My Translation of "La Duración del Infierno"

The Duration of Hell
by Jorge Luis Borges, Discusión, 1932

     Hell—a speculation that has become weary with the years.  Preachers themselves ignore it, perhaps because they've been abandoned by the poor, but serviceable, human allusion that the ecclesiastical fires of the Holy Office had in this world: a temporal torment no doubt, but not unworthy within terrestrial limitations of being a metaphor for an immortal, perfect pain without destruction, which the heirs of the divine wrath will know forever.  Whether this hypothesis is satisfactory or not, it is unarguable that there is a general lassitude in the propaganda of this institution.  (Let no one jump to conclusions: the term propaganda is not of commercial origin, but catholic; it is a meeting of cardinals.)  In the second century, the Carthaginian Tertullian could imagine Hell and foresee its operation in this discourse:

"Do spectacles please you? then expect a greater one, the Final Judgment.  What wonder will I experience, what laughter, what celebration, what joy, when I see so many arrogant kings and lying gods agonizing in the very lowest prison of darkness; so many magistrates who persecuted the name of the Lord, melting in fires more fierce than the ones they ever incinerated for Christians; so many grave philosophers shaming themselves in the red flames with their illusory auditors; so many acclaimed poets trembling not before the tribunal of Midas, but of Christ; so many actors of tragedy more eloquent now in the manifestation of so genuine a torment...  (De spectaculis, 30; citation and version from Gibbon.)

Dante himself, who in his great task to foresee in anecdotal mode some decisions of the Divine Justice concerning northern Italy, does not display an equal enthusiasm. The literary infernos of Quevedo—mere comedic opportunities for anachronisms—and of Torres Villaroel—mere opportunity for metaphors—only prove the growing abuse of the dogma.  The decadence of Hell is in them almost similar to Baudelaire's, who was so skeptical of the imperishable torments that he pretends to adore them.  (A significant etymology derives the innocuous French verb géner from the powerful Scriptural word gehnna.)

     I now consider Hell.  The nominal but thoughtless article from Diccionario enciclopédico hispano-americano is useful reading, not for its dispirited news or for its frightening ecclesiastical theology, but for the perplexity evident in its pages.  It begins by observing that the notion of hell does not belong exclusively to the catholic church, a precaution whose intrinsic meaning is: "Let not the masons say that the Church introduced those brutalities"; but it constantly reminds us that Hell is dogma, and it adds with urgency: " It is to the unfading glory of Christianity that it attracts all the truths it finds dispersed in false religions."  Whether Hell is a fact of natural religion or simply of revealed religion, for me no other topic of theology is as fascinating and powerful.  I am not referring to the simplistic mythology of dung, roasters, fire and tongs, which has been growing at the root and which all the writers have been repeating to the dishonor of their imagination and their decency [1].  I am speaking of the strict notion—a place of eternal punishment for the wicked—which constitutes the dogma without other obligations to place it in loco reali, in a precise space, and a beatorum sede distincto, a different place from that which the elect inhabit.  To imagine the contrary would be sinister.  In the fiftieth chapter of his History, Gibbon attempts to remove Hell's wonder and writes that the two vulgar ingredients of fire and darkness are sufficient to create a sensation of pain that can be aggravated infinitely by the idea of duration without end.  This unhappy objection proves, perhaps, that the creation of infernos is easy, but it does not mitigate the admirable terror of its invention.  The attribute of eternity is horrifying.  Continuity—the fact that the divine persecution lacks intervals, that in Hell there is no rest—is even more so, but imagining it is impossible.  The eternity of the punishment is what is under dispute.

     There are two important and wonderful arguments to invalidate its eternity.  The oldest is the one concerning conditional immortality or annihilation.  Immortality, argues this comprehensive reasoning, is not an attribute of fallen human nature, it is a gift of God in Christ.  It cannot be mobilized, therefore, against the same individual upon whom it is bestowed.  It is not a curse, it is a gift.  Whoever is worthy of it deserves heaven; whoever is unworthy of receiving it, dies in death, as Bunyan wrote, dies without rest.  Hell, according to this pious theory, is the blasphemous human name for oblivion from God.  One of its propagators was Whately, the author of that famous unforgettable pamphlet: Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte.

