Women's Abacus Poem by gershon hepner

When women are twenty
they get sex in plenty.
Once they are thirty
they like it more dirty
and when they turn forty
they’re glad to be naughty
Of course, once they’re fiftyish
technique becomes niftyish.
Once older the story
is holy or whory.
They can’t have more babies,
so priests and some rabbis
advise them to stop it,
but some overtop it
by being more randy
when lovers are handy.
From sixty to eighty
sex may be too weighty.
If they go on top
I ask them to stop,
unless on a diet.
When, coming they’re quiet,
in case nosey neighbors
suspect there are rapers
invading their premise
so close to their demise.
Not mentioned by Belli
is need for some jelly
if, once they’ve reached ninety,
they still feel vaginety,
an experience that I
have not had, but will try
to enjoy when I’m older,
and one make me smolder.
Inspired by a sonnet by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, who wrote 1,950 poems in Romanesco between 1831and 1837. He was one of Primo Levi’s favorite poets, as mentioned in The Search for Roots. Beginning with The Book of Job, that drama of the just oppressed by injustice, these thirty pieces with introductions by Levi, reflect his profound knowledge of science and deep passion for literature, and his survival of Auschwitz, making it a collection that is both universal and poignantly autobiographical. Levi suggests four routes through these writings, the four responses that helped him ward off despair and find salvation in an apparently indifferent universe. These are salvation through laughter, through knowledge, through language and through understanding the stature of man. With this in mind, he presents familiar voices: Swift, Conrad, T.S. Eliot and Arthur C. Clarke, and introduces us to less familiar ones in cluding Giuseppe Belli, among them Frederic Brown, Stefano D’Arrigo and Hermann Langbein. Most of the pieces, as Levi comments, reflect the fundamental dichotomies that face us all: ‘falsehood/truth, laughter/tears, judgement/folly, hope/despair, triumph/disaster’. Many have their roots in Levi’s experience of Auschwitz, and in their startling juxtaposition they give the impression of a world turned upside down. As Peter Forbes says in his Introduction, ‘In the context of the twenty-first century, all of Levi’s choices are striking’; they exhibit ‘a kind of chastened curiosity rare in our time, and an undiminished sense of wonder and horror at a universe that has such things in it’. Belli has been translated into English by Anthony Burgess, who created a fictional meeting between Belli and Keats in his novel ABBA ABBA (1977) , and has more recently been translated by Mike Stocks, in a book reviewed by Ian Thomson in the TLS, January 30,2009:

L'ABBICHINO DE LE DONNE (Womens Abacus)

La donna, inzino ar venti, si è contenta
Mamma, l'anni che ttiè ssempre li canta:
Ne cresce uno oggni cinque inzino ar trenta,
Eppoi se ferma lì ssino a quaranta.

Dar quarantuno impoi stenta e nun stenta,
E ne dice antri dua sino ar cinquanta;
Ma allora, che aruvina pe la scenta,
Te la senti sartà ssubbito a ottanta.

Perché, ar cresce li fiji de li fiji,
Nun potenno esse ppiù donna d'amore,
Vò ffigurà da donna de conziji.

E allora er cardinale o er monziggnore,
Che j'allisciava er pelo a li cuniji,
Comincia a recità da confessore.


English Translation

Women, till the age of twenty, if mother agrees
Always declare their age:
They count one every five until they are thirty,
And then they stop counting until forty.

From forty-one onwards they barely move,
Declaring two more, until they are fifty;
But then, spoilt by time,
They suddenly reach the age of eigthy.

Because, as the children of their children grow,
No longer being women of love,
They wish to appear as women of wisdom.

And then, cardinals and bishops
Who used to be in friendly terms with them,
Start playing the role of the confessor.

2/1/09