Translator’s Note: The poems from “Erscotz” are versions, respectively, of a lyric by the Comtessa de Dia (fl. 1170s) and of an anonymous 13th-century Occitan song whose speaker is an unhappily married woman.  I used the texts in Songs of the Women Troubadours (eds Bruckner, Shephard, White) to make these adaptations.  They carry the broad sense of the originals, with the greatest departure, I think, being in the second stanza of the Comtessa de Dia’s lyric. I am generally interested in poetry written in synthetic language or idiolect, but I cannot pretend that I had any systematic method in writing these.  There are precedents for the analogy between Occitan and Scots – for example, Dorothy L. Sayers translates Sordel’s dialogue into a rather kailyard Scots in her version of the Purgatorio – but since like all analogies it is problematic, and I am not a Scots speaker, I decided to sidestep the problems by writing in a language that never was spoke. “Gospel from the Waning Middle Ages” emerged from the reflection that I seem to know a disproportionate number of people who are both early modern literature and blues geeks.  These are loose translations, carrying the broad sense of Pernette de Guillet and Villon’s originals.  The idiom of the Villon translation is a synthetic blues idiom, meant to suggest the koine that has emerged as the result of the commercialisation and globalisation of the music. “Lock” is a version of Paul Celan’s ‘Die Schleuse’, made with the help of Michael Hamburger’s and (especially) John Felsteiner’s translations. It attempts to suggest, with neologism, some of the grammatical complexity of Celan’s original. The words ‘Kaddish’ and ‘Jiskor’ are not words that I, a non-Jew, could articulate; nor could I embody the loss that is suggested in his ‘Schwester’. I have left them as (I hope) respectful ellipses, but I’m far from certain that I’m improving on the blank page here.