A Vision (1937)

«Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting.3 Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge. The little town described in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”4 In what better place» — Yeats abre A Packet for Ezra Pound describiendo Rapallo, el lugar donde dice haber pensado buena parte del libro

«I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening on to a flat roof by the sea.» — Yeats presenta a Pound como el interlocutor de Rapallo y define de entrada la oposición entre las dos poéticas

«Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue.9 There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical» — Yeats transmite la explicación que Pound le da de la estructura de The Cantos: una fuga de Bach, sin trama ni cronología, con el Descenso al Hades de Homero y una Metamorfosis de Ovidio como temas

«He has tried to produce that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in Le chef d’œuvre inconnu where everything rounds or thrusts itself without edges, without contours—conventions of the intellect—from a splash of tints and shades;» — Yeats compara el procedimiento de Pound con el cuadro sin contornos del relato de Balzac, donde todo se redondea sin las convenciones del intelecto

«He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day.» — Yeats traduce el esquema de The Cantos a los tres registros de una decoración de Cosimo Tura: los elementos fijos ocupan el lugar del Zodiaco, las personas arquetípicas el de los Triunfos y los sucesos modernos el de los hechos del día

«I may, now that I have recovered leisure, find that the mathematical structure, when taken up into imagination, is more than mathematical, that seemingly irrelevant details fit together into a single theme, that here is no botch of tone and colour, all Hodos Chameliontos, except for some odd corner where one discovers beautiful detail like that finely modelled foot in Porteous’ disastrous picture.» — Yeats deja la cuestión en suspenso y llama a la alternativa por su nombre técnico: o la estructura matemática se vuelve más que matemática al entrar en la imaginación, o todo es Hodos Chameliontos

«Yet now that I recall the scene I think that he has no affection for cats—“some of them so ungrateful”, a friend says—he never nurses the café cat, I cannot imagine him with a cat of his own.» — Yeats corrige su propia escena de Pound alimentando gatos y niega que haya en ella afecto por los gatos

«I have been wondering if I shall go to church and seek the company of the English in the villas. At Oxford I went constantly to All Souls Chapel, though never at service time» — Yeats sitúa la tentación de volver a la iglesia y su costumbre de entrar en las capillas fuera de hora

«I am too anaemic for so British a faith; I shall haunt empty churches and be satisfied with Ezra Pound’s society and that of his travelling Americans.» — el modo en que Yeats declina esa vuelta, después de oír en un café la conversación sobre himnos y cerveza

«All that is laborious or mechanical in my book is finished; what remains can be added as a momentary rest from writing verse.» — Yeats da por terminada en 1928 la parte laboriosa del libro y trata lo que queda como descanso entre versos

«Descartes went on pilgrimage to some shrine of the Virgin when he made his first philosophical discovery, and the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli seems like something in my own mind, something that I have discovered.» — Yeats compara su propia gratitud con la peregrinación de Descartes tras su primer hallazgo filosófico

«“This way of publishing introductions to books, that are God knows when to come out, is either wholly new, or so long in practice that my small reading cannot trace it.”» — el epígrafe de Swift con que Yeats abre la introducción a A Vision: publicar introducciones a libros que aún no salen

«The other day Lady Gregory said to me: “You are a much better educated man than you were ten years ago and much more powerful in argument”. And I put The Tower and The Winding Stair into evidence to show that my poetry has gained in self-possession and power.21 I owe this change to an incredible experience.» — Yeats atribuye a una experiencia increíble el cambio que Lady Gregory le señala, y pone sus dos libros de poemas por prueba

«He supported his classification by a series of geometrical symbols and put these symbols in an order that answered the question in my essay as to whether some prophet could not prick upon the calendar the birth of a Napoleon or a Christ.» — el paso siguiente: los símbolos geométricos puestos en un orden que contesta la pregunta del ensayo sobre si un profeta podría marcar en el calendario el nacimiento de un Napoleón o de un Cristo

«A system of symbolism, strange to my wife and to myself, certainly awaited expression, and when I asked how long that would take I was told years.» — Yeats declara ajeno a los dos el sistema que pedía expresión, y consigna el plazo que le dieron

«Sometimes when my mind strays back to those first days I remember that Browning’s Paracelsus did not obtain the secret until he had written his spiritual history at the bidding of his Byzantine teacher, that before initiation Wilhelm Meister read his own history written by another, and I compare my Per Amica to those histories.» — Yeats compara su propio libro anterior con las historias que Paracelso y Wilhelm Meister debieron escribir o leer antes de la iniciación

«When the automatic writing began we were in a hotel on the edge of Ashdown Forest, but soon returned to Ireland and spent much of 1918 at Glendalough, at Rosses Point, at Coole Park, at a house near it, at Thoor Ballylee, always more or less solitary, my wife bored and fatigued by her almost daily task and I thinking and talking of little else.» — Yeats sitúa el primer año de la escritura automática y consigna sin adorno el cansancio y el aburrimiento de su mujer frente a su propio arrobamiento

«My teachers did not seem to speak out of her sleep but as if from above it, as though it were a tide upon which they floated.» — Yeats describe la posición desde la que le parecía que hablaban sus maestros: no desde el sueño de ella sino por encima, como flotando sobre una marea

«A chance word spoken before she fell asleep would sometimes start a dream that broke in upon the communications, as if from below, to trouble or overwhelm, as when she dreamed she was a cat lapping milk or a cat curled up asleep and therefore dumb. The cat returned night after night, and once when I tried to drive it away by making the sound one makes when playing at being a dog to amuse a child, she awoke trembling, and the shock was so violent that I never dared repeat it.» — la interferencia del sueño propio de la médium: el gato que vuelve noche tras noche y el sobresalto que Yeats no se atrevió a repetir

«once I remember saying to a friend as we came out of Sant’Ambrogio at Milan, “That is my tradition and I will let no priest rob me”.» — la frase que Yeats se atribuye a la salida de Sant’Ambrogio de Milán, donde reclama la tradición para sí y no para el clero

«and that which is from a combat with circumstance, and upon this simple distinction he built up an elaborate classification of men according to their more or less complete expression of one type or the other.» — la continuación en la plana siguiente: sobre esa distinción entre el combate consigo mismo y el combate con las circunstancias se levanta la clasificación de los hombres

«Early in 1919 the communicator of the moment—they were constantly changed—said they would soon change the method from the written to the spoken word as that would fatigue her less, but the change did not come for some months.» — el comunicador de turno anuncia a comienzos de 1919 el paso de la palabra escrita a la hablada para fatigar menos a la médium

«My questions must be accurately worded, and, because they said their thought was swifter than ours, asked without delay or hesitation. I was constantly reproved for vague or confused questions» — las condiciones que le imponían: precisión y rapidez, porque decían pensar más aprisa que nosotros

«they kept me from mastering that conception. They shifted ground whenever my interest was at its height, whenever it seemed that the next day must reveal what, as I soon discovered, they were determined to withhold until all was upon paper.» — Yeats atribuye a los comunicadores el propósito deliberado de impedirle dominar la concepción geométrica única en que se apoyaba la exposición

«They drew their first symbolical map of that history, and marked upon it the principal years of crisis, early in July 1918, some days before the publication of the first German edition of Spengler’s Decline of the West, which, though founded upon a different philosophy, gives the same years of crisis and draws the same general conclusions, and then returned to the soul’s judgment.» — Yeats fecha el primer mapa simbólico de la historia europea días antes de la primera edición alemana de Spengler y consigna la coincidencia de años de crisis pese a la distinta filosofía

«I believe that they so changed their theme because, had I grasped their central idea, I would have lacked the patience and the curiosity to follow their application of it, preferring some hasty application of my own.» — la explicación que Yeats se da de esos cambios de tema: si hubiera captado la idea central, le habría faltado paciencia para seguir la aplicación

«They once told me not to speak of any part of the system, except of the incarnations which were almost fully expounded, because if I did the people I talked to would talk to other people, and the communicators would mistake that misunderstanding for their own thought.» — la prohibición de hablar del sistema y su razón: el malentendido ajeno volvería a ellos como si fuera su propio pensamiento

«For the same reason they asked me not to read philosophy until their exposition was complete, and this increased my difficulties.» — la segunda prohibición: no leer filosofía hasta terminada la exposición

