Volgens
en.wikipedia
is Willis Barnstone (born November 13, 1927) an American poet, memoirist,
translator, Hispanist, and comparatist. He has translated the Ancient Greek
poets and the complete fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
He is also a New Testament and Gnostic scholar.” In zijn
Willis
Barnstone, Life Watch: Poems. BOA
Editions, Ltd., 2003 werd zijn gedicht “Spinoza in the Dutch ghetto” opgenomen
De
flap van Life Watch: “A Circle of
Ninety-One Nights is an ambitious sequence of -poems that begins in childhood,
moves through Barnstone's adult years, and returns to youth. The poems engage
and reflect on the civil wars that the author found himself in the midst of,
Mexican orphanages, the cafes and arts salons in Paris, and walking with
Borges. As the circles of these poems widen, they gather many perspectives on a
life watched.
Willis
Barnstone has taught at universities in Greece and Argentina and authored more
than 40 books—poetry collections, poetry translations, philosophical and
religious texts. The New Covenant, his literary translation of the New
Testament, was published in 2001 (Riverhead Books).”
Uiteraard
ga ik dat gedicht hieronder opnemen. Maar de informatie onder NOTES &
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS lijkt enigszins afbreuk te doen aan de kwaliteit van het
gedicht.
"Spinoza
in the Dutch ghetto." Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), the Dutch
pantheistic philosopher, lived quietly in the ghetto during his short life,
dying from tuberculosis probably aggravated by his inhaling glass dust from his
scientific lens grinding. Despite radical ideas of God that earned him
excommunication by fellow Jews in 1856, he felt free and safe in the Dutch
ghetto and selected not to take a professorship in Heidelberg. Shortly before
he died he began a critically enlightened translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Though close to mathematical Descartes whom he translated, he does not split
mind and body which for him are distinct qualities of a single substance he
calls God or nature. God is nature in its fullness, suggesting, perhaps by coincidence,
the gnostic pleroma (fullness) that represents the gnostic deity. Spinoza's
friend Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) was a rationalist
philosopher and mathematician. Three years before Newton, he also invented
infinitesimal calculus (1684). As a logician and metaphysical thinker he shared
with Spinoza the notion of the universe divided into rational monads. For
Leibniz each monad is a distinct immaterial universe with self-conscious-ness,
arranged in an infinitely ascending order. His optimism led him to a satiric
role in Voltaire's Candide. [p. 138]
Er
zitten teveel foutieve en onzinnige dingen in om er hier op in te gaan
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten