Spinoza Poems

Las traslucias manos del judio
Labran en la penumbra los cristales
Y la tarde que muere es miedo y frio.
(Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.)
Las manos y el espacio de jacinto
Que palidece enel confin del Ghetto
Casi no existen para el hombre quieto
Que esta sonando un claro laberinto.
No lo turba la fama, ese reflejo
De suenos en al sueeno de otro espejo
Y el temeroso amor de las doncellas.
Libre de la metaphor a y del mito,
Labra un arduo o cristal: el infinito
Mapa de Aquel que es todas sus estrellas.

“Spinoza.” Borges

The Jew’s hands, translucent in the dusk,
Polish the lenses time and again.
The dying afternoon is fear, is
cold, and all afternoons are the same.
The hands and the hyacinth – blue air
That whitens at the ghetto edges
Do not quite exist for this silent
Man who conjures up a clear labyrinth,
Undisturbed by fame – that reflection
Of dreams in the dreams of another
Mirror – or by maidens’ timid love.
Free of metaphor and myth, he grinds
A stubborn crystal: the infinite
Map of the one who is all His stars.

Translated by Richard Howard & Cesar Rennert

A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window.  Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he’s begun
To construct God, using the word. Noone
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.

“Baruch Spinoza”
Translated by Willis Barnstone

One

basic

truth can

be used as

a foundation for

a mountain of lies,

and if we dig down deep

enough in the mountain of lies,

and bring out that truth, to set it

on top of the mountain of lies; the entire

mountain of lies will crumble under the weight of

that one truth, and there is nothing more devastating to a

structure of lies than the revelation of the truth upon which

the structure of lies was built, because the shockwaves of

the revelation of the truth reverberate, and continue to

reverberate throughout the Earth for generations to

follow, awakening even those

people who had no

desire to be

awakened

to the

truth.

Delamer Duverus