«Apart from two or three of the principal Platonic Dialogues I knew no philosophy. Arguments with my father, whose convictions had been formed by John Stuart Mill’s attack upon Sir William Hamilton, had destroyed my confidence and driven me from speculation to the direct experience of the Mystics.» — Yeats declara su desconocimiento de la filosofía y lo achaca a las discusiones con su padre, que lo empujaron de la especulación a la experiencia directa de los místicos

«I had once known Blake as thoroughly as his unfinished confused Prophetic Books permitted, and I had read Swedenborg and Boehme, and my initiation into the “Hermetic Students” had filled my head with Cabbalistic imagery, but there was nothing in Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme or the Cabbala to help me now.» — Yeats enumera su bagaje ocultista previo —Blake, Swedenborg, Boehme, la imaginería cabalística de los Hermetic Students— y declara que nada de eso le servía

«They encouraged me, however, to read history in relation to their historical logic, and biography in relation to their twenty-eight typical incarnations, that I might give concrete expression to their abstract thought.» — en cambio le mandaron leer historia según su lógica histórica y biografía según las veintiocho encarnaciones, para dar expresión concreta a su pensamiento abstracto

«and if my mind returned too soon to their unmixed abstraction they would say, “We are starved”.» — la queja con que los comunicadores le reclamaban lo concreto

«Because they must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom they named Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time.31 Who these Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained, nor will be unless I can finish “The Soul in Judgment” (Book III of this work), but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel.» — Yeats introduce a los Frustrators como agentes que confunden o hacen perder tiempo, y declara no haber recibido explicación adecuada de quiénes eran

«I would spread out the script and he would cross all out back to the answer that began it, but had I not divined frustration he would have said nothing.» — la condición que Yeats señala: la corrección solo llegaba si él adivinaba primero la frustración

«A predecessor of his had described the geometrical symbolism as created for my assistance and had seemed to dislike it, another had complained that I used it to make their thought mechanical, and a Frustrator doubtless played upon my weakness when he described a geometrical model of the soul’s state after death which could be turned upon a lathe.» — las objeciones internas al simbolismo geométrico: un comunicador lo daba por hecho para su ayuda y parecía no quererlo, otro le reprochaba mecanizar su pensamiento, y un Frustrator le ofreció un modelo torneable del alma después de la muerte

«It was part of their purpose to affirm that all the gains of man come from conflict with the opposite of his true being.» — el principio que Yeats les atribuye: todo lo que el hombre gana viene del conflicto con lo opuesto de su verdadero ser

«One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play in their dream, “Remember we will deceive you if we can”.» — la advertencia que Yeats consigna en boca de uno de ellos

«Upon the other hand they seem like living men, are interested in all that interests living men, as when at Oxford, where we spent our winters, one asked upon hearing an owl hoot in the garden, if he might be silent for a while. “Sounds like that”, he said, “give us great pleasure.”» — el rasgo contrario que Yeats también consigna: se comportan como vivos, y uno pidió silencio para oír un búho

«Some six months before the communications came to an end, a communicator announced that he was about to explain a new branch of the philosophy and seemed to add, “But please do not write anything down, for when all is finished I will dictate a summary”. He spoke almost nightly for I think three months, and at last I said, “Let me make notes, I cannot keep it all in my head”. He was disturbed to find that I had written nothing down, and when I told him of the voice, said it was frustration and that he could not summarise.» — el episodio de frustración más largo: tres meses de exposición nocturna perdidos porque una voz le había pedido no tomar notas

«While we were staying at a village near Oxford we met two or three nights in succession what seemed a sudden warm breath coming up from the ground at the same corner of the road.» — el primero de los fenómenos que Yeats dice haber acompañado a la escritura: un aliento tibio del suelo en la misma esquina, tres noches seguidas

«At first I was inclined to think that these whistlings were made by my wife without her knowing it, and once, when I heard the whistle and she did not, she felt a breath passing through her lips as though she had whistled.» — Yeats consigna su primera explicación de los silbidos —que los hacía su mujer sin saberlo— y el dato que se la complicó

«I had to give up this explanation when servants at the other end of the house were disturbed by a “whistling ghost”, and so much so that I asked the communicators to choose some other sign.» — y el hecho por el que la abandonó: el silbido molestaba a la servidumbre al otro extremo de la casa

«Sweet smells were the most constant phenomena, now that of incense, now that of violets or roses or some other flower, and as perceptible to some half-dozen of our friends as to ourselves, though upon one occasion when my wife smelt hyacinth a friend smelt eau-de-cologne.» — los olores como fenómeno más constante, percibidos también por conocidos, con una divergencia que Yeats consigna sin resolver

«I seldom knew why such smells came, nor why one sort rather than another, but sometimes they approved something said. When I spoke of a Chinese poem in which some old official described his coming retirement to a village inhabited by old men devoted to the classics,38 the air filled suddenly with the smell of violets, and that night some communicator explained that in such a place a man could escape those “knots” of passion that prevent Unity of Being» — Yeats declara no saber por qué venía un olor u otro, y da el caso en que un olor de violetas aprobó lo dicho y trajo la doctrina de los nudos de pasión contrarios a la Unidad del Ser

«I can discover no apparent difference between a natural and a supernatural smell, except that the natural smell comes and goes gradually while the other is suddenly there and then as suddenly gone.» — la única diferencia que Yeats dice hallar entre un olor natural y uno sobrenatural: el modo de aparecer y de irse

«one afternoon, knowing from the smell of burnt feathers that one of my children would be ill within three hours, I felt before I could recover self-control the mediaeval helpless horror at witchcraft.» — Yeats consigna el miedo que no pudo dominar cuando el olor le anunció la enfermedad de un hijo

«I was dictating to my wife, perhaps, and a voice would object to a sentence, and I could no more say where the voice came from than I could of the whistling, though confident that it came through my wife’s personality.» — sobre el origen de las voces, Yeats declara no poder situarlas y a la vez darlas por pasadas a través de la personalidad de su mujer

«Once a Japanese who had dined with my wife and myself talked of Tolstoy’s philosophy, which fascinates so many educated Japanese, and I put my objections vehemently. “It is madness for the East”, I said, “which must face the West in arms”, and much more of the same sort, and was, after he had gone, accusing myself of exaggerated and fantastic speech when I heard these words in a loud clear voice: “You have said what we wanted to have said”.43 My wife, who was writing a letter at the other end of the room, had heard nothing, but found she had written those words in the letter, where they had no meaning.» — el episodio de la frase oída en voz alta y hallada después escrita, sin sentido, en la carta que su mujer redactaba en el otro extremo del cuarto

«Exposition in sleep came to an end in 1920, and I began an exhaustive study of some fifty copy-books of automatic script, and of a much smaller number of books recording what had come in sleep. Probably as many words had been spoken in sleep as had been written, but I could only summarise and much had been lost through frustration.» — Yeats fecha en 1920 el fin de la exposición y describe el material que quedó: unos cincuenta cuadernos de guion automático y muchas menos anotaciones de lo hablado en sueños

«And then, though I had mastered nothing but the twenty-eight phases and the historical scheme, I was told that I must write, that I must seize the moment between ripe and rotten—there was a metaphor of apples about to fall and just fallen.» — la orden de escribir, con la metáfora de las manzanas, cuando Yeats aún no dominaba más que las fases y el esquema histórico

«When in 1926 the English translation of Spengler’s book came out, some weeks after A Vision,III I found that not only were dates that I had been given the same as his but whole metaphors and symbols that had seemed my work alone.46 Both he and I had symbolised a difference between Greek and Roman thought by comparing the blank or painted eyes of Greek statues with the pierced eyeballs of the Roman statues, both had described as an illustration of Roman character the naturalistic portrait heads screwed on to stock bodies, both had found the same meaning in the round bird-like eyes of Byzantine sculpture, though he or his translator had preferred “staring at infinity” to my “staring at miracle”.» — Yeats detalla la coincidencia con Spengler —fechas, metáforas, los ojos de las estatuas griegas y romanas, la mirada de la escultura bizantina— y consigna la variante de traducción que las separa

«I had always to question, and every question to rise out of a previous answer and to deal with their chosen topic.» — la continuación en la plana siguiente: cada pregunta debía nacer de la respuesta anterior y quedarse dentro del asunto elegido por ellos

