I’ve been following a fine freelance translator named A. Z. Foreman, who it seems has never met a language he doesn’t know. His Poems in Translation site is full of gems imported from a dozen or more different languages, including ancient Greek, Persian, Arabic, French, German, and Russian.
Jorge Luis Borges walking with Willis Barnstone in Buenos Aires, 1975 |
His latest translation, as of this writing, is an extraordinary poem by Borges called “Cristo en la Cruz,” or “Christ on the Cross.” Says Foreman: “I think this may be the best poem in the Spanish language about Christ’s crucifixion.” I’m not conversant enough with the Spanish tradition to have a valid opinion, but I do think the poem is unquestionably fine. In fact, I became so enamored of it that I found myself drawn into doing my own version. There are places where Foreman expands the lines to incorporate what amount to explanations of Borges’s references; he does this with “la conversión de Guthrum por la espada,” for example, rendering it as “Guthrum’s conversion by the sword of Alfred,” which in my view doesn’t help much: Alfred, although called “the Great,” is scarcely better known than Guthrum. So I’ve stuck a bit more closely to the text, though temptations abound.
Borges, for example, has this to say toward the end of the poem:
Nos ha dejado espléndidas metáforas
y una doctrina del perdón que puede
anular el pasado. (Esa sentencia
la escribió un irlandés en una cárcel.)
Foreman translates it thusly:
He has left us some splendid metaphors
And a doctrine of pardon with the power
To cancel out the past. (This is a dictum
Written down by an Irishman in jail.)
What this misses, I think, is Borges’s use of “anular,” meaning “to annul”, which deepens the irony because the Irishman in question is Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned for “gross indecency” (read: homosexual acts) with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. While jailed, Wilde wrote De Profundis, a letter to Douglas that prison authorities didn’t allow him to send. In the second half, Wilde describes the spiritual development he experienced in prison, which led to his seeing himself as a Christ figure—Christ, that is, as a kind of romantic artist. Here’s the passage Wilde wrote that Borges probably had in mind:
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one’s past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, ‘Even the Gods cannot alter the past.’ Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said—I feel quite certain about it—that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
It’s repentance, of course, that occasions divine forgiveness.
This seems more to me than a “dictum,” which I think of (subjectively) as a very brief statement, almost an aphorism. But for the life of me I couldn’t come up with a better word. I did try to capture the occasional nature of Wilde’s writing in De Profundis, though, with the verb “jotted”, and to bring the word “annul” into play:
He’s given us splendid metaphors
and a doctrine of amnesty that’s able
to annul the past. (This dictum
was jotted down by a jailed Irishman.)
There are churches, of course, that may annul a marriage, asserting that the marriage never truly existed. The deeper irony Borges is after, I think, is that Douglas and Wilde were actually in love, actually “married,” but Wilde, repenting of that past, essentially had that marriage annulled. Wilde’s compliance with doctrine provided forgiveness but denied the love at the heart of his “crime.” I wonder, too, if Borges didn’t see Guthrum’s forced conversion to Christianity by Alfred the Great as a parallel to Wilde’s jailhouse conversion, in some way “forced” by Lord Alfred Douglas. Hmmm….
Anyway, here’s my effort, probably not yet “final” (if a translation is ever final), undertaken simply for the pleasure of it:
Christ on the Cross
Jorge Luis Borges
Christ on the cross. Feet touching earth.
Three wooden beams, all the same height.
Christ isn’t in the middle. He’s the third.
The black beard slumps onto the chest.
The face not the face from iconic pictures.
It’s rough and Jewish. I don’t see it—
and I’ll keep seeking it until the last day
my footsteps wander upon the earth.
The man suffers, broken and silent.
The crown of thorns hurts him.
He’s untouched by jeers of the crowd
that has seen his agonies so often.
His or another’s. Makes no difference.
Christ on the cross. Wildly he obsesses
over the kingdom that may await him,
obsesses over a woman who wasn’t his.
He’s not given a glimpse of theology,
the indecipherable Trinity, the Gnostics,
the cathedrals, Occam’s razor,
the purple, the mitre, the liturgy,
Guthrum’s conversion at sword-point,
the Inquisition, the blood of martyrs,
the atrocious Crusades, Joan of Arc,
the Vatican that blesses armies.
He knows he’s not a god—he’s a man
who dies with the day. No matter.
The cruel iron nails matter.
Not a Roman. Not a Greek. He groans.
He’s given us splendid metaphors
and a doctrine of amnesty that’s able
to annul the past. (This dictum
was jotted down by a jailed Irishman.)
Hastily the spirit seeks the end.
It’s darkened a little. Now he’s dead.
A fly wanders over the stilled flesh.
What use can it be to me that that man
has suffered, if I suffer now?