     A more curious speculation is the one presented by the evangelical theologian Rothe, in 1869.  His argument—ennobled by the secret mercy of denying the infinite punishment of the condemned—observes that to make punishment eternal is to make Evil eternal.  God, he affirms, cannot will that eternity for His universe.  He insists on the scandal of supposing that sinful man and the devil can mock God's benevolent intentions forever.  (Theology teaches that the creation of the world is a work of love.  The term predestination, in theology, refers to predestination to glory; depravation is merely the opposite, it is a non-election translated into infernal punishment, but it does not constitute a special act of divine grace.)  He advocates, then, a declining, waning life for reprobates.  He envisions them loitering in the edges of Creation and the emptiness of infinite space, maintaining themselves with scraps of life.  He concludes: "Just as demons are unconditionally removed from God and are his unconditional enemies, their activity is against the kingdom of God and is organized into a diabolical kingdom, which must naturally elect a leader.  The head of that demoniacal government—the Devil—must be imagined as changing.  The individuals that assume the throne of that kingdom succumb to the phantasm of their being, but are renewed within the diabolical lineage" (Dogmatik, 1,248).

     I arrive at the most unlikely part of my task: the reasons elaborated by humanity in favor of the eternity of Hell.  I will summarize them in order of increasing significance.  The first is of a punitive nature: it postulates that the fear of punishment resides precisely in its eternal aspect and that to question this invalidates the efficacy of the dogma and is like playing games with the devil.  This is an argument made by police-types and doesn't deserve a refutation.  The second one is written: The punishment must be infinite because so is the sin of attacking the majesty of the Lord who is an infinite Being.  It has been observed that this demonstration proves so much that we may infer it proves nothing: it proves there is no venial sin, all faults are unpardonable.  I would add that this is a case of scholastic frivolity and that its trap lies in the plurality of meanings of the term infinite, which when applied to the Lord means unconditional, to punishment it means unceasing, and to sin nothing that I understand.  Besides, to argue that a sin is infinite because it assails God who is an infinite Being, is like arguing that it is holy because God is, or like thinking that all injuries against a tiger have to be striped.

Now I deal with the burden of the third argument, the only one.  Perhaps it is written in this manner: Heaven and Hell are eternal because the dignity of free will demands it; either our deeds are eternal or the "I" is a delusion.  The virtue of this reasoning is not logic, it is much more; it is entirely dramatic.  It imposes on us a terrible game, it dispenses on us the atrocious right of damning ourselves, of insisting on evil, of rejecting the operations of grace, of being fuel for the fire that never ends, of causing God to fail in our destiny, of being ghostly bodies in eternity and detestabile cum cacodaemonibus consortium.  "Your destiny is real," it tells us, "eternal condemnation and eternal salvation are in your hands; this responsibility is your honor."  This sentiment is similar to Bunyan's: "God did not play in tempting me; neither did I play, when I sunk as into the bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in relating them..." (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; The Preface).

I believe that in our unthinkable destiny, in which infamies rule like a carnal pain, every bizarre thing is possible, even the perpetuity of a Hell, but also that it is irreligious to believe in it.



POSTSCRIPT
On this merely factual page I can also relate a dream.  I dreamed that I awoke from another dream—populated with cataclysms and tumults—and that I awoke into an unrecognizable room.  It grew clear: a general small light defined the foot of the metal bedframe, the standard chair, the closed door and window, the clear table.  I thought with fear, "Where am I?" and intuited that I didn't know.  I thought, "Who am I?" and couldn't recognize myself.  Fear grew within me.  I thought: This disconsolate vigil is Hell, this vigil without destiny will be my eternity.  Then I really awoke: trembling.

Borges, the Other Borges, and the Digital Borges

     The translation of "La Duración del Infierno" has been a tough one.  Because this essay is one of Jorge Luis Borges' early writings, the style and grammar of the sentences can be complex and baroque.  I am almost done with the translation though, and I want to publicly thank my friend Joshua Adachi for reading it and giving me feedback.  He's noted the areas in which my translation seems convoluted and incomprehensible and areas in which the tone doesn't match the rest of the essay.  Of course if there are still any problems with the translation, and I'm sure there will be, I am completely responsible for them.

