AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE, WHAT FORGIVENESS? (Eliot)
Carlos Barbarito
trans. Brian Cole
°***°
He would have liked not to know, but he does know.
What he knows lashes him,
injures him, burns him:
the darkness
is profound, heaven abstains
and leaves its creatures in bitter liberty,
in the depths there is nowhere to find a foothold
and the word draws back in waves
into oblivion.
Now it does not believe.
Or it hardly believes in a possible nook
between passages where it could take refuge
for an instant,
or perhaps
in some future a short snatch of happiness
a momentary failing of the solid mass of disgust.
A little, almost nothing.
The image comes to his memory
of a tree by Segantini,
he feels that the soil
shackles it, he opens his arms,
closes his eyes,
waits for death or a miracle
while, outside,
the vendors are putting up their stalls
that they will fill with fish and fruits.
Is there something
outside, behind the last black
or white stone, beyond
the high hedges that grow over the horizon?
Here
rises up the tethered tree, the buoy
that lights up the monotonous waves
on their surface, the fire
that burns without denying the superior power
of ice.
There
perhaps a different ambit, a different illumination,
a different wind over the grass,
the soil without error or ashes?
...
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