Iscariot
Translated by Joe Martin
They gave me thirty silver pieces and I
—suspecting something big was soon to be—
accepted and I pointed out the one.
What would the thing have come to without me?
In the garden it was dark. And between them
the soldiers led him off, sleepless, frayed.
And he was pale, but all his steps were light.
And so I took the funds and went my way.
It was spring. And the branch I chose
was heavy with the smells of flowers that snowed.
So we were both fruit—on each our tree.
It was before Pesach; they'd whitewashed every house.
Before the Sabbath the end had to be obtained:
The others fled. Just we two remained.
Twelve years old was He when he stood tall
there in the temple. Twelve was John, when, burning,
he sought the desert, following the call
stamped in his gaze, black and inward-turning.
Twelve were you, Salome, when you danced;
the moment when the music ceased to be,
your name was slung around the holy man's.
He took you with him to eternity
(the queen, your mother, bade the guests applaud)—
yes, took you along as if you were a burr
clinging to his cloak, or else a straw
stuck in his hair. In this way you became
Entwined forever with the Baptist's name,
while most kings' daughters scarcely leave a blur.
The crisp chimes of the clock break the stillness
around me and in the world. I hear the noise
from the snowy street, of other girls and boys.
For one month and a day I've had this illness.
I am so tired, and all is different
from other days. It's good to lie here, dark and
flat and still under the blanket—hearken—
Not to have been with them, not to have lent
my voice to swell that childish choir of tinkling
sounds, with edges cold and sharp as glass.
Far away I hear the daylight pass.
I have had fever long, but have an inkling
That I received a visit and some grapes
From grownup aunts all serious in capes.
And I who was to be just like an arrow!
Speeding toward the mark's high holiness
which only the archer's quiet hunter-smile,
merciless and omniscient, knows about!
And I who was to be just like an arrow
seeking the way to the altar of the times:
I moulder in the creeping vines of doubt!
Those who know the way won't pay the price.
No, those who know won't make the sacrifice,
and the archer's smile was dead for many nights.
But, chilly still with night-time's bitter sweat,
I saw in the dawn's twilight, purplish-red
(and all grew silent in me, when I saw it)
that it is doubt itself which is the altar.
In all the rooms with darkened wallpaper,
By all the beds in which I've ever slept,
in all the towns I couldn't settle down in,
To this day no inhabitant knows my name.
A flock of goats is wandering on the mountain;
by people and by oceans leads a track.
A greater homeless one has led me past them;
I am a child of strange and alien planets.
A greater nameless one took me by force
away from wonted faces, lands and cities;
Down avenues I went, past trees and houses,
into the peace of sky-blue centuries.
I dwell in the horizon's silhouettes,
in days and gloamings and in wind and nights.
Jens Bjørneboe, "Emigranten." Samlede Dikt, ©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. Originally published in Dikt, ©1951 by Aschehoug Forlag. Used by permission. English translation ©1998 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
I
I am one of those who only loves where
death and pain, considered well and weighed
are shown me. Need for any earthly, close
and fertile love I've never had.
My life is formed so that it, immobile
and linked to the spheres of highest thoughts—
where earth and heaven meet—without reprieve
must live beneath the weight of Being!
My life would go where earth gives way to spirit.
And in itself that's nourishment and bread,
and knows not the warmth of any hand.
And it's full of fear and trembling, that is right!
But there where death is nothing more than dead,
There I will not die, but rise in light!
II
They praised me and proclaimed: "Brother, you are
Immune from God's judgment—you are just.
Of all the brothers you're the only worthy of him!
You are like one of those giant trees
which can't be battered down by wind and storm.
You serve the Lord, and loyally persevere!"
To this I kept my shameless silence:
for the whole time I was screaming with desire!
Yes, inside me there was a dog I had beaten.
With bared teeth, snarling and afraid
lay something there crippled, bent and howling
and snarled at me like a wounded captive.
And if I would sometimes join him in his screaming
the entire cloister thought that I was singing.