«The automatic script would deteriorate, grow sentimental or confused, and when I pointed this out the communicator would say, “From such and such an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration”.» — el modo en que se declaraba la frustración: el guion se deterioraba y el comunicador fechaba desde qué hora todo era frustración

«Was he constrained by a drama which was part of conditions that made communication possible, was that drama itself part of the communication, had my question to be asked before his mind cleared?» — las tres preguntas que Yeats deja abiertas sobre la naturaleza de esa restricción dramática

«I had already noticed that if their thought was interrupted they had to find some appropriate moment before they could take it up again, and that though they could sometimes foretell physical events they could not foretell those moments.» — Yeats acota el poder de los comunicadores: podían prever hechos físicos y no el momento en que retomarían un pensamiento interrumpido

«There were still stranger phenomena that I prefer to remain silent about for the present because they seemed so incredible that they need a long story and much discussion.» — Yeats declara callar otros fenómenos por increíbles

«The first version of this book, A Vision, except the section on the twenty-eight phases, and that called “Dove or Swan” which I repeat without change, fills me with shame.» — Yeats declara vergüenza por la primera versión, salvo por las veintiocho fases y por Dove or Swan, que repite sin cambios

«Then I took down from my wife a list of what she had read, two or three volumes of Wundt, part of Hegel’s Logic, all Thomas Taylor’s Plotinus, a Latin work of Pico della Mirandola, and a great deal of mediaeval mysticism.» — Yeats levanta la lista de lecturas de su mujer para cotejarla con lo recibido: Wundt, parte de la Lógica de Hegel, el Plotino de Thomas Taylor, una obra latina de Pico y mucha mística medieval

«I did not expect to find that the communicators echoed what she had read, for I had proof they were not dependent on her memory or mine, but did expect to find somewhere something from which their symbolic geometry had been elaborated, something used as they had used Per Amica» — Yeats declara la prueba negativa que buscaba: no esperaba que los comunicadores repitieran lo leído por ella, pero sí hallar la fuente de la geometría simbólica

«Although the more I read the better did I understand what I had been taught, I found neither the geometrical symbolism nor anything that could have inspired it except the vortex of Empedocles.» — el resultado de esa búsqueda: cuatro años de lectura no dieron con el simbolismo geométrico ni con nada que pudiera haberlo inspirado, salvo el vórtice de Empédocles

«I might have gone on reading for some two or three years more but for something that happened at Cannes. I was ill after pneumonia and general nervous breakdown, had partly recovered but fallen ill again, and spent most of the days on my back considering a slowly narrowing circle.» — Yeats fecha en su enfermedad de Cannes el corte de esas lecturas

«The communicator came next day, but later, and only to say over and over in different words, “It cannot happen again, for at this hour nobody comes”, and then day after day to discuss what I had written.» — tras el sobresalto de la médium, el comunicador vuelve solo a repetir que no puede volver a ocurrir

«My wife’s interests are musical, literary, practical, she seldom comments upon what I dictate except upon the turn of a phrase; she can no more correct it than she could her automatic script at a time when a slight error brought her new fatigue.» — Yeats separa los intereses de su mujer de la doctrina y declara que ella no podía corregir ni lo dictado ni su propio guion automático

«But the communicator, as independent of her ignorance as of her knowledge, had no tolerance for error. He had no more than tolerated my philosophical study and was enraged by the intrusion, not so much into what I had written as into the questions I put, of a terminology not his.» — y adjudica al comunicador una independencia igual del saber y de la ignorancia de ella, con cero tolerancia al error y enojo ante la terminología ajena

«This led to one of those quarrels which I have noticed almost always precede the clearest statements, and seem to arise from an independence excited to injustice because kept with difficulty.» — la observación de Yeats sobre esas peleas: casi siempre preceden a los enunciados más claros

«But now in a few minutes they drew that distinction between what their terminology calls the Faculties and what it calls the Principles, between experience and revelation, between understanding and reason, between the higher and lower mind, which has engaged the thought of saints and philosophers from the time of Buddha.» — de esa pelea sale la distinción entre Faculties y Principles, que Yeats equipara a la de experiencia y revelación, entendimiento y razón, mente alta y baja

«I have heard my wife in the broken speech of some quite ordinary dream use tricks of speech characteristic of the philosophic voices.» — Yeats consigna el parecido entre las voces filosóficas y el habla de un sueño común, en los dos sentidos

«Furthermore their doctrine supports the resemblance, for one said in the first month of communication, “We are often but created forms”, and another, that spirits do not tell a man what is true but create such conditions, such a crisis of fate, that the man is compelled to listen to his Daimon.» — y consigna que la propia doctrina sostiene ese parecido: los comunicadores se declaran formas creadas, y los espíritus no dicen lo verdadero sino que crean la crisis que obliga a escuchar al Daimon

«And again and again they have insisted that the whole system is the creation of my wife’s Daimon and of mine, and that it is as startling to them as to us.» — la afirmación que Yeats les atribuye repetidamente: el sistema entero es creación de los Daimons de la pareja y les asombra tanto a ellos como a ella

«Mere “spirits”, my teachers say, are the “objective”, a reflection and distortion; reality itself is found by the Daimon in what they call, in commemoration of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Ghostly Self. The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all.» — la jerarquía que Yeats recoge: los espíritus sin más son lo objetivo, reflejo y distorsión, y la realidad la halla el Daimon en el Ghostly Self, nombrado en conmemoración de la tercera persona de la Trinidad

«Much that has happened, much that has been said, suggests that the communicators are the personalities of a dream shared by my wife, by myself, occasionally by others— they have, as I must some day prove, spoken through others without change of» — Yeats propone la hipótesis contraria a la sobrenatural —los comunicadores como personalidades de un sueño compartido— y la sostiene con que han hablado también por otros

«and as my wife was unwilling that her share should be known, and I to seem sole author, I had invented an unnatural story of an Arabian traveller which I must amend and find a place for some day because I was fool enough to write half a dozen poems that are unintelligible without» — Yeats da su propia explicación de la ficción árabe de 1925: su mujer no quería que se conociera su parte y él no quería aparecer como autor único; la mantiene por los poemas que sin ella no se entienden

«X When the proof sheets came I felt myself relieved from my promise not to read philosophy and began with Berkeley because a young revolutionary soldier who was living a very dangerous life said, “All the philosophy a man needs is in Berkeley”, and because Lennox Robinson, hearing me quote that sentence, bought me an old copy of Berkeley’s works upon the Dublin quays.» — Yeats fecha en las galeradas el comienzo de sus lecturas filosóficas y adjudica la elección de Berkeley al consejo de un soldado revolucionario

«I am always afraid”, he said in apology, “that when not at our best we may accept from you false reasoning.”» — la disculpa del comunicador tras esa pelea

«What I have to say of them is in “The Soul in Judgment”,V but because it came when my wife’s growing fatigue made communication difficult and because of defects of my own, it is the most unfinished of my five books.» — Yeats declara al Libro III el más inacabado de los cinco y da dos razones: el cansancio creciente de su mujer y defectos propios

«Some, perhaps all, of those readers I most value, those who have read me many years, will be repelled by what must seem an arbitrary, harsh, difficult symbolism. Yet such has almost always accompanied expression that unites the sleeping and waking mind.» — Yeats prevé el rechazo de sus lectores al simbolismo y lo defiende como acompañante habitual de toda expresión que una la mente dormida con la despierta

«One remembers the six wings of Daniel’s angels, the Pythagorean numbers, a venerated book of the Cabbala where the beard of God winds in and out among the stars, its hairs all numbered, those complicated mathematical tables that Kelly saw in Dr. Dee’s black scrying-stone, the diagrams in Law’s Boehme, where one lifts a flap of paper to discover both the human entrails and the starry heavens.» — la serie con que lo ilustra: las alas de los ángeles de Daniel, los números pitagóricos, el libro cabalístico donde la barba de Dios se enreda entre las estrellas, las tablas que Kelly vio en la piedra negra de Dee y los diagramas del Boehme de Law

«William Blake thought those diagrams worthy of Michelangelo, but remains himself almost unintelligible because he never drew the like.» — Yeats adjudica a Blake el aprecio por esos diagramas y le atribuye su propia oscuridad por no haber dibujado nada semejante

