Some more American poetry, two versions on the same subject:
Spinoza
Here in the twilight the translucent hands
of the Jew polish the crystal glass.
The dying afternoon is cold with bands
of sweat. Each day the afternoons all pass
the same. The hands and space of hyacinth
paling in the confines of the ghetto walls
barely exist for the quiet man who stalls.
in there, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth.
Fame does not trouble him, that reflection
of dreams in the dream of another mirror, nor affection,
the timid love of women. Gone the bars,
he is free from metaphor and myth, to sit
and polish a stubborn lens: the infinite
Map of the One who is all of His stars.
Baruch Spinoza
A haze of gold, the Occident light a spark
in the window. The assiduous manuscript
is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
someone is building God almost in the dark.
a man engenders God. It is a Jew
with sad eyes and lemon-coloured skin;
time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
a river, is borne by the waters to
its end. No matter. The magician moved
carves out his God with exquisite geometry;
from his disease. from nothing, he's begun
to construct God, using the word. No one
is granted such prodiguous love as he:
the love that does not hope to be loved.
(translation by Willis Barnstone, futilely corrected by me)
Although it is not named in either poem, the subject is as much the
Ethica as Spinoza himself. The author is one of my favourites:
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 14 June 1986) was an
Argentine writer born on 24 August 1899 in
Buenos Aires,
Argentina. He was brought-up bilingual in Spanish and English. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, then traveled around Spain. On return in 1921, he began his career as a writer with the publication of poems and essays in
Surrealism literary journals. He worked as a librarian, spending most of his time at work writing articles and short stories. He suffered political persecution at the hands of the Peron administration and became a public lecturer.
Due to a hereditary condition Borges became blind in his early fifties. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the
University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize
Prix Formentor, his work was published in the US and in Europe. He died in
Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986.
J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: "He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
(Quoted from Wikipedia)
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