     For now I've decided to post some YouTube videos related to "El Libro de Arena."  As you may guess, there is a whole digital culture out there dedicated to Borges, and I seem to have tapped into it by writing this blog.  If Borges differentiated between himself as the person who lived day to day and the other Borges who was a celebrity writer, he might have nonetheless been surprised to hear that there is a virtual, digital version of him out there, and that all these constituent elements of his digital identity—the Borges fan art on DeviantArt, the video versions and extrapolations of his stories on YouTube, and the transcriptions of his writings into HTML—can become, as Josh tells me, an object of study in itself: the anthropology and sociology of the digital cult of Borges.

A Queer Book

     The Book of Sand is a queer book in the sense that it's strange, as I've written already, but also because there is something peculiarly sexual about it.

     Every book has a place that it occupies based on the categories attributed to it by humans—just think about how books are shelved at public libraries and you'll know what I mean.  Now, when the narrator of "El Libro de Arena" purchases the Book of Sand, he believes at first that the book should substitute the blackletter Wycliffe Bible:

"I though of hiding the Book of Sand in the space left by the Wycliffe, but I finally opted to hide it behind some shoddy volumes of the Thousand and One Nights."

     The fact that he hides the Book of Sand behind the Thousand and One Nights is relevant for both postcolonial readings and queer readings.  For postcolonial readings because Borges compares the fantastic nature of the Book of Sand with the magical tales found in the Thousands and One Nights.  Any preliminary reading of the Thousand and One Nights also reveals that apart from being fantastic, the background of the tales and the frame story are also sexual.  At least in this sense the Book of Sand has sexual connotations to it.

     But let me get back to the quote.  So he hides the Book of Sand behind other books.  One would think he's placing the books on a bookshelf; however, in a different Borges story we find out where precisely the books are located.  In "The Other," an older Borges meets a younger skeptical Borges and has to prove that they are the same person.  He tells the younger Borges that he knows what he keeps in his closet both literally and metaphorically:

"In the wardrobe closet in your room, there are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane's translation of the Thousand and One Nights—which Lane called The Arabian Nights Entertainment—with steel engravings and notes in fine print between the chapters, Quicherat's Latin dictionary, Tacitus' Germania in Latin and in Gordon's English version, a Quixote in the Garnier edition, a copy of Rivera Indarte's Tablas de Sangre signed by the author, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a biography of Amiel, and, hidden behind the others, a paperbound volume detailing the sexual customs of the Balkans.  Nor have I forgotten a certain afternoon in a second-floor apartment on the Plaza Dubourg."

     Even though Borges was a private man and would not speak about his private life, especially about his relationships with women, now we know the contents of Borges' closet: He has his favorite books hidden away there, including a book which we can technically term pornographic even though he only gives us a description of it and doesn't give us its title ("a paperbound volume detailing the sexual customs of the Balkans").  And he also tantalizingly gives us a detail which may or may not refer to some sexual episode in Borges' life ("Nor have I forgotten a certain afternoon...").  In this small confession, then, Borges tells us the contents of his closet, or if I phrase this differently, Borges has come out of the closet—as much as Borges can or would come out anyway.

     My point is that when the narrator of "El Libro de Arena" hides the Book of Sand, he's placing it in the closet, hidden away behind his stash of personally favorite books.  By hiding the Book of Sand in his closet, the book becomes a part of Borges' private and sexual identity, that aspect of his life which he does not openly share with others, which is secretive, closeted, undisclosed, personal.

     If we think about the Book of Sand as connected with Borges' private-sexual identity (private because sexual and sexual because private), then his failed attempt to catalog and categorize the Book of Sand tells us something about the queer nature of his private-sexual identity.  Borges cannot understand his own private-sexual identity, he cannot catalog or categorize it, he can only hide it away from others.  No wonder Borges never spoke about his private and sexual life: he never understood it.

