Poem of the Week 2014/40

Adam Cast Forth

The Garden – was it real or was it dream?
Slow in the hazy light, I have been asking,
Almost as a comfort, if the past
Belonging to this now unhappy Adam
Was nothing but a magic fantasy
Of that God I dreamed. Now it is imprecise
In memory, that lucid paradise,
But I know it exists and will persist
Though not for me. The unforgiving earth
Is my affliction, and the incestuous wars
Of Cains and Abels and their progeny.
Nevertheless, it means much to have loved,
To have been happy, to have laid my hand on
The living Garden, even for one day.

Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid

Here is the original Spanish:

¿Hubo un Jardín o fue el Jardín un sueño?
Lento en la vaga luz, me he preguntado,
Casi como un consuelo, si el pasado
De que este Adán, hoy mísero, era dueño,
No fue sino una mágica impostura
De aquel Dios que soñé. Ya es impreciso
En la memoria el claro Paraíso,
Pero yo sé que existe y que perdura.
Aunque no para mí. La terca tierra
Es mi castigo y la incestuosa guerra
De Caines y Abeles y su cría.
Y, sin embargo, es mucho haber amado.
Haber sido feliz, haber tocado
El viviente Jardín, siquiera un día.

In this sonnet Borges gives us a monologue by a man with an experience he shares with only one other person: this is Adam, erstwhile inhabitant of the Garden of Eden, after he and Eve transgressed and were expelled into the world that we know. These thoughts must be occurring some time after the expulsion, since the "now unhappy" Adam has begun to have a clear sense of what his exile means: the unforgiving earth rather than the lush Garden, affliction rather than joy, and endless battles among his sons and their offspring (battles with the added perversity of being "incestuous," since the warring factions are all close kin). He is adjusting to his new reality: he asks, "almost as a comfort," if the Garden and even God really existed at all, or were only dreams and magical fantasies of his own. The "hazy light" (la vaga luz) in which he ponders these questions is contrasted with the "lucid paradise" (el claro Paraíso) he once lived in (Borges, like Milton, ended his life in blindness, and both poets convey Paradise and the Fall in terms of light, shade, and darkness). Yet Adam is hard-headed enough to admit that Paradise exists, though not for him. He finds happiness in having once been happy, and in the memories of the lost.

I took this poem from the Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. The book contains both Spanish originals and English translations, which is handy, especially for people like me who can stumble through the Spanish if we have an English key.