«We can (those hard symbolic bones under the skin) substitute for a treatise on logic the Divine Comedy, or some little song about a rose, or be content to live our thought.» — la alternativa que Yeats deja abierta al lector: sustituir el tratado por la Comedia o por una canción, o vivir el pensamiento sin escribirlo

«Some will associate the story I have just told with that popular spiritualism which has not dared to define itself, to go like all great spiritual movements through a tragedy of separation and rejection, which instead of asking whether it is not something almost incredible, because altogether new or forgotten, clings to all that is vague and obvious in popular Christianity; and hate me for that association.» — Yeats prevé que se lo asocie con el espiritismo popular y describe a éste como movimiento que no se atrevió a definirse ni a pasar por la tragedia de la separación y el rechazo

«Some will ask whether I believe in the actual existence of my circuits of sun and moon. Those that include, now all recorded time in one circuit, now what Blake called “the pulsation of an artery”, are plainly symbolical, but what of those that fixed, like a butterfly upon a pin, to our central date, the first day of our Era, divide actual history into periods» — Yeats separa los círculos plainly simbólicos de los que fijan la historia a la fecha central de la Era; la pregunta queda cortada por el cambio de plana

«To such a question I can but answer that if sometimes, overwhelmed by miracle as all men must be when in the midst of it, I have taken such periods literally, my reason has soon recovered; and now that the system stands out clearly in my imagination I regard them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.67 They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice.» — la respuesta completa: tomados a veces literalmente en medio del milagro, la razón se recobra, y los tiene ahora por arreglos estilísticos de la experiencia, comparables a los cubos de Wyndham Lewis y a los ovoides de Brancusi

«Do not be elected to the Senate of your country. I think myself, after six years, well out of that of mine.» — el consejo con que se abre la carta a Ezra Pound

«Neither you nor I, nor any other of our excitable profession, can match those old lawyers, old bankers, old business men, who, because all habit and memory, have begun to govern the world. They lean over the chair in front and talk as if to half a dozen of their kind at some board-meeting, and, whether they carry their point or not, retain moral ascendancy.» — Yeats concede a los viejos abogados, banqueros y hombres de negocios el gobierno del mundo, y lo funda en que son todo hábito y memoria

«Once when I had called at a Dublin bank, rifle fire began all round the bank, and I was told that nobody could leave for an hour or two and invited to lunch with the Directors. We lunched in a room overlooking the courtyard, and from time to time I got up and looked out of the window at a young soldier who ran from the protection of a wall, fell upon one knee and fired through the gateway. The Republicans were attacking the next building, but was the bank well protected? How many such young soldiers stood or crouched about us? The bankers talked their ordinary affairs, not one went to the window or asked whether a particular shot was fired by the young soldier or at him; they had to raise their voices a little as we do when we have selected by accident a restaurant where there is an orchestra.» — la escena del banco de Dublín bajo fuego, con los directores hablando de sus asuntos y alzando apenas la voz

«I send you the introduction of a book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity.» — Yeats anuncia a Pound lo que el libro terminado proclamará

«Oedipus lay upon the earth at the middle point between four sacred objects, was there washed as the dead are washed, and thereupon passed with Theseus to the wood’s heart until amidst the sound of thunder earth opened, “riven by love”, and he sank down soul and body into the earth.» — Yeats narra la muerte de Edipo, hundido en la tierra con alma y cuerpo

«I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body, and I see him altogether separated from Plato’s Athens, from all that talk of the Good and the One, from all that cabinet of perfection, an image from Homer’s age.» — y lo pone en la balanza opuesta a Cristo, que sube al cielo abstracto con alma y cuerpo; a Edipo lo separa de la Atenas de Platón y de todo el gabinete de la perfección

«He knew nothing but his mind, and yet because he spoke that mind fate possessed it and kingdoms changed according to his blessing and his cursing.» — lo que Yeats adjudica a Edipo: no sabía sino su propia mente, y por decirla el destino la ocupó y los reinos cambiaron con su bendición y su maldición

«I think that he lacked compassion, seeing that it must be compassion for himself, and yet stood nearer to the poor than saint or apostle, and I mutter to myself stories of Cruachan, or of Cruchmaa, or of the road-side bush withered by Raftery’s curse.» — Yeats le niega compasión y a la vez lo sitúa más cerca del pobre que un santo o un apóstol, y lo enlaza con los relatos irlandeses de Cruachan y con el arbusto secado por la maldición de Raftery

«What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?» — la figura con que Yeats plantea la alternancia histórica: Cristo y Edipo, o Catalina de Génova y Miguel Ángel, como los dos platillos de una balanza

«What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of a balance, the dip of a scale, and so date the coming of that something?» — y la pregunta que de ahí saca: si cada dos mil y pico de años algo vuelve sagrado a uno y secular al otro, ¿hay una aritmética o una geometría que mida la inclinación y feche esa llegada?

«You will hate these generalities, Ezra, which are themselves, it may be, of the past—the abstract sky—yet you have written “The Return”, and though you but announce in it some change of style, perhaps, in book and picture it gives me better words than my own.» — Yeats concede a Pound que odiará esas generalidades y le devuelve su propio poema como formulación mejor que la suya

«Mr. Wyndham Lewis, whose criticism sounds true to a man of my generation, attacks this art in Time and Western Man. If we reject, he argues, the forms and categories of the intellect there is nothing left but sensation, “eternal flux”. Yet all such rejections stop at the conscious mind, for as Dean Swift says in a meditation on a woman who paints a dying face, Matter as wise logicians say Cannot without a form subsist; And form, say I as well as they, Must fail, if matter brings no grist.» — en una nota al pie de su propia mano, Yeats resume la objeción de Wyndham Lewis —rechazadas las formas y categorías del intelecto solo queda la sensación, el flujo eterno— y le opone unos versos de Swift sobre materia y forma

«It is now finished, but less detailed than I once hoped.» — otra nota de Yeats, sobre el Libro III que en la introducción había dado por inacabado: ya está terminado, y menos detallado de lo que esperaba

«Michael Robartes and his Friends is the amended version.» — la nota con que Yeats remite la enmienda de la historia árabe a las Stories

«Was Oedipus familiar to Theban “wren boys”? One of those Lives “collected out of good authors” at the end of North’s Plutarch describes a meeting between Epaminondas and what I would like to consider some propitiation of his shade. “Even as they were marching away out of Thebes, divers of the souldiers thought they had had many unluckie signes. For as they were going out of the gates, Epaminondas met on his way a Herald, that following an auncient ceremonie and custome of theirs, brought an old blind man as if he had bene run away; and the Herald crying out aloud, Bring him not out of Thebes nor put him not to death, but carie him backe againe, and save his life.” The accepted explanation is that he was a runaway slave welcomed back with some traditional ceremony because he returned of his own will; but imagination boggles at a runaway, old blind slave.» — en otra nota propia, Yeats trae del Plutarco de North el encuentro de Epaminondas con un viejo ciego, rechaza la explicación admitida —un esclavo fugitivo devuelto con ceremonia— y declara que la imaginación se resiste

«Three of us, two young men and a young woman, sat round a fire at eleven o’clock at night on the ground floor of a house in Albert Road, Regent’s Park.3 Presently a third young man came in, drew a chair into the circle and said, “You do not recognise me, but I am the chauffeur: I always am on these occasions, it prevents gossip”.» — arranca la ficción de las Stories, contada por un narrador que forma parte de la escena; el recién llegado se presenta como el chofer de siempre

«“Owen”, said he, “is with Michael Robartes making his report.” Said I, “Why should there be a report?” Said he, “Oh, there is always a report.» — el personaje que se hace llamar Daniel O’Leary da por rutinario el informe que Aherne redacta para Robartes

«My name is Daniel O’Leary, my great interest is the speaking of verse, and the establishment some day or other of a small theatre for plays in verse. You will remember that a few years before the Great War the realists drove the last remnants of rhythmical speech out of the theatre.» — el personaje declara su interés —la dicción del verso y un teatro para obras en verso— y fecha la expulsión del habla rítmica del teatro a manos de los realistas

«Unfortunately, although I can do whatever I command myself to do, I lack the true courage, which is self-possession in an unforeseen situation.» — O’Leary distingue lo que puede mandarse a sí mismo del valor verdadero, que llama dominio de sí ante lo imprevisto

«The realists turn our words into gravel, but the musicians and the singers turn them into honey and oil.» — la fórmula con que el personaje opone realistas a músicos y cantantes

