On Borges' "Spinoza"

Or rather, on just its fourth verse:

(Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.)

and the problem of translating it into English while trying to preserve some of its quality.

Why I find this verse so striking? First, it's an example of a perfect Spanish hendecasyllable, the so-called endecasílabo propio (proper hendecasyllable), with the least number of stressed syllables: the second, the sixth and the tenth, the last two obligatory. Second, the anastrophic antimetabole is masterful. It carries by itself the bleak melancholy of the entire poem, using just two distinct words.

First problem: how to translate "tardes"? In Buenos Aires, tarde is the time of day that stretches from just after noon (1 PM local time) to dusk (5:30 PM to 8:00 PM, local time), with subdivisions like "tardecita" (before 3 PM), "siesta" (3 PM to 5 PM) and "tarde tarde" (6 to 7 PM in summer). Let me try with the generic English "afternoon". Of course, I strive for a iambic pentameter:

The afternoons are equal to themselves.

I dare say it is viable, given the constraints: it is a translation, and it is a iambic pentameter. However, I find it unacceptable: I did preserve none of the qualities of the original. In particular, I miss its sense of "perpetual sameness", the circularity, the eternal return. Second try, a slight variation:

The afternoons are equal one another.

Well, some alliteration here, and to me the nasals are melancholic (No one, Nothing, Never is one of Juan José Saer's novels); however, there is an extra unstressed syllable now that marrs the pentameter. If I drop the requirement of preserving the plural "tardes":

One afternoon is equal to another.

which has a more regular syntax but is definitely a step backwards, and doesn't solve the problem of the extra syllable.

And, besides, the distinct image I have of "tardes" is of dusks, a sun that is forever gone, or rather, the recurrent evidence of the disappearing sun. So how about:

The dusks are equal one another.

Now I'm one syllable short. Again:

The dusks to dusks themselves are equal.

Better, but still short of a syllable. On the other hand, it is not clear if the dusks are equal to themselves (that is, identical as individual dusks), or if they are equal one another, as in the original. Also, I don't like to mix English words of Germanic and Latin origin: I like better using "same" than "equal". So:

The dusks to every other dusk are same.

I badly mangled the syntax (I've found English usage for "is same", mainly journalistic, so I don't think it's unjustifiable, but then); this could be a dead end.

The dusks to dusks are equal and the same.

This attempt leaves me with a sense of accomplishment. Now I understand what Borges meant: it is the days, dusk to dusk, that are equal, not the afternoons themselves. The Jews count days as starting with the first star, that is, at dusk; this sense is nicely conveyed by the English "dusk to dusk". The antimetabole is preserved, and "equal and the same" makes clear that days are not only compared one to another, but confused and confounded into one, unchanging day.

Catullus' Fifth

The many suns may set and rise as usual.
But after this brief light of ours is snuffed,
We have a single night to sleep for ever.

What moves me in this poem is not the bleak rejection of an afterlife, but the sudden flash of insight that comes from feeling one day turning after another. This is the analeptic memory Graves spoke of: the future, as the past, compressed in a single blinding instant of awareness; the "many suns" frozen in a searing trace fixed in the sky, the short stub of a candle that will not be enough to see us through the night.

This is enlightenment, too.

Borges' "The Golem"

Prompted by this nice but rather free translation of Borges' "El Golem", here's my attempt. I tried to be as literal as possible; I've changed some words that were obviously chosen by Borges not for their meaning but to preserve the rhyme ("soga" in the eleventh stanza, for instance, is rather gratuitous).

If (as one Greek states in the Cratyle)
the name is archetype for the thing,
in the letters for rose is the rose
and all of the Nile in the word Nile.

So, made of consonants and vowels,
there'd be a terrible Name, the essence
of God its cipher, that Omnipotence
guards in letters and syllables full.

Adam and the stars knew it
in the Garden. Sin's stain
(so the kabbalists say) erased it
and the many generations lost it.

The cunning and candor of man
have no end. We know that in their day
God's own people searched for the Name
in the small hours of the Jewry.

Unlike that of some other vague
shadow betrayed in vague history,
there is still fresh and living memory
of Judah Loew, a rabbi in Prague.

Thirsty to see what God would see,
Judah Loew gave in to permutations
with letters in such complex variations
that he at last uttered the Name that is Key.

Portal, Echo, Host and Palace,
upon a doll with clumsy hands
he engraved, and taught it the strands
of Word, of Time and Space.

Through dreamy lids was this likeness
confounded by forms and colors,
utterly mixed in subtle rumors
and made its first timid movements.

By small degrees, like us it was
imprisoned in this resounding net
of Before, After, Yesterday, While, Now,
Left, Right, I, You, Them, Others.

(The kabbalist that gave it home
this vast creature nicknamed Golem;
these truths are told by Scholem
in a learned passage of his tome.)

The rabbi taught to it the universe
"My foot, and yours; here is a clog."
After some years this thing perverse
could sweep, well or not, the Synagogue.

It could have been a miswriting,
or an error uttering the Holy Name;
despite so high a spell, it did not
learn to speak, this apprentice of man.

Its eyes, less a man's than a dog's
and so much less of dog than of thing,
tracked the rabbi through the trembling
shadows of their closed quarters.

Something odd and crude was in the Golem,
since out of its way the rabbi's cat
scurried. (This cat is not in Scholem
but, across time, I can glimpse that.)

Raising its pious hands to God
it mimed his God's devotions
or, dull and smiling, it sank
in hollow oriental genuflections.

The rabbi looked upon it with pride
and with some horror. How (he mused)
could I give birth to a pitiful son
and lose the sanity of inaction?

Why did I add yet another symbol
to the infinite Series? Why bring
to the vain skein spun by eternity
another cause, another effect and pain?

In that hour of dread and blurred light,
his eyes lingered on his Golem.
Who will tell us, what did God feel,
looking upon His rabbi in Prague?

I'm extremely thankful to psykotic whose input (there over reddit) was invaluable. Without it this would be much worse than it is now.