Jens Bjørneboe, "Munken." Samlede Dikt, ©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. Originally published in Dikt, ©1951 by Aschehoug Forlag. English translation ©1997 by Joe Martin. Used by permission.
1000 B.C.
Just let the prophets witness about Him!
We don't believe them. We have the tradition.
But if their tone becomes too obstinate,
Well, then we know that we can all agree:
In our opinion such folk should be stoned.
500 B.C.
The prophets whom our fathers met with stones,
are now the cornerstones of our tradition,
our doctrine of God's single personhood:
The Lord is one, forever, without end.
For the prophets we are building tombs of stone.
100 B.C.
He didn't appear to us. Only to them.
Our duty is to safeguard the tradition.
And should new prophets call us to repent,
we'll meet them with propriety and stones.
Our duty is to keep the doctrine pure.
33 A.D.
Let the Galilean witness about Him!
We don't believe him. We have the tradition.
But should his tone grow yet more arrogant,
then we know what's for everybody's best:
To have this agitator crucified.
1000 A.D.
Our forebears nailed him to the cross's beams.
But we have nailed him fast to the tradition;
there we scan and study Him in secret.
As if God were a kind of butterfly,
thus do we transfix him with our pins.
1400 A.D.
And if a man should wish to take God off
our pins and seek Him, not in the tradition,
but in the stars, the nature of the crystal,
the oscillation of the pendulum,
then we should burn this person at the stake.
1500 A.D.
We didn't see Him. Why should others see?
For so it is according to tradition:
it's always been the stones, the cross, the stake
that constituted our theology's
most subtle, quintessential proof of God.
19-- A.D.
A Protestant who's sober and devout
should zealously adhere to the tradition,
console himself with Drs. Barth and Kant,
and duly spend and steadfastly divide
his time, and split his mind, 'twixt faith and reason.
19-- A.D.
With certainty but one thing can be known:
We haven't seen Him! Never will He be seen!
The only thing which is, is the tradition.
But, purified of supernatural slag,
it may perhaps acquire the rank of science!
Jens Bjørneboe, "Summa theologia". Samlede Dikt, ©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. Originally published in Dikt, ©1951 by Aschehoug Forlag. Used by permission. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
I
There goes a great November over the earth.
Now it's November, friends, and we're freezing;
a frozen fog is blowing in from the fjord,
without warmth the sun as it shines.
It warns of a fierce winter over the land.
an Oslo winter approaches, the dark deepens;
Along Carl Johan blows snow from the mountains,
ageless, icy dust in our hearts' deserts.
Nature writhes at a too early dying,
behind the palace the sun hangs ruby red—
We sniffle at the sharp perfume of winter,
and shiver slightly: Hans Jæger is in the air!
In all the ages barricades are built,
which separate tomorrow from yesterday;
Windswept, beaten, arctic wanderers
shall perish there as long as the earth abides.
When demon Time shakes his shaggy head,
then he raises up a select son
and pours a shooting star into his blood
and lets him see from atop the barricade.
As the Milky Way forms a heavenly bridge,
that's not the way he traveled; he was gray
—and dark, but with an eagle in his faith.
How mighty was Hans Jæer when he saw!
There he saw a sun-time dawning for Europe,
a new liberation, a waterfall, a weal
powered by a new history whose goal
he called Humanity's Meeting with Itself.
"It flames beyond the thousand-year horizon!
Soon the Edge will burst! The mastodon will crack!"
He saw it, yes, but nobody would believe it,
for everybody else had "holes in their heads."
But he grew old and he lost all his friends,
Along with teeth and job, bread and clothes—
stood crying in the rain: "If you still have teeth,
then you know nothing at all of what love is!"
II
The many winters left their footprints behind.
He looked back on his life's miseries:
"Only the thought of death gives me strength!"
Then Death took him to its starry spheres,
thither where no one asks about his job
and none about his income and his rank
and no one rises at the sight of him,
takes hat and cane and leaves the Grand Café.
The story of his life was very like
moonlight casting silhouettes on snow.