"The Collar" by George Herbert

     As I said in my first blog, borgesian bibliophilia is my method for writing not only on Borges, but on other writers also.  For today, I will take a break from Borges (because every organism needs a Sabbath to grow and ripen the more) and write about the poet whose line stands as a curious epigram at the beginning of "El Libro de Arena"—George Herbert and his poem "The Collar."
     A few autobiographical notes on George Herbert.  He was an Anglican priest and near contemporary of John Donne.  Herbert's mother, Magdalen, was actually a friend and patron of John Donne.  While Donne was appointed Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in the city of London and thereby preached to statesmen, Herbert was priest of a small parish in Wiltshire.
     Among literates, it is also common to compare the poetry of Donne and Herbert.  While Donne's poetry is learned and alludes to ancient cosmology and philosophy, Herbert derives his metaphors from Scripture.  Some metaphors include the body as temple, the heart as altar, redemption as tenantry, and the believer's lifespan as pilgrimage.
     For more on George Herbert (1593-1633) please visit your local knowledge archive, and by that I mean a public library.

Here's the poem:

The Collar

I struck the board and cried, "No more;

I will abroad!

        What? shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free, free as the road,

        Loose as the wind, as large as store.

                     Shall I be still in suit?

        Have I no harvest but a thorn

        To let me blood, and not restore

What I have lost with cordial fruit?

Sure there was wine

            Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn

              Before my tears did drown it.

        Is the year only lost to me?

                     Have I no bays to crown it,

No flowers, no garlands gay? all blasted?

All wasted?

        Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,

And thou hast hands.

                     Recover all thy sigh-blown age

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,

Thy rope of sands,

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee

        Good cable, to enforce and draw,

And be thy law,

        While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.

                                           Away! take heed;

                                           I will abroad.

Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears.

                                           He that forbears

                    To suit and serve his need,

                                           Deserves his load."

But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild

                                           At every word,

        Methoughts I heard one calling, Child!

                    And I replied, My Lord.

     There are really only two parts to this poem: the last four lines marked by the coordinating conjunction "But" and everything else.  In the first section he raves against his childish relationship with authority (whether divine or civil) and yearns for liberty, and in the second section he submits, seemingly out of fear, to the paternal and regal voice of what Lacan calls the Father.
     So what is this poem about?
     It's about his inability to outgrow the Father.

     Despite his reneging: his thirty-two line soliloquy in which he asks himself rhetorical questions that are complaints against his present unprofitable condition as servant and child of the Father, and in which he attempts to free himself by way of imperatives ("recover," "leave," "forsake," "away," "call," and "tie"); despite the powerful rhetoric of his free verse ("my lines and life are free," he says) that marks his break from poetic and authorial tradition; and despite the madness and violence of his behavior (of striking the board, of crying, of raving fiercely and wildly)—he is bowed into submission (and I find this quite unsettling) by an audible or inner voice.
     The voice that calls him "Child!" is the voice of the Father, both the voice of the Christian deity and the voice of the King.  A marxist might call the voice "the voice of ideology," which blinds the consciousness of the individual through and through in such a way that even when individuals reason out their need for freedom and liberty and their need to escape and fight oppression, ideology tightens its hold much more strongly.  The voice of the Father substitutes the voice (soliloquy) of the individual.
     If individuals imagine they will free themselves of oppression, of sighing and pining and crying, then the voice of the Father denies any such liberty by asserting its power through fear and reinforcing the hierarchical structures already in place of father and son, king and servant.
     I find interesting that in this late Renaissance poem we find the seeds of what will later bloom (more than a century later) into the violent American and French revolutions meant to free the individual from monarchical and religious tyranny.  And, despite Herbert's Christian poetics, his education in renaissance humanism still puts up a fight for individual liberty through the form of free verse.
     Herbert's free verse in this poem may be one of the earliest in English.  It won't be until two centuries later that Walt Whitman will take up the form to celebrate the early American spirit of independence.  Sure he was unable to outgrow the voice of the Father in his own time, but we can see the development of the child into the independent adult.




Here's another poem by George Herbert, titled "The Altar." Enjoy.