Jorge Luis Borges' El Instante

Last night was a strange night. I had a funny dream. I dreamt that I was trying to translate a Spanish poem of the Argentinian poet and writer, Jorge Luis Borges but no matter what, the last line of all the stanzas of the poems was the same. That last line would require me to refer back to itself, in the same manner as in the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the narrator of Cien Anos de soledad (One Hundred years of Solitude), an Arab, would find that he was at his desk writing in Spanish in that imaginary town called Macondo those very lines of the novel which predicted that he would be writing those same lines at that moment of the story i.e. that the boundaries between reality and fiction, between one language and another, between one culture and another may have become so blurred that practically, they may have  been rendered illusory.

I may have been influenced by three things which occurred yesterday. Earlier in the day, I  read from another fellow blogger's (李華川) blog that he had just read a book of literary criticism by Borges. He did not state the name of the book. But I suspect that he might be referring to The Craft of Verse by Borges edited by Calin-Andrei Mihailescu (2000) published by the Harvard University Press or its Chinese translation by Chen Zhong ren (2002) published by the Shanghai yi wen chu ban she, which is a series of lectures Borges gave at that venerable ivy league American university in 1967 to 1968. In my comment on his blog, I dislosed my long held ambition to translate the poetry of a number of selected Latino poets from Spanish into Chinese. Borges was one such poet writing in the Spanish language. In fact, shortly after having read that blog and before I attended another talk at the HKSHP in the evening, I had already finished the Chinese translation of one of Borge's short poems.

Another reason I had this strange dream might be that I also commented in the blog of my childhood friend Peter on some paintings by Tetsuya Ishida, a talented young Japanese painter of urban isolation, alienation, desolation and loneliness in contemporary Japanese society who died shortly after 30 in a traffic "accident". In his paintings, he often depicted himself or other similar characters being engaged numbly in mechanical motions, either being packed, buried or imprisoned by physical objects or environment and dying for a tad of human care and warmth and longing for freedom. His paintings follow the Spanish surrealist tradition of Dali and Margritte popular in the 1920s and 30s and in which elements of reality and fantasy are woven into a weird dreamscape of melting forms and dismembered body parts with many of those monsters one finds in the gargoyles overhanging the eaves of the pillars supporting the arches or sides of Gothic churches, depicting the fragmentation of our emotional life by the material conditions of modern life. Again, one finds the melting of the boundaries between physical and psychological realities in the psyche of the artist.

A third reason might be that my Spanish lesson at the Baptist College of Continuing Education is about to begin again tonight and I really had to do a bit of revision before class begins. Combined with my younger daughter's return from Spain to America and the recent Spanish victory at the World Cup, my mind was almost completely preoccupied by things Spanish!

Whatever might have been the true causes of this strange dream, here is my Chinese translation of the poem. It is a short poem on an eternal subject close to poetic sensibility: the transience of time and the importance of seizing the present before it escapes us, never again to return.

 El Instante                                              此刻

Dónde estaran los siglos, dónde el sueno        世紀在哪, 韃靼人  

de espadas que los tártarlos soñaron,              夢想之刀在哪

dónde los fuertes muros que allanaron,           他們突襲之堅牆在哪

donde el Árbol de Adán y el otro Leño?         亞當之樹及另一樹幹在哪？

El presente está solo. La memoria                   祇有現在。記憶正

erige el tiempo. Sucesion y engaño                 建築時光。時鐘的

es la rutina del reloj. El ano                             工序是順序與哄騙。歲月的

no es menos vano que la vana historia.           空虛不比歷史空虛少。

Entre el alba y la noche hay un abismo           破曉與黑夜間祗有

de agonías, de luces, de cuidados;                  劇痛 ，光芒，勞慮的深淵；

el rostro que se mira en los gastados               疲憊鏡前夜間顧盼的

espejos de la noche no es el mismo.               已不再是同一面容。 

El hoy fugaz es tenue y es eterno;             在逃之今天乏力且永恆；

otro Cielo no esperes, ni otro Infierno.    莫望另一天堂，也莫望另一地獄。

Here what Borges thinks is the nature of time can't be more obvious. Whether it is dawn or dusk, whether it is agonies or lights or cares, whether it is heaven or hell, the moment is all we have!