Are you happy? Unamuno, Life 5.24
Unamuno
discusses differences between happiness and knowledge, science and
wisdom.
«¿Sois
felices?» pregunta Caín en el poema byroniano a Lucifer, príncipe
de los intelectuales, y éste le responde: «Somos poderosos»; y
Caín replica: «¿Sois felices?», y entonces el gran Intelectual le
dice: «No; ¿lo eres tú?» Y más adelante este mismo Luzbel dice a
Adah, hermana y mujer de Caín: «Escoge entre el Amor y la Ciencia,
pues no hay otra elección.» Y en este mismo estupendo poema, al
decir Caín que el árbol de la ciencia del bien y del mal era un
árbol mentiroso, porque «no sabemos nada, y su prometida ciencia
fué al precio de la muerte», Luzbel le replica: «Puede ser que la
muerte conduzca al más alto conocimiento». Es decir, a la nada.
En
todos estos pasajes donde he traducido ciencia, dice lord
Byron knowledge, conocimiento;
el francés science y el alemán
Wissenschaft, al que muchos enfrentan la
wisdom—sagesse
francesa y Weisheit alemana—la
sabiduría. «La ciencia llega, pero la sabiduría se retarda, y trae
un pecho cargado, lleno de triste experiencia, avanzando hacia la
quietud de su descanso.»
Knowledge
comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full
of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest
dice
otro lord, Tennyson, en su Locksley Hall. ¿Y qué
es esta sabiduría, que hay que ir a buscarla principalmente en los
poetas, dejando la ciencia? Está bien que se diga, con Matthew
Arnold —en su prólogo a los poemas de Wordsworth—, que la poesía
es la realidad, y la filosofía la ilusión; la razón es siempre la
razón, y la realidad la realidad, lo que se puede probar que existe
fuera de nosotros, consuélenos o desespérenos.
“Are
you happy?” Cain asks Lucifer in the poem by Byron (†). The
devil, prince of intellectuals, responds, “We are powerful.” To
which Cain replies, “But are you happy?” And the great
intellectual tells him, “No. Are you?” Further on this same demon
addresses Adah, sister and wife of Cain: “Choose between love and
science, for there is no other choice.” And in this splendid poem,
when Cain observes that the tree of the science of good and evil was
a lying tree, for “we know nothing, and the science you promised
comes at the price of death,” Lucifer replies, “It may be that
death leads to the greatest science of all.” To nothing, in other
words.
In
all these passages I have translated Lord Byron's knowledge as
ciencia, like
a Frenchman (science),
where a German might use Wissenschaft
(the consequence of knowing). Many would contrast this knowledge
or science with
English
wisdom—sagesse
in French, Weisheit in
German, and sabiduría for
us. In that spirit, I offer a novel reading (‡)
of these lines from another English lord:
Knowledge
comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full
of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest
Tennyson,
Locksley Hall
Science
comes but wisdom goes
And
drags her heavy breast
Laden
with all
life's sad woes
She
seeks a quiet
rest.
Unamuno's
translation
What
is this wisdom that we must seek principally in the poets, leaving
science behind? Matthew Arnold puts us well
on her track in his prologue to the poems of Wordsworth (*),
where he observes that poetry is reality, and philosophy illusion.
That reason is always rational, and reality remains real: whatever
exists in any form we can confirm beyond the confines of ourselves
abides there, in spite of our hope or despair, indifferent
to them.
---
(†)
George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824) was
born an English peer, heir to a great fortune, and went to school
(Aberdeen Grammar, Wm Glennie's academy in Dulwich Grove, and
Cambridge) with the notion of entering politics. He began publishing
poetry, thinking it no great matter until it made him a celebrity in
London, becoming the occasion for sexual escapades that ended in a
messy divorce and his voluntary exile from Britain. He eventually
died abroad, from complications of tuberculosis aggravated by medical
treatment that included bleeding, but in the meantime he wrote an
oeuvre that continues to impress (like his life, marked by travel and
intrigue, and his death, which found him organizing men and means for
the Greek war of independence that later succeeded in creating a
state independent of the Ottoman empire). Unamuno here quotes (in
translation) from the play Cain (published
in 1821).
(‡)
Note that where Tennyson
appears to personify wisdom as an old man, Unamuno reads her as an
old woman, drawing on Spanish grammar (sabiduría is
feminine) and ancient traditions (about lady Wisdom, cf. Proverbs
1.20-33).
(*)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
was an English
poet, himself, and a critic, who paid the bills by becoming a
government school inspector and traveling in that capacity all over
Britain. William Wordsworth
(1770-1850) was another English writer whose poetry, like that of
Lord Byron, became associated with the cultural movement that
historical critics have dubbed Romanticism. The preface Arnold wrote
for his 1879 collection of Woodsworth's poems is short, and worth reading.
Does Unamuno sum its message
well?
“It is
important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom
a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, – to the
question: How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false
fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which
have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and
professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find
attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a
poetry which might take for its motto Omar Kheyam's words: 'Let us
make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the
mosque.' Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a
poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form
is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the
best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great
and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its
meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt
against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a
poetry of indifference towards life.”