«Robartes”, said O’Leary, “sees what is going to happen, between sleeping and waking at night, or in the morning before they bring him his early cup of tea.» — O’Leary describe la clarividencia que atribuye a Robartes, situada entre el sueño y la vigilia

«Aherne is a pious Catholic, thinks it Pagan or something of the kind and hates it, but he has to do what Robartes tells him, always had to from childhood up.» — y el vínculo que atribuye a Aherne con Robartes: lo tiene por pagano, lo odia y le obedece desde niño

«I remember that Swedenborg has described all those between the celestial state and death as plastic, fantastic and deceitful, the dramatis personae of our dreams; that Cornelius Agrippa attributes to Orpheus these words: “The Gates of Pluto must not be unlocked, within is a people of dreams”.» — Yeats recoge la descripción swedenborgiana de los que están entre el estado celeste y la muerte —plásticos, fantásticos y engañosos— y la palabra que Agrippa atribuye a Orfeo sobre las puertas de Plutón

«Meanwhile I am to tell you my story and to hear yours. There will be plenty of time, for as I left the study Michael Robartes called the universe a great egg that turns inside-out perpetually without breaking its shell, and a thing like that always sets Owen off.» — el personaje trae, como fórmula de Robartes, el universo como un huevo grande que se vuelve del revés a perpetuidad sin romper la cáscara

«Presently Aherne came in with a big old man. Aherne, now that I saw him in a good light, was stout and sedentary-looking, bearded and dull of eye, but this other was lank, brown, muscular, clean-shaven, with an alert, ironical eye.» — el narrador de las Stories describe físicamente a Aherne y a Robartes y los contrapone

«I want the right sort of young men and women for pupils. Aherne acts as my messenger.» — Robartes declara buscar discípulos y da a Aherne el papel de mensajero

«I have brought you here”, said Robartes, “to tell you where I found that book, what followed from the finding of it, what is still to follow.» — Robartes anuncia el relato del hallazgo del libro, sus consecuencias y lo que aún ha de seguir

«I had founded a small Cabbalistic society in Ireland; but, finding time and place were against me, dissolved it and left the country.» — Robartes fecha su punto de partida en una sociedad cabalística irlandesa que él mismo disolvió

«In the morning I found that the book was called Speculum Angelorum et Hominum, had been written by a certain Giraldus, had been printed at Cracow in 1594, a good many years before the celebrated Cracow publications.» — el hallazgo del Speculum en la versión de 1937: Robartes lo encuentra apuntalando una cama en Viena, y con la grafía Hominum, distinta de la de 1925

«It was very dilapidated, all the middle pages had been torn out; but there still remained a series of allegorical pictures, a man torn in two by an eagle and some sort of wild beast, a man whipping his shadow, a man between a hunchback and a fool in cap and bells, and so on to the number of eight and twenty, a portrait of Giraldus, a unicorn several times repeated, a large diagram in the shape of a wheel where the phases of the moon were mixed up with an apple, an acorn, a cup, and what looked like a sceptre or wand.» — la descripción de lo que quedaba del libro: veintiocho estampas alegóricas, el retrato de Giraldus, el unicornio repetido y una rueda con las fases de la luna mezcladas con una manzana, una bellota, una copa y algo como un cetro

«My mistress had found it in a wall cupboard where it had been left by the last tenant, an unfrocked priest who had joined a troupe of gypsies and disappeared, and she had torn out the middle pages to light our fire.» — el relato adjudica la mutilación del libro a la amante de Robartes, que arrancó las páginas centrales para encender el fuego

«Though little remained of the Latin text, I spent a couple of weeks comparing one passage with another and all with the unintelligible diagrams.» — Robartes describe su método con el resto: cotejar pasaje contra pasaje y todo contra los diagramas ininteligibles

«One day I returned from a library, where I had made a fruitless attempt to identify my Giraldus with Giraldus of Bologna, and found my mistress gone, whether in mere disgust at my preoccupation or, as I hope, to some more attentive man.» — el intento fallido de identificar a su Giraldus con el de Bolonia, y la desaparición de la amante

«I have always known that love should be changeless and yet my loves drank their oil and died—there has been no ever» — el balance amoroso de Robartes, con la lámpara que nunca ardió sin apagarse; la frase se corta en el cambio de renglón

«Love contains all Kant’s antinomies, but it is the first that poisons our lives.» — Robartes atribuye al amor todas las antinomias de Kant y culpa a la primera

«Thesis, there is no beginning; antithesis, there is a beginning; or, as I prefer: thesis, there is an end; antithesis, there is no end.19 Exhausted by the cry that it can never end, my love ends; without that cry it were not love but desire, desire does not end.» — Robartes formula esa antinomia en las dos direcciones y separa amor de deseo por el grito de que no puede acabar

«Life is no series of emanations from divine reason such as the Cabbalists imagine, but an irrational bitterness, no orderly descent from level to level, no waterfall but a whirlpool, a gyre.» — Robartes niega la emanación ordenada de los cabalistas y pone en su lugar una amargura irracional: no una cascada sino un remolino, un gyre

«Portrait of Giraldus15 from the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum» — el pie de la lámina, que 1937 conserva de la edición anterior, imprime la grafía Hominum

«One night, between three and four in the morning, as I lay sleepless, it came into my head to go pray at the Holy Sepulchre.20 I went, prayed, grew somewhat calmer, until I said to myself, ‘Jesus Christ does not understand my despair, He belongs to order and reason’.» — Robartes cuenta su oración en el Santo Sepulcro y la conclusión con que la cierra

«The day after, an old Arab walked unannounced into my room. He said that he had been sent, stood where the Speculum lay open at the wheel marked with the phases of the moon, described it as the doctrine of his tribe, drew two whorls working one against the other, the narrow end of one in the broad end of the other, showed that my single wheel and his two whorls had the same meaning.» — la llegada del árabe que dice haber sido enviado, y la equivalencia que traza entre la rueda única del Speculum y sus dos torbellinos encajados por los extremos

«He belonged to a tribe of Arabs who called themselves Judwalis or Diagrammatists because their children are taught dances which leave upon the sand traces full of symbolical meaning.» — el nombre y la razón del nombre de los Judwalis, que 1937 conserva de la ficción anterior: la enseñanza queda en las huellas del baile sobre la arena

«This is John Bond and this is Mary Bell.24 Aherne has brought John Bond from Ireland that you may hear what he has to say, and Mary Bell because I think her a suitable guardian for what I carry in this box.» — Robartes presenta a los dos personajes que traerán el relato siguiente y designa guardiana del cofre

«I was reading Axel in bed. It was between twelve and one on the 2nd June last year. A date that I will never forget, because on that night I met the one man I shall always love.» — Denise de L’Isle Adam abre su historia con la lectura de Axel y con la fecha que dice no olvidar

«He talks of her hair as full of the odour of dead rose leaves—a pretty phrase—a phrase I would like somebody to say to me; and then comes the famous sentence: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us’.» — la frase de Axel que el personaje cita, y con la que la ficción de Yeats se enlaza con la de Villiers

«And now you know,” said Denise, “why I have named myself after the author of Axel.” I said: “You wish always to remember that upon that night I introduced you to Huddon”.» — Denise cierra su historia con la razón del nombre que se puso, y el narrador se la niega

«When a man gives me a cigarette, and I like the brand, I want a hundred, but the box is almost empty”.» — la fórmula con que Denise contesta a la pregunta por su relación con Huddon

«Now”, said Robartes, “the time has come for John Bond.» — Robartes ordena el turno de los relatos dentro de la ficción

«Some fifteen years ago this lady married an excellent man, much older than herself, who lived in a large house on the more peaceable side of the Shannon.» — John Bond abre su relato, que hablará en tercera persona de la mujer sentada delante

«Brought up in the strictest principles of the Church of Ireland, we were horror-struck and hid our feelings from one another.» — el personaje sitúa el impedimento en la formación religiosa de ambos

«She wished to study the nests of certain migratory birds, thought the only exact method was to make their nests with her own hands.» — el pretexto científico con que Mary Bell vuelve a buscarlo: hacer nidos con sus propias manos

