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miércoles, 8 de julio de 2009

Algunos versos del Canto I de Altazor


Contradictorios ritmos quiebran el corazón
En mi cabeza cada cabello piensa otra cosa


Altazor I 487-488


Hombre perro que aúllas a tu propia noche
Delincuente de tu alma
El hombre de mañana se burlará de ti

Ibid. 500-502




Altazor / Temblor de Cielo
Vicente Huidobro
Edición de René de Costa
Cátedra, 13a. edición, 2005

En la Torre de Babel; Wisława Szymborska


—¿Qué hora es? —Sí, soy feliz,
y sólo me falta una campanilla al cuello
que suene encima de ti cuando estés dormido.
—¿Entonces, no has oído la tormenta? El viento ha sacudido
___el muro;
la torre ha bostezado, como un león, con su gran puerta
de goznes chirriantes.
—¿Cómo? ¿Lo has olvidado?
Yo llevaba un sencillo vestido gris
abrochado en el hombro. —E inmediatamente después
el cielo se rompió en mil destellos.
—Cómo iba a entrar
si no estabas solo. —Vi de repente
los colores anteriores a la existencia de la vista.
—Lástima
que no me lo puedas jurar. —Tienes razón,
probablemente fue un sueño.
—¿Por qué mientes,
por qué me llamas con su nombre,
la amas todavía? —Oh, sí, me gustaría
que te quedaras conmigo.
—No siento rencor,
tendría que haberlo imaginado.
—¿Sigues pensando en él? —No, no estoy llorando.
—¿ Y eso es todo? —A nadie como a ti.
—Por lo menos eres sincera. —Puedes estar tranquilo,
me iré de la ciudad. —Puedes estar tranquila,
me iré de esta ciudad.
—Tienes unas manos tan preciosas…
—Es una vieja historia, el filo pasó
sin lesionar el hueso.
—No hay de qué,
querido, no hay de qué. —No sé,
ni quiero saber, qué hora es.



Traducción de Abel A. Murcia

domingo, 5 de julio de 2009

Is spiritual value undone if we can explain that it comes from a "lowly" origin?


Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel- quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform- menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion- probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc. A more fully developed example of the same kind of reasoning is the fashion, quite common nowadays among certain writers, of criticizing the religious emotions by showing a connection between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And the like. *
_____

* As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality. It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther's wish to marry a nun:- the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature. It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory- e.g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We 'hunger and thirst' after righteousness; we 'find the Lord a sweet savor;' we 'taste and see that he is good.' 'Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,' is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.

Saint François de Sales, for instance, thus describes the 'orison of quietude': "In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here.... Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord." And again: "Consider the little infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i.

In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function. The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression: "Hide not thine ear at my breathing; my groaning is not hid from thee; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God." God's Breath in Man is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris); and in certain non-Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration.

These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere. The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct:- but that would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age par excellence would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past?

The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the content of the sexual consciousness. Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any general assimilation is simply impossible: what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast. If now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis; that without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive: we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value. In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague, general assertion of the dependence, somehow, of the mind upon the body.
_____

We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticizing persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticize our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
Lecture 1. Religion and Neurology
Pages 12-16
2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Algunos Versos y oraciones del caminante aparecidos en Antología rota, de León Felipe


II

Deshaced ese verso.
Quitadle los caireles de la rima,
el metro, la cadencia
y hasta la idea misma.
Aventad las palabras,
y si después queda algo todavía,
eso
será la poesía.


III

Poesía,
tristeza honda y ambición del alma,
¡cuándo te darás a todos... a todos,
al príncipe y al paria,
a todos...
sin ritmo y sin palabras!


V

Poeta,
ni de tu corazón,
ni de tu pensamiento,
ni del horno divino de Vulcano
han salido tus alas.
Entre todos los hombres las labraron
y entre todos los hombres en los huesos
de tus costillas las hincaron.
La mano más humilde
te ha clavado
un ensueño...
una pluma de amor en el costado.


León Felipe
Antología rota
Losada
Tercera reimpresión

Traducir poesía...


Traducir poesía supone asumir previamente un cierto fracaso...

Aparecido en la Nota de los traductores de Edgar Allan Poe. Poesía Completa. poesía Hiperión, 2006. Traducción de María Condor y Gustavo Falaquera.

Y sí, como dijo alguien en Wikisource, esta edición es un ejemplo de "traducción acertada pero de lectura aburrida".

Lo que regía la vida de los aztecas...


Religión y destino regían su vida, como moral y libertad presiden la nuestra. Mientras nosotros vivimos bajo el signo de la libertad y todo —aun la fatalidad griega y la Gracia de los teólogos— es elección y lucha, para los aztecas el problema se reducía a investigar la no siempre clara voluntad de los dioses. De ahí la importancia de la prácticas adivinatorias. Los únicos libres eran los dioses. Ellos podían escoger y, por lo tanto, en un sentido profundo, pecar. La religión azteca está llena de grandes dioses pecadores —Quetzatcóatl, como ejemplo máximo—, dioses que desfallecen y pueden abandonar a sus creyentes, del mismo modo que los cristianos reniegan a veces de su Dios. La Conquista de México sería inexplicable sin la traición de los dioses que reniegan de su pueblo.

Octavio Paz
"Todos Santos, Día de Muertos"

sábado, 4 de julio de 2009

Un poète...; Boris Vian


UN POÈTE…

Un poète
C’est un être unique
À des tas d’exemplaires
Qui ne pense qu’en vers
Et n’écrit qu’en musique
Sur des sujets divers
Des rouges et des verts
Mais toujours magnifiques.


UN POETA…

Un poeta
Es un ser único
En montones de ejemplares
Que no piensa más que en verso
Y no escribe más que en música
Sobre motivos diversos
Unos rojos otros verdes
Pero magníficos siempre.

Traducción de Juan Antonio Tello