For Christians, the ultimate question...that still echoes on earth !

"God ! God ! Why have you forsaken me !" Translation of Pierre Emmanuel’s "Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani" by T. Wignesan

(Note: Sarveppalli Radhakrishnan, the ex-professional-philosopher President of India, and Pierre Emmanuel shared humility of purpose and true compassion in their own sense of servitude towards their fellow men. Emmanuel (pseudonym of the poet) was abandoned by his mother - barely a fortnight after his birth - who then took off with his father to settle permanently in the States. Brought up by his uncle in Lyon, he became a professor of French Lit., married a West Indian, had two children, published some forty volumes of poetry as a devout Catholic, and was a revered member of the prestigious French Academy. He passed away in 1984 while heading the French National Audio-Visual Institute. It remains a startling mystery why he nor Radhakrishnan (the "Bertrand Russell" of India) were not awarded the Nobel Prize.) T. Wignesan

Opening the eyes requires such an immense effort
As if the entire sky were their eyelids
And the forehead how to hold it up......raise the earth
To stare wide-eyed the space between the sticky eyebrows
In order to be able to see

All of a sudden the neatness of the slashes
Of black and white during the afternoon’s storm
A world of sharp detached angles
The exact banality of the tiniest things
All for nothing

So therefore it’s really for nothing he was going to die
On this stump of a cross......his ankles frozen
By your atrocious coming and going to the beat of the
...........lapping
Inundating the cramped sinister woods
O ! the Crowd !

If the gallows were the Tree in the Garden
Indeed it has changed since Adam enjoyed its shade
So vast and dark in waves of palms towering high
The taste of these nocturnal waters rendered them .........insipid
The sky

Adam concentrated on the fruit and in the fruit the night
His eye was the ultimate star the most solitary
Someone wanted to destroy himself screaming into it
The hand already held the fruit. Of a sudden the .........anguish
Abated

Now the Tree is extirpated from all space
Its sap is concentrated in one monstruous fruit
This body where God is shriveled up....this Face
Of the Person in the desert of an over-populated world
This is the Man

God ! God ! Why have you forsaken me !
The Christ as pulp bruised empties itself in the depths of
.............the void
The entire spirit is drawn upwards by the cry
But the taciturn echo awaits that it enters into him
The Yes

This Yes that Adam has refused him in the Garden
Adam Christ uttered it out loud to sum up his tortures
Necessary that the act of abandonment be out of
.............proportion
And the cross the supreme echo of divine Names.

(from "La nouvelle naissance", Oeuvres Complètes, tome I, p. 1088)

© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014