III
Seventy years ago! La vie bohème,
Absinthe, hour of the wolf, a suicide wind!
The first gust of the terrible winter lurking
behind the gate to the twentieth century!
One thing he was wont to talk about;
our holy liberty, inviolable.
To guard it was the duty of the state,
to tend it with a firm but gentle hand.
At the century's tender daybreak time
began to ripen as he had proclaimed.
And see, today we're standing at the milestone
of the state's dominion over the soul!
IV
At Jæger's corner table in the Grand Café
Nary a freezing Bohemian is to be seen.
So marvelous the forward strides of time
That the radicals of today are protected.
This new breed of national democrats,
they don't sit around like that and talk;
for they are folk who know the old technique
of delousing the people's billygoat under the belly.
Yes, it's easy to say: "He was spared the sight!"
We'd rather believe that those who die are dead,
But well-known folk still walk on Pilestredet.
Let the winter sun hang there and glow!
When it is gone, then others will come forth
to see the seeds they've sown bear juicy crops.
Then, citizens of the future, hurry home!
Put on the kettle and smear your bread with fat!
From our hearts the dead suck nourishment,
but if we fail to provide strong fare and fodder,
then their spirits will waste eternally—
They easily turn to werewolves, do the dead!
They need heart's blood to drink, warm with life,
and find nothing but icicles to lick.
Yes, you can feel them, but you cannot see them;
to future citizens they're hid from sight!
Your "radical view" is the foliage of the age.
And do not venture outside of it, my friend,
Stay cozy within a tested view of life,
for outside the spirits walk again!
On such nights you will surely go astray
and easily lose your freedom out of fear.
The empty streets belong to other beings,
and any can become their welcome catch!
On such nights the howl of the wolf Fenris
Ice-cold penetrates our very marrow;
If it hasn't got hold of us already,
it will take our heart the night we die.
On such nights a black porphyry sky
stretches around the earth on every side,
and wondrously from now down all the ages
the psalm may ring: "The human is a beast!"
On such nights the winter grows within us,
the great woe walks nameless over our earth,
and our "idea" has no sun to give us.
Oh Jæger, Jæger! A troll walked in your words!
Yes, we are beasts! And yet we're so just barely.
It is a viewpoint, friends, which has effects!
We feel the fear beating in black waves
against our souls, pounding them to jelly.
Yes, we are beasts, afraid of other beasts,
we're only waiting for our hour to dawn:
In our time it will come, the great craving
for others' blood and others' death from hunger,
ere all grows silent under snow and snow.
Until this hour arrives we'll sit together,
and then, instead of kneeling down and praying,
we'll stand up and slough our human skin.
Yes, even as we stretch and take our ease
between the candles and the Christmas tree
their flames will shrivel down, while outside
a mighty golden aurora borealis
of flaring flamethrowers and bursting bombs
vibrates like streaks of sun against the night.
Then we won't dig ourselves into catacombs,
Instead we'll see the tiger, the saber-toothed cat
break out of the cages of our ribs
and hurl itself onto the fields and roar.
And high and pale the winter sky will glitter
as we wallow in a mire of blood and filth.
Until this time all is as it should be,
and half-dead radio music, soft as plush
between the cold faraway noise and thunder
will spawn yet more terror in our gaze.
Yes, we shall wait, wait until we stand
vibrating with terror just like harp strings—
on instruments which don't sound any longer—
and know this: There will be no spring.
And every time the season's about to turn,
then we shall stand there huddling in our sweaters
and feel as if we're falling head over heels:
Now it's blowing! Now there's lye in the air!
All of us feel the fiercest winter's coming,
turn up our collars, duck our heads and shiver.
Now it's November, friends, and we're freezing,
it will be winter before our time is up!
And there will be no spring before all is burnt,
till all is burnt down into black ash
And fulled and purified in winter's cold!
Only then will the fire age and the ice age end.
This page maintained by Esther Greenleaf
Mürer
Last updated October 28, 2000