«Some months later she brought me swift’s, swallow’s, corncrake’s, and reed-warbler’s nests made by her own hands and so well that, when I compared them with the natural nests in the cases of stuffed birds, I could see no difference.» — el resultado de esa labor, indistinguible de los nidos naturales según el personaje

«She thought a man who planted trees, knowing that no descendant nearer than his great-grandson could stand under their shade, had a noble and generous confidence. She thought there was something terrible about it, for it was terrible standing under great trees to say ‘Am I worthy of that confidence?’» — la reflexión que el relato pone en boca de Mary Bell sobre quien planta árboles para una sombra que no verá

«When I left the Foreign Office because I wanted to serve God I was a very young man. I wanted to make men better but not to leave this estate, and here nobody did wrong except as children do.» — el moribundo Bell cuenta por qué dejó el Foreign Office y describe la bondad que lo rodeaba

«I thought a great deal and remembered that birds and beasts, dumb brutes of all kinds, were robbing and killing one another. There at any rate I could alter without blasphemy.» — y sitúa el único desorden que podía corregir sin blasfemia: la rapiña entre los animales

«I have never taken Genesis literally. The passions of Adam, torn out of his breast, became the birds and beasts of Eden. Partakers in original sin, they can be partakers in salvation.» — la doctrina con que Bell justifica su obra: las pasiones de Adán arrancadas del pecho se hicieron aves y bestias, y por partícipes del pecado original pueden serlo de la salvación

«I knew that the longest life could do but little, and wishing especially to benefit those who lacked what I possessed, I decided to devote my life to the cuckoos.» — y la consecuencia práctica de esa doctrina, que da a la ficción su vuelta cómica

«My great object was of course to persuade them to make nests; but for a long time they were so obstinate, so unteachable, that I almost despaired. But the birth of a son renewed my resolution and a year ago I persuaded some of the oldest and cleverest birds to make circles with matches, twigs and fragments of moss, but though the numbers who can do this are increasing, even the cleverest birds make no attempt to weave them into a structure.» — el estado de la empresa: los cucos más viejos llegan a trazar círculos con cerillas, ramitas y musgo, y ninguno los teje

«It is unnecessary, a cuckoo has made a nest. Your long illness made the gardeners careless. I only found it by chance a moment ago, a beautiful nest, finished to the last layer of down.’» — Mary Bell interrumpe la escena declarando cumplida la obra del moribundo

«He told us of scenes that had risen before Mr. Robartes’ eyes on several successive mornings as he awaited his early tea. These scenes being part of our intimate lives, our first meeting in the South of France, our first meeting in the museum, the four-poster with the nest on the pillow, so startled us that we set out for London that very evening.» — el relato hace de Aherne el mensajero de las visiones matinales de Robartes, que reproducen la vida íntima de los dos personajes

«I have now two questions to ask, and four of you must answer. Mary Bell and John Bond need not, for I have taught them nothing. Their task in life is settled.» — Robartes separa a quienes no ha enseñado nada y somete a examen a los otros cuatro

«We have read Swift’s essay upon the dissensions of the Greeks and Romans; you have heard my comments, corrections, amplifications.39 Have I proved that civilisations come to an end when they have given all their light like burned-out wicks, that ours is near its end?» — la segunda pregunta, sobre el fin de las civilizaciones, apoyada en el ensayo de Swift sobre las disensiones de griegos y romanos

«If you had answered differently”, said Robartes, “I would have sent you away, for we are here to consider the terror that is to come.» — Robartes declara el propósito de la reunión

«Mary Bell then opened the ivory box and took from it an egg the size of a swan’s egg, and standing between us and the dark window-curtains, lifted it up that we might all see its colour.» — el objeto que la ficción pone en el centro: un huevo del tamaño del de un cisne

«Hyacinthine blue, according to the Greek lyric poet”, said Robartes.40 “I bought it from an old man in a green turban at Teheran; it had come down from eldest son to eldest son for many generations.» — Robartes le da color según un poeta lírico griego y le adjudica una procedencia y una transmisión de primogénito a primogénito

«“No”, said Aherne, “you never were in Teheran.”» — Aherne niega en el acto la procedencia que Robartes acaba de dar

«Perhaps Aherne is right”, said Robartes. “Sometimes my dreams discover facts, and sometimes lose them, but it does not matter. I bought this egg from an old man in a green turban in Arabia, or Persia, or India.» — Robartes acepta la objeción y declara que sus sueños a veces descubren hechos y a veces los pierden, y que no importa

«It was for a time in the treasury of Harun Al-Rashid and had come there from Byzantium, as ransom for a prince of the imperial house.» — la historia que Robartes atribuye al huevo: el tesoro de Harún al-Rashid y, antes, Bizancio, como rescate de un príncipe imperial

«During the reign of the Antonines tourists saw it hanging by a golden chain from the roof of a Spartan temple.43 Those of you who are learned in the classics will have recognised the lost egg of Leda, its miraculous life still unquenched.» — y su identificación: el huevo perdido de Leda, con la vida milagrosa aún sin apagar

«He then spoke of the two eggs already hatched, how Castor and Clytaemnestra broke the one shell, Helen and Pollux the other, of the tragedy that followed, wondered what would break the third shell.» — y la pregunta que deja abierta sobre el tercer cascarón, tras Cástor y Clitemnestra y Helena y Pólux

«I set down a few passages without attempting to recall their context or to arrange them in consecutive order.» — el narrador declara el estatuto de lo que sigue: pasajes sueltos, sin contexto ni orden

«I found myself upon the third antinomy of Immanuel Kant, thesis: freedom; antithesis: necessity; but I restate it.46 Every action of man declares the soul’s ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul’s disappearance in God; declares that reality is a congeries of beings and a single being; nor is this antinomy an appearance imposed upon us by the form of thought but life itself which turns, now here, now there, a whirling and a bitterness.» — Robartes replantea la tercera antinomia kantiana entre libertad y necesidad y niega que sea apariencia impuesta por la forma del pensamiento: es la vida misma

«After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war. Has our age burned to the socket?» — la alternancia de edades que Robartes enuncia por listas contrapuestas

«Death cannot solve the antinomy: death and life are its expression. We come at birth into a multitude and after death would perish into the One did not a witch of Endor call us back, nor would she repent did we shriek with Samuel: ‘Why hast thou disquieted me?’ instead of slumbering upon that breast.» — Robartes niega a la muerte el poder de resolver la antinomia y trae la bruja de Endor y el reproche de Samuel

«The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy, and were more than symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep. That sleep is the same as the sleep of death.» — el lecho conyugal como símbolo de la antinomia resuelta, y su límite: el hombre se duerme

«Dear predatory birds, prepare for war, prepare your children and all that you can reach, for how can a nation or a kindred without war become that ‘bright particular star’ of Shakespeare, that lit the roads in boyhood?49 Test art, morality, custom, thought, by Thermopylae; make rich and poor act so to one another that they can stand together there.50 Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilisation renewed. We desire belief and lack it. Belief comes from shock and is not desired. When a kindred discovers through apparition and horror that the perfect cannot perish nor even the imperfect long be interrupted, who can withstand that kindred? Belief is renewed continually in the ordeal of death.» — el discurso de guerra que la ficción pone en boca de Robartes, con Termópilas por medida y la creencia nacida del choque

«Even if the next divine influx be to kindreds why should war be necessary? Cannot they develop their characteristics in some other way?» — Aherne objeta la necesidad de la guerra dentro de la misma escena

«I have access to records of Robartes’ thought and action. There are diaries kept by my brother Owen during their tramps in Ireland in 1919, 1922 and 1923.» — la carta de John Aherne a Yeats declara su acceso a los papeles de Robartes

«You have sent me three poems founded upon “hearsay” as you put it, “The Phases of the Moon”, “The Double Vision”, and “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid”.» — el personaje enumera los tres poemas que Yeats le habría enviado, fundados según el propio Yeats en habladurías

«I have compared what you sent of your unpublished book55 with the diagrams and explanations recorded by his pupils, and find no essential difference.» — el personaje declara no hallar diferencia esencial entre el libro inédito de Yeats y los diagramas de los discípulos de Robartes

«That you should have found what was lost in the Speculum or survives in the inaccessible encampments of the Judwalis, interests me but does not astonish.» — y dice que el hallazgo le interesa sin asombrarlo

