ad astra

Here’s another translation I did.  It’s an excerpt from a longer speech given by Gabriel García Márquez concerning the arms race.  It was given in the 80s but I think it’s still applicable.  I’m not trying to be depressing with this - I just like the way that he describes “the end.”  I also need to reiterate once again that I’m not a translator and that my words can’t do his justice.  Anyways, here it is.

***
Excerpt from “The Sword of Damocles” by Gabriel García Márquez

     A minute after the last explosion, more than half of the human race will have died, the dust and the smoke of the flaming continents will blot out the light of the sun, and absolute darkness will return to reign over the world.  A winter of orange rains and frozen hurricanes will invert the movement of the oceans and will reverse the flow of the rivers, whose fish will have died of thirst in the burning waters, and whose birds will not be able to find the sky.  Perpetual clouds will cover the Sahara Desert, the vast Amazon will disappear from the face of the earth, destroyed by hail, and the age of rock and of heart transplants will return to its glacial infancy.  The few human beings who survive the first horrors, those who will have had the privilege of a safe refuge at three in the afternoon that fateful Monday of the Great Catastrophe, will have been saved only to die later from the horror of their memories.  Creation will have ended.  In the final chaos of the humid, eternal nights, the only trace of what was life will be the cockroaches.

     This is not a poor attempt at plagiarizing John’s delirium after his shipwreck on Patmos, but the anticipated vision of a cosmic disaster that could happen at any moment: the explosion – ordered or accidental – of only a minimal part of the nuclear arsenal that sleeps with one eye open in the powder kegs of the Great Powers.

     This is the situation: today, the sixth of August, 1986, there exists in the world more than 50,000 nuclear warheads, ready for launch at a moment’s notice.  In other words, it is to say that every human being, without excluding children, is sitting in their own powder keg loaded with four tons of dynamite, whose complete explosion could eliminate twelve times over every trace of life on Earth.  The potential of annihilation from this colossal threat, which hangs over our heads like the Sword of Damocles, suggests the theoretical possibility of rendering useless four more planets than those which revolve around the sun, and of influencing the equilibrium of the Solar System.  No science, no art; no industry has doubled itself as many times as the nuclear industry since its origin 41 years ago, nor has any other human ingenuity had such power in deciding the world’s fate.

     In spite of these dramatic certainties, the arms race will not concede even a moment of truce.  Right now, as we are eating, a new nuclear warhead has been created.  Tomorrow, when we wake up, there will be 9 more in the deadly storehouses of the rich hemisphere.

     One of our time’s greatest novelists once asked whether Earth might not be other planets’ hell.  It might be much less: a long forgotten village, abandoned by its gods in the final suburb of the universe.  But the growing suspicion that Earth is the only place in the Solar System where the incredible adventure of life has appeared, drags us without pity to a disheartening conclusion: the arms race goes against all intelligence.

     And not only human intelligence, but the intelligence of nature, whose finality escapes even the clairvoyance of poetry.  Since the appearance of visible life on Earth, 380 million years passed before a butterfly learned to fly, another 180 million years before a rose formed without any other purpose other than to be beautiful, and four more geological eras before human beings, distinct from their Pithecanthropus ancestors, were capable of singing better than the birds and of dying of heartache.  Humanity should not be proud, in the Golden Age of Science, of having conceived of a way of destroying such a colossal millennial process, returning it to the nothing from which it came through the simple art of pushing a button.  We are here to try to prevent this from happening, joining our voices to the innumerable others which clamor for a world without arms and a peace united with justice.

     But even if we destroy ourselves, our being here will not have been completely useless.

     Millions and millions of millenniums after the explosion, a triumphant salamander will have returned to climb the ladder of all species; it may be crowned as the most beautiful part of the new creation.  It depends on us, men and women of science, men and women of art and of letters, men and women of intelligence and peace, it depends on all of us that those invited to that chimaeric coronation do not go to their celebration with the same fears which plague us today.  With all modesty, but also with all the determination of my spirit, I propose that we agree here and now to create a time capsule, capable of surviving the atomic deluge.  A bottle of astral shipwrecks thrown into the oceans of time, so that the new humanity may then know what the cockroaches won’t be able to tell them: that here life existed, that in it suffering prevailed and injustice predominated, but that also we knew about love and were even capable of imagining true happiness.  And so that they know and can make known for all times who were the ones guilty of causing our disaster, and how deaf they made themselves to our clamors for peace as we tried to make this the best of possible lives, and with what barbaric inventions and for what miserable interests we erased that life from the universe.

***

Thoughts?