shelley.  

So what would the image generators make of this? The line, not the poem. The poem may be the prompt, but here the line is the prompt, with a little nudge. I asked premium Chat and Gemini to elucidate the line, sans text, in a cubist manner, just to be perverse. As Chat notes, the Surrealists were not, as a rule, enamored of the “formalism and rationality” of the Cubists, Picasso excepted. The original line yielded something rather dignified and no more than mildly cubist from Chat (left), while Gemini missed the cubist aspect entirely and insisted on getting down and dirty with the egg. Generic enema bulbs are the order of the day, as one might expect.

Gemini needed another nudge, so I vaguely requested a do-over “in the manner of Picasso” and got this very unfortunate Guernica diet lunch.

Meta’s output was so off the mark, it’s not worth showing, but it’s not a premium service. Similarly, the free version of Grok didn’t do anything interesting, and both Meta and Grok won’t go near an enema bulb, they’ve simply been ignored. And what about the new line? “A musical note in the balls with a pig, violins, an enema” sounds promising as a straight line-prompt, no nudges, no mention of Mansour. Well, the prompt does include, “Please create an image that elucidates without text this line of poetry . . .” It’s good to be polite to LLMs, I read somewhere. And it’s not impolite to note the results aren’t worth showing, they’re terrible, and do-overs with a Picasso request are just as bad. This applies to Chat and Gemini; Meta and Grok were left out of this entirely, they’re not worthy.

But I also did an entire poem is the prompt, using the English original, for basic-plan Midjourney and got literal roughage like a witch playing a cello in a field of eggs under a full moon. Yes, I’ve seen the MJ discussion groups where a prompt must be so granularly specific it reads like the fine print on a contract, but that’s about as anti-stochastic as you can get, and we’re not going there. Also tried the potentially dangerous “A musical note in the balls with a pig, violins, an enema” on MJ and, sure enough, got that old standby, “Sorry! The AI Moderator is unsure about this prompt. Please try adjusting your prompt or trying a different idea.” Hey, what if that is the prompt? Give MJ a taste of its own diffusion medicine.

And behold! This is the best of the four “Sorry!” returns (the others being really quite awful), and it’s clearly Mansour herself pondering a poem, even though she was not in the prompt. It all comes around!