«I recall what Plato said of memory, and suggest that your automatic script, or whatever it was, may well have been but a process of remembering.» — el personaje propone leer la escritura automática como recuerdo, en el sentido platónico

«I think that Plato symbolised by the word “memory” a relation to the timeless, but Duddon is more literal and discovers a resemblance between your face and that of Giraldus in the Speculum. I enclose a photograph of the woodcut.» — y consigna la lectura más literal de Duddon: un parecido entre la cara de Yeats y la de Giraldus en el Speculum

«Robartes, then a young man, had founded a society, with the unwilling help of my brother Owen, for the study of the Kabbala Denudata and similar books, invented some kind of ritual and hired an old shed on Howth Pier for its meetings.» — la versión que la ficción da de aquel incidente: una sociedad para el estudio de la Kabbala Denudata, con ritual propio, en un cobertizo del muelle de Howth

«A foolish rumour got out among the herring or mackerel sorters, and some girls (from Glasgow, my brother says, for they come from all parts) broke the window. You hatched out of this the murder of Robartes and his friends, and though my brother incorporated Christ in the ritual, described a sort of orgy in honour of the pagan gods.» — y el modo en que Yeats lo habría convertido en asesinato y orgía, según el personaje

«Robartes makes no complaint about your description of his death and says nobody would have thought the Aherne and Robartes of such fantastic stories real men but for Owen’s outcry.» — Robartes, dentro de la ficción, no objeta que se lo mate en un relato y adjudica a la protesta de Owen que alguien tomara a los personajes por hombres reales

«He is, however (and this I confirm from my own knowledge), bitter about your style in those stories and says that you substituted sound for sense and ornament for thought.» — lo que sí objeta: el estilo de aquellos relatos, con sonido en lugar de sentido y ornamento en lugar de pensamiento

«and said, “Have I proved by practical demonstrations that the soul survives the body?» — la primera de las dos preguntas de Robartes, planteada como demostración práctica

«“Or transformation”, Aherne corrected. I said, speaking in the name of all, “You have proved that civilisations burn out and that ours is near its end”. “Or transformation”, Aherne corrected once more.» — Aherne corrige dos veces la afirmación sobre el fin de las civilizaciones, dentro de la misma escena

«I return to the desert in a few days with Owen Aherne and this lady chosen by divine wisdom for its guardian and bearer. When I have found the appointed place, Owen Aherne and I will dig a shallow hole where she must lay it and leave it to be hatched by the sun’s heat.» — el plan que Robartes anuncia: enterrar el huevo en el desierto para que lo incube el sol

«Denise whispered: “She has done very well, but Robartes should have asked me to hold it, for I am taller, and my training as a model would have helped”.» — Denise comenta la escena desde su propio oficio, y la ficción cierra el discurso con esa nota

«The first two compared with what I find in the diaries are sufficiently accurate. One has to allow of course for some condensation and heightening. “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” seems to have got the dates wrong, for according to the story Robartes told my brother, the Founder of the Judwali Sect, Kusta ben Luka, was a young or youngish man when Harun Al-Rashid died.54 However, poetic licence may still exist.» — el personaje juzga los poemas: los dos primeros bastante exactos, y el tercero con las fechas mal, porque Kusta ben Luka era joven cuando murió Harún al-Rashid

«Some thirty years ago you made “Rosa Alchemica”, “The Tables of the Law” and “The Adoration of the Magi”, out of “a slight incident”.» — el personaje fecha en un incidente menor el origen de los tres relatos de Yeats sobre Robartes

«He answered that when the candle was burnt out an honest man did not pretend that grease was flame.» — la respuesta que el personaje atribuye a Robartes sobre el estilo de aquellos relatos

«An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge; He and his friend, their faces to the South, Had trod the uneven road. Their boots were soiled, Their Connemara cloth worn out of shape;1 They had kept a steady pace as though their beds, Despite a dwindling and late-risen moon, Were distant still. An old man cocked his ear.» — arranca el poema, con los dos personajes en el puente y la torre iluminada al fondo

«We are on the bridge; that shadow is the tower, And the light proves that he is reading still.2 He has found, after the manner of his kind, Mere images; chosen this place to live in Because, it may be, of the candle-light From the far tower where Milton’s Platonist3 Sat late, or Shelley’s visionary prince:4 The lonely light that Samuel Palmer engraved,5 An image of mysterious wisdom won by toil; And now he seeks in book or manuscript What he shall never find.» — en el poema, Robartes describe al hombre de la torre que busca en libros lo que nunca hallará y que solo ha encontrado imágenes

«He wrote of me in that extravagant style He had learned from Pater, and to round his tale Said I was dead; and dead I choose to be.» — el Robartes del poema reclama su propia muerte literaria y la elige

«Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in; For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.» — el poema enuncia la cuenta básica del sistema: veintiocho fases y solo veintiséis cunas, porque no hay vida humana ni en la luna llena ni en la oscura

«From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure, and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast;» — el primer tramo de la rueda según el poema: el sueño solo convoca a la aventura y el hombre es feliz como animal

«But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim’s most difficult Among whims not impossible, and though scarred, As with the cat-o’-nine-tails of the mind, His body moulded from within his body Grows comelier.» — el segundo tramo: se sigue el capricho más difícil entre los no imposibles y el cuerpo, moldeado desde dentro, se hace más hermoso

«Eleven pass, and then Athena takes Achilles by the hair,9 Hector is in the dust,10 Nietzsche is born,11 Because the hero’s crescent is the twelfth.» — la fase doce como creciente del héroe, con Aquiles, Héctor y Nietzsche por ejemplos

«The thirteenth moon but sets the soul at war In its own being, and when that war’s begun There is no muscle in the arm; and after, Under the frenzy of the fourteenth moon, The soul begins to tremble into stillness, To die into the labyrinth of itself!» — las fases trece y catorce: guerra del alma consigo misma y temblor hacia la quietud, hasta morir en el propio laberinto

«All thought becomes an image and the soul Becomes a body: that body and that soul Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle, Too lonely for the traffic of the world: Body and soul cast out and cast away Beyond the visible world.» — la fase quince en el poema: todo pensamiento se hace imagen y el alma cuerpo, demasiado perfectos para una cuna

«It must be that the terror in their eyes Is memory or foreknowledge of the hour When all is fed with light and heaven is bare.» — Aherne, en el poema, adjudica al terror de esos ojos memoria o presciencia de la hora en que todo se llena de luz

«And after that the crumbling of the moon: The soul remembering its loneliness Shudders in many cradles; all is changed. It would be the world’s servant, and as it serves, Choosing whatever task’s most difficult Among tasks not impossible, it takes Upon the body and upon the soul The coarseness of the drudge.» — el descenso: el alma recuerda su soledad, se hace sierva del mundo y toma la tosquedad del bracero

«Because you are forgotten, half out of life, And never wrote a book, your thought is clear.15 Reformer, merchant, statesman, learned man, Dutiful husband, honest wife by turn, Cradle upon cradle, and all in flight and all Deformed, because there is no deformity But saves us from a dream.» — Robartes atribuye a Aherne claridad por olvidado y por no haber escrito libro, y enumera las cunas de la segunda mitad

«Hunchback and Saint and Fool are the last crescents.16 The burning bow that once could shoot an arrow Out of the up and down, the wagon-wheel Of beauty’s cruelty and wisdom’s chatter— Out of that raving tide—is drawn betwixt Deformity of body and of mind.» — los tres tipos de los últimos crecientes y el arco tendido entre deformidad del cuerpo y de la mente

«Were not our beds far off I’d ring the bell, Stand under the rough roof-timbers of the hall Beside the castle door, where all is stark Austerity, a place set out for wisdom That he will never find; I’d play a part; He would never know me after all these years But take me for some drunken country man; I’d stand and mutter there until he caught “Hunchback and Saint and Fool”, and that they came Under the three last crescents of the moon, And then I’d stagger out. He’d crack his wits Day after day, yet never find the meaning.» — Aherne imagina entrar en la torre disfrazado de borracho para soltar las tres palabras y dejar al hombre de la torre devanándose los sesos

«And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard Should be so simple—a bat rose from the hazels And circled round him with its squeaky cry, The light in the tower window was put out.» — el cierre del poema, con el murciélago y la luz apagada

«The Great Wheel1 from the Speculum Angelorum et Hominum» — el pie de la lámina de la Gran Rueda, que la sigue atribuyendo al Speculum

