Desterro
Editor's Note: In the spirit of universal exile, I present a guest post from another hemisphere. Et in Brasil ego.
There is an outlandish harmony in the world, a fearful symmetry that can only be glimpsed in brief, rare intervals. When the author of this blog invited me to blog here as a guest, I didn’t think I’d have anything to say. I couldn’t see the subterranean implications of this invitation; I was blind to something that stood right in front of me, but something so big that I couldn’t see, precisely because it is so big.
This consideration soon brought memories of an essay by Borges, which first paragraph I reproduce and translate here, for the sake of making this digression relevant.
Call me Dude. I’m not Jewish; I’m a lapsed Catholic and lapsed Brazilian. I try to lead a life unlike the life of a typical Brazilian, whatever that might be. So I read and write and read and write. And translate on occasion. A few months ago, I moved to a city-island whose original name used to be Desterro. In Portuguese this word means roughly “exile.” — But I wasn’t born here, so one could say that I’m exiled in Desterro.
A mere coincidence, perhaps. But in this coincidence I see a glimpse of that outlandish harmony, that fearful symmetry. I could go on and say that even in my hometown I felt in exile, but that should be obvious by now. Our exile is not physical, it is metaphysical. We are expatriates without a patria. We are the chosen without a choice.
I don’t intend to become a regular contributor here, but maybe I’ll become an irregular contributor, and not only because the author invited me. Exile is a theme that speaks to my innermost being; it is something as great as the face of that invisible God.
There is an outlandish harmony in the world, a fearful symmetry that can only be glimpsed in brief, rare intervals. When the author of this blog invited me to blog here as a guest, I didn’t think I’d have anything to say. I couldn’t see the subterranean implications of this invitation; I was blind to something that stood right in front of me, but something so big that I couldn’t see, precisely because it is so big.
This consideration soon brought memories of an essay by Borges, which first paragraph I reproduce and translate here, for the sake of making this digression relevant.
Cuando el remoto compilador del Zohar tuvo que arriesgar alguna noticia de su indistinto Dios—divinidad tan pura que ni siquiera el atributo de ser puede sin blasfemia aplicársele—discurrió un modo prodigioso de hacerlo. Escribió que su cara era trescientas setenta veces más ancha que diez mil mundos; entendió que lo gigantesco puede ser una forma de lo invisible y aun de lo abstracto.
When the remote compiler of the Zohar had to venture an announcement concerning his indistinct God—a divinity so pure that not even the attribute of being can be applied to it without blasphemy—he conceived a prodigious way of doing it. He wrote that His face was three hundred and seventy times larger than ten thousand worlds; he understood that the gigantic can be a form of the invisible and even of the abstract.
El otro Whitman, in Discusión, 1932
Call me Dude. I’m not Jewish; I’m a lapsed Catholic and lapsed Brazilian. I try to lead a life unlike the life of a typical Brazilian, whatever that might be. So I read and write and read and write. And translate on occasion. A few months ago, I moved to a city-island whose original name used to be Desterro. In Portuguese this word means roughly “exile.” — But I wasn’t born here, so one could say that I’m exiled in Desterro.
A mere coincidence, perhaps. But in this coincidence I see a glimpse of that outlandish harmony, that fearful symmetry. I could go on and say that even in my hometown I felt in exile, but that should be obvious by now. Our exile is not physical, it is metaphysical. We are expatriates without a patria. We are the chosen without a choice.
I don’t intend to become a regular contributor here, but maybe I’ll become an irregular contributor, and not only because the author invited me. Exile is a theme that speaks to my innermost being; it is something as great as the face of that invisible God.
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