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2010年7月18日 星期日

On Borges' Blindness.1

Whilst still on the subject of blindness, Borges has written something directly on how he felt about it and also on how blindness may have affected Milton. Here is the first of them.


Sobre su ceguera                                            On His Blindness                            瞎眼一二


Al cabo de los años me rodea          At the end of all these years, a stubborn    多年來我籠罩在


una terca neblina luminosa              luminous fog surrounds me                         一頑固的霧光中


que reduce las cosas a una cosa       reducing all things to one thing               它使多事減為一事


sin forma ni color.Casi a una idea.   Without form nor color Almost to an idea. 沒形狀亦沒顏色。機近一概念。


La vasta noche elemental y el dia     The vast elemental night and the day          那浩瀚强勁的夜和那人頭擁擁的


Lleno de gentre son esa neblina        Full of people are this fog           白晝均成那含糊不清且寸步不離的霧光


De luz dudosa y fiel que no declina   of doubtful and faithful light which declines no 它從不衰敗


Y que acecha en el alba. Yo querria  and which lurks in dawn. I would like         在破曉時分埋伏。我有時會樂於 


Ver una cara alguna vez. Ignoro       To see a face sometimes. I am ignorant        看到一些面孔。我不認識


la inexplorada enciclopedia, el goce of the unexplored encyclopedia, the enjoyment 那不能探索的百科全書,那以我手


de libros que mi mano reconoce,       of book which my hand knows,                    認纖各書之樂趣,


las altas aves y las lunas de oro,.        The high flying bird and moons of gold      些高處的雀鳥和那些金黃的月亮。


A los otros les queda el unverso,         For the others, there remains the universe,  他人宇宙仍在


A mi penumbra, el hábito del verso.    In my penumra, the habit of my verse.       在我的半暗影中,祇遺下詩歌的外套


 


The poem describes the hazy world of shadowy shapes, vsgue and blurred outlines, a world where every objects is reduced to a common fog. He lives wthin that fog. He is denied the multifsrious colors on the crowded streets on the numerous Spanish fiestas of the saints: the dresses, the masks, the brightly colored feathers, the deliciously curvaceous shapes of female bodies swinging their youthful vitality under the sun, the sight of all the people crowding the streets on such days in the hurly burly or even on the less dramatic and exciting market days. All variety is reduced to one single dull, monotonous and shapeless haze from dawn to dusk. On special moments, when he feels particularly touched, he would like to see the reaction on the faces of of those near and dear to him . But he could not. He is also denied all the beauties of Nature. He mentions birds and the gold of the moon during the day and upon the fall of night.


Borges wss made the Director of the National Library at Buenos Aires with its 800,000 volumes of all kinds of books in 1955, a post he held until 1973  He became a blindman in possesion of one of the largest book collections in the whole of Argentina. He wss also a professor of English literature at the Univiersity of Buenos Aires and as such, he had numerous books to be read in connection with his profession. He would dearly love to be able to look at its excellent encyclopedias as he used to do in the library of his father, the disorganized "house-library" of his mentor Rafael Cansinos-Assens with books piled up from the floor to ceiling and all those books on the basement of the municipal library of Buenos Aires. For a man who loved books so much and who has devoted his entire life to books and writing, the inability to savor the print and the illustrations on the books first hand must be particularly galling. He expressed his pain not in any exaggerated fashion. He did so calmly. He did so as if it were just a matter of fact. The reversal comes in the last line. He consoled himself with his verses. The tension thereby lurks there with even greater rebounding force, as if mounted upon a tightly pressed spring, paradoxically as a result of that understatement, that repressed and conversional style! The word "habito" in Spanish has a very rich meaning: it may mean the habit of a monk, a profession, or the habit or customary practice or activities a man does with "habit" as in the sentence "he has the habit of arriving late."


4 則留言:

  1. "Blind man walks, he sees his way...  Man enough to walk on his own,  Walks with his dancing shoes,  He sings along with the mocking bird,  Sees the world through his blind eyes,  His heart beats fasten his senses,  Way to Paradise with joy..."             



    [版主回覆07/19/2010 09:13:00]Wow, I see that the Leopard has not lost its customary speed! Yes,though one be blind, one shall never let blindness extinguish the fire burining within one's breast, the very pulseof Life itself. We can still sing. We sing our sorrows and such joys as we may still snatch from the miserly fingers of time. Though we be blind, our mind can still soar through time, through history, through the furthest limits of the universe. We can still explore and savour its delights and probe its mysteries.  We can still do so because we still got our imagination which even blindness cannot take away.



     

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  2. My vision not good….Must use the very long time to look and to read.....
    [版主回覆07/20/2010 06:49:00]I do not know if it is a concolation to know that you are not alone. I think not one in ten people in Hong Kong has 20/20 vision. But thanks to technology, our sight can now be corrected. And girls can use contact lens so that they can still keep their beautiful eyes shining before  boys. But sometimes, the world looks slightly more beautiful if we do not see it too clearly. Its hard outlines may be softened by a wee bit of  haze, fog even smog. I hope your eyes do not give you too much trouble. 

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  3. My eyes had nearsightedness 700... Your essays read well.


    [版主回覆07/20/2010 12:02:00]I used to have myopia of 450 degrees. With age, it is now about 150! Thank you for your encouragement. I'll keep on writing so as not to disappoint or to annoy.

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  4. I dare not glorify blindness. I feel that amongst all kind of physical disabilities, blindness is the cruelest and most horrible form of handicap. To a person who is born blind, perhaps blindness is tolerable because he has never experienced anything which we called sight. But to a person who suddenly loses his ability to see, just imagine the kind of desperation he feels when he is suddenly deprived of all the visual pleasures (faces of his loved ones, flowers, colors, scenery, painting, etc.) with which he is so familiar. Not to mention total blindness, my cataract problem in my left eye (getting more serious now and an operation is impending) has been such a nuisance that I miss so much the days when my eyes were as sharp as that of an eagle.
    I take Borges’ tribute to Milton as a consolation, a call for fortitude in times of inescapable misfortune.  
     
    By the way, thanks to you and Michele for telling me how to enlarge the blog types. I feel much more comfortable now.
    [版主回覆07/20/2010 19:53:00]Sorry my friend. It seems that I have stepped on to a raw nerve! I can't agree with you more. I enjoy seeing all kinds of shapes and colors. Losing the sense of sight might be the greatest punishment that God could have meted out to me. I hope to make full use of my eyes before I lose them to that mortal enemy of vision: age.

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