«When Discord”, writes Empedocles, “has fallen into the lowest depths of the vortex”— the extreme bound, not the centre, Burnet points out—“Concord has reached the centre, into it do all things come together so as to be only one, not all at once but gradually from different quarters, and as they come Discord retires to the extreme boundary . . . in proportion as it runs out Concord in a soft immortal boundless stream runs in.”» — Yeats abre el Libro I con Empédocles: cuando la Discordia llega al límite extremo, la Concordia ocupa el centro, y la acotación de Burnet sobre qué es ese fondo

«And again: “Never will boundless time be emptied of that pair; and they prevail in turn as that circle comes round, and pass away before one another and increase in their appointed turn”.» — el segundo pasaje de Empédocles: los dos principios prevalecen por turnos mientras el círculo gira

«It was this Discord or War that Heraclitus called “God of all and Father of all, some it has made gods and some men, some bond and some free”, and I recall that Love and War came from the eggs of Leda.» — Yeats enlaza esa Discordia con el dios y padre de todo de Heráclito y con los huevos de Leda

«According to Simplicius,I a late commentator upon Aristotle, the Concord of Empedocles fabricates all things into “an homogeneous sphere”,4 and then Discord separates the elements and so makes the world we inhabit, but even the sphere formed by Concord is not the changeless eternity, for Concord or Love but offers us the image of that which is changeless.» — Yeats acota el alcance de la esfera: aun formada por la Concordia no es la eternidad inmutable, solo su imagen

«If we think of the vortex attributed to Discord as formed by circles diminishing until they are nothing, and of the opposing sphere attributed to Concord as forming from itself an opposing vortex, the apex of each vortex in the middle of the other’s base, we have the fundamental symbol of my instructors.» — Yeats construye el símbolo fundamental que atribuye a sus instructores: dos vórtices con el ápice de cada uno en el centro de la base del otro

«If I call the unshaded cone “Discord” and the other “Concord” and think of each as the bound of a gyre, I see that the gyre of “Concord” diminishes as that of “Discord” increases, and can imagine after that the gyre of “Concord” increasing while that of “Discord” diminishes, and so on, one gyre within the other always. Here the thought of Heraclitus dominates all: “Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death”.» — el movimiento alternado de los dos gyres, con la fórmula de Heráclito por remate

«The first gyres clearly described by philosophy are those described in the Timaeus which are made by the circuits of “the Other” (creators of all particular things), of the planets as they ascend or descend above or below the equator. They are opposite in nature to that circle of the fixed stars which constitutes “the Same” and confers upon us the knowledge of Universals.» — Yeats sitúa en el Timeo la primera descripción filosófica de los gyres, con lo Otro y lo Mismo repartidos entre planetas y estrellas fijas

«Alcmaeon, a pupil of Pythagoras, thought that men die because they cannot join their beginning and their end.8 Their serpent has not its tail in its mouth.» — la explicación de la muerte que Yeats atribuye a Alcmeón: los hombres mueren porque no pueden juntar su principio con su fin

«He has also found me passages in Dr. Dee,13 in Macrobius,14 in an unknown mediaeval writer, which describe souls changing from gyre to sphere and from sphere to gyre.» — y los pasajes sobre almas que pasan del gyre a la esfera, en Dee, en Macrobio y en un autor medieval sin nombre

«Gyres are occasionally alluded to, but left unexplored, in Swedenborg’s mystical writings. In the Principia, a vast scientific work written before his mystical life, he describes the double cone. All physical reality, the universe as a whole, every solar system, every atom, is a double cone; where there are “two poles one opposite to the other, these two poles have the form of cones”.» — Yeats sitúa el doble cono en los Principia de Swedenborg, obra científica anterior a su vida mística

«I am not concerned with his explanation of how these cones have evolved from the point and the sphere, nor with his arguments to prove that they govern all the movements of the planets, for I think, as did Swedenborg in his mystical writings, that the forms of geometry can have but a symbolic relation to spaceless reality, Mundus Intelligibilis.» — y acota qué toma de ahí: no la evolución de esos conos ni su gobierno de los planetas, porque las formas de la geometría solo pueden guardar relación simbólica con una realidad sin espacio

«Flaubert is the only writer known to me who has so used the double cone. He talked much of writing a story called “La Spirale”. He died before he began it, but something of his talk about it has been collected and published.18 It would have described a man whose dreams during sleep grew in magnificence as his life grew more and more unlucky, the wreck of some love affair coinciding with his marriage to a dream princess.» — el único uso literario del doble cono que Yeats reconoce: el relato que Flaubert no llegó a escribir

«A line is a movement without extension, and so symbolical of time— subjectivity—Berkeley’s stream of ideas—in PlotinusIV it is apparently “sensation”—and a plane cutting it at right angles is symbolical of space or objectivity.» — las equivalencias con que Yeats fija el simbolismo: la línea es tiempo y subjetividad, el plano perpendicular espacio y objetividad

«Line and plane are combined in a gyre which must expand or contract according to whether mind grows in objectivity or subjectivity.» — y el gyre como combinación de las dos, que se expande o se contrae según crezca la objetividad o la subjetividad

«When the moon’s full those creatures of the full Are met on the waste hills by country men Who shudder and hurry by: body and soul Estranged amid the strangeness of themselves, Caught up in contemplation, the mind’s eye Fixed upon images that once were thought, For separate, perfect,13 and immovable Images can break the solitude» — Robartes describe en el poema el encuentro con las criaturas de la luna llena, con la mirada fija en imágenes que antes fueron pensamiento; el verso sigue en la plana siguiente

«AHERNE Before the full It sought itself and afterwards the world.» — la fórmula con que Aherne resume el eje del poema

«Because all dark, like those that are all light, They are cast beyond the verge, and in a cloud, Crying to one another like the bats; But having no desire they cannot tell What’s good or bad, or what it is to triumph At the perfection of one’s own obedience; And yet they speak what’s blown into the mind;» — las fases finales del poema: sin deseo no pueden distinguir el bien del mal y solo dicen lo que se les sopla en la mente

«My instructors used this single cone or vortex once or twice but soon changed it for a double cone or vortex, preferring to consider subjectivity and objectivity as intersecting states struggling one against the other.» — Yeats consigna el cambio de sus instructores del cono único al doble, para tratar subjetividad y objetividad como estados que se atraviesan y pugnan

«In what I call the cone of the Four Faculties which are what man has made in a past or present life—I shall speak later of what makes man—the subjective cone is called that of the antithetical tincture because it is achieved and defended by continual conflict with its opposite; the objective cone is called that of the primary tincture because whereas subjectivity—in Empedocles “Discord” as I think—tends to separate man from man, objectivity brings us back to the mass where we begin.» — los nombres de las dos tinturas y su razón: la antithetical se logra y defiende en conflicto continuo con su opuesta, y la primary devuelve a la masa de donde se parte

«I had suggested the word tincture, a common word in Boehme,22 and my instructors took the word antithetical from Per Amica Silentia Lunae.» — Yeats declara el origen de los dos términos: tincture lo propuso él, tomándolo de Boehme, y antithetical lo tomaron sus instructores de un libro suyo anterior

«I had never read Hegel, but my mind had been full of Blake from boyhood up and I saw the world as a conflict—Spectre and Emanation—and could distinguish between a contrary and a negation. “Contraries are positive”, wrote Blake, “a negation is not a contrary”, “How great the gulph between simplicity and insipidity”, and again, “There is a place at the bottom of the graves where contraries are equally true”.» — Yeats niega deuda con Hegel y la reconoce con Blake, de quien toma la distinción entre contrario y negación

«I had never put the conflict in logical form,VI never thought with Hegel that the two ends of the see-saw are one another’s negation, nor that the spring vegetables were refuted when over.» — y acota qué no sostiene: que los dos extremos del balancín sean negación uno del otro, ni que el fin de las verduras de primavera valga por una objeción contra ellas

«The cones of the tinctures mirror reality but are in themselves pursuit and illusion. As will be presently seen, the sphere is reality.» — Yeats niega realidad a los conos y la reserva para la esfera

«By the antithetical cone, which is left unshaded in my diagram, we express more and more, as it broadens, our inner world of desire and imagination, whereas by the primary, the shaded cone, we express more and more, as it broadens, that objectivity of mind