The Heath by Luis Cernuda
Look, this is the heath. Back in your childhood your imagination envisioned it, never doubting -- how could a child doubt his imagination? -- that the heath could only be as you created it, with that interior gaze that fills solitude, and so seen definitively. The word surprised you in the pages of a book, and you fell in love with it, associating it with gusts of wind and rain out of some unknown Northern sky. The vision was real and true, all dense, profuse, mysterious countryside; but in that landscape, as in a dream, there was no color whatsoever.
Time was to add color, when under foreign skies, weary and bored, you saw one day that moorland covered in sullen green bushes, which the summer set flowering with purple blossoms (there was no white heather there), so the fall could then turn them rosy, until withering little by little, they'd blend into that basic green their sad and monotonous dullness. That's when you understood the vividness of imagination's reality, and how much it can add to what you've read, however slight the plot on which it plays and builds.
Time, while applying color, removed enchantment, and a lot of time had now passed, when your intimate reality finally met the other one. So many things like the heath could speak to you before, and now that you faced them were mute and expressionless -- or was it you? -- because heather is a plant of desolate and solitary places. Then, after a long look at the countryside and the sky, attuned in their grim appearance, with a vague satisfaction, more for the proof you were finally observing than for the problematic enchantment of the heath, you crossed disillusioned past its frontier flowers from summer into fall.
And you told yourself that when visible reality seems more beautiful than the one you imagined it's because a lover's eyes are seeing it, and yours weren't in love, at least not at that moment. Imaginary creation trumped reality, and while that might mean nothing with respect to the beauty of the actual heath, there was move love in the child's vision than in the grown man's reasoned contemplation, and the pleasure of the former, in its fullness and beauty, had exhausted the future prospects of the latter, however real they were or seemed to be.
[from Sentence: a journal of prose poetics (No. 2, 2004), translated by Stephen Kessler]
Time was to add color, when under foreign skies, weary and bored, you saw one day that moorland covered in sullen green bushes, which the summer set flowering with purple blossoms (there was no white heather there), so the fall could then turn them rosy, until withering little by little, they'd blend into that basic green their sad and monotonous dullness. That's when you understood the vividness of imagination's reality, and how much it can add to what you've read, however slight the plot on which it plays and builds.
Time, while applying color, removed enchantment, and a lot of time had now passed, when your intimate reality finally met the other one. So many things like the heath could speak to you before, and now that you faced them were mute and expressionless -- or was it you? -- because heather is a plant of desolate and solitary places. Then, after a long look at the countryside and the sky, attuned in their grim appearance, with a vague satisfaction, more for the proof you were finally observing than for the problematic enchantment of the heath, you crossed disillusioned past its frontier flowers from summer into fall.
And you told yourself that when visible reality seems more beautiful than the one you imagined it's because a lover's eyes are seeing it, and yours weren't in love, at least not at that moment. Imaginary creation trumped reality, and while that might mean nothing with respect to the beauty of the actual heath, there was move love in the child's vision than in the grown man's reasoned contemplation, and the pleasure of the former, in its fullness and beauty, had exhausted the future prospects of the latter, however real they were or seemed to be.
[from Sentence: a journal of prose poetics (No. 2, 2004), translated by Stephen Kessler]
posted by Ismael Ricardo Archbold at 4/15/2006 05:45:00 PM
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