Ни в даль, ни в глубь из Фроста

Перевод во всех отношениях замечательный!
Но я бы подумала над финальными строчками. Ведь у него совершенно не случайно "but": нам, людям, никогда не постичь полностью ни всей глубины, ни всей высоты, но мы все равно будем стремиться к этому... и ничто не в силах помешать нам вглядываться в эти высоты и глубины... и ждать (to keep watch - нести вахту).
Почитайте... во многом созвучно Фросту:

ISLANDERS

Faith is not a form of knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.
Soren Kierkegaard ‘Philosophical Fragments’

Tuesday morning, sitting on rocks in the surf of Cape Cod Bay with other members of our hospice team, I listened to Mary Beth, a nurse, tell the story of a little boy, three years old. This child had asked his parents if he could go into the room of his little sister, just two weeks old, and talk to her. The parents offered a routine if not curious yes. They stopped at the threshold of the nursery as their son walked to the crib. The little boy leaned over and placed his face close to the infant’s ear. He whispered, “Tell me about God. I’m beginning to forget.”
This little expressed better than most the meaning of one of my favorite images in The Book Of Common Prayer. It is from Eucharistic Prayer C: “At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, the galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.” Our island home.
There is this sense seeded in our souls that we have come from somewhere else. It’s as if we have been cast up on the beach of a strange island. We don’t remember the shipwreck nor the harbor from which the boat sailed. Being resourceful types, we make the best of the situation, get jobs, take mates, raise families, go to school, enjoy the local arts. We become useful members of the community. Yet, our souls are never quite in sync with the world. The music of our lives is often discordant and we don’t seem to have a pitch problem. An almost magnetic bout of homelessness pulls us in to these pews week after week, year after year, for news from across the sea. There is that three-year-old boy within us: “Tell me about God. I’m starting to forget.”
We come here for news, not knowledge. What made me choose 15 Newbury Street this morning instead of a nice spread on the lawn of DeCordiva Park in Lincoln with my family and The Sunday Globe was not that I might learn something about God but that I might hear something from God. The disposition of my face is not my rear pressed into a Windsor chair with reading light over my head and The Encyclopedia Britannica spread before my weary eyes. Rather it is feet springing across the floor of my kitchen in the early evening to play back the messages of the day left on the answering machine.
My favorite religious object is a green, pear-shaped bottle I found almost completely submerged in the sand on South Beach at Martha’s Vineyard. I walked upon it on a crisp winter morning a few years ago. The serendipitous discovery quickly penetrated my rationalist armor. Believe it or not, I earnestly shook it hoping to hear paper rattling. I opened the top and looked inside for the clue. What I encountered was the smell of stale wine. I know the bottle is more than likely rummage from an off shore tryst. For me, though, it is symbol of the human condition as experienced through a Judeo-Christian anthropology. I am a castaway on an island home, always thirsty, sometimes desperate, for news from across the sea.
My belief is not based on a reading of, say, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, but on the living human document of my life. At those very moments when I should feel most at home in this life, when needs are satisfied, knowledge arrived at, family raised, business attended to, at those moments when by every criterion of island at-homeness I should feel most at home, I feel most homeless. My life at its best is beset by a morning after. My bet is that you know something about which I speak.
I don’t always sense myself to be a castaway. Sometimes I can deny, with the best of them, that this life is an island home. I act like this life is it, the mainland. Why not? I have a great mate, two wonderful daughters, a home in Lexington, rewarding work, great music, southern literature, friends, two trips to Northern Carolina a year to visit family, and a decent pension plan. I can escape the suburban heebie jeebies and show off the same sweat shirt of contentment that all the rest of the parents at the Saturday morning soccer game seem to wear. Kierkegaard sizes up this scene. He suggested that the worst of all despairs is not to know one is despairing. The worst despair is to imagine one is at home when one is really homeless.
Sometimes I please the Dane and name my estrangement. But caught as I am in a John Bradshaw world, I quickly determine its etiology to be problematic rather than reflective of my island existence. So, I set out to exorcise it. Let’s see, the problem is my relationship. I’ll adjust it. My psyche – I’ll shrink it. My childhood – I’ll own it and heal it. My parents – I’ll accept them or confront them or both. My career – I’ll tinker with it. My denomination – I’ll find another one. My parish – I’ll fix it. I may be able to adjust the idle of my spirit through self actualization, self help and right religion, but the knocks do not go away. I can lose heart, lose heart in a way that even Prozac doesn’t redeem.
And, occasionally, I wear the cloak of faith, the mantle of a castaway. I may put on my grey flannel suit, go to meetings, act bought into and bound up in the system. But I don’t forget that I am a resident alien. I know myself essentially to be set apart from the mainland, situated off the coast of my true homeland. I look warmly at that green bottle on the shelf of my office and remember to wait expectantly for a message, for news from across the sea. I position myself in time as one ready to be embraced by the timeless. I stand in the present as one ready to be comprehended by the eternal.
Waiting is a wonderful way to be in the world. I am able to experience my life as something other than a predicament to be fixed. I experience my mate, my childhood, my parents, my church for no more nor less than what they are – fellow islanders; strangers with me in a strange land watching for a Word; maidens with me watching for the Bridegroom. And sure enough, mostly when we least expect it, a voice astounds us. Amen.

William Wallace
Emmanuel Church
Boston, Massachusetts

Вечная Ученица   25.08.2011 12:07   •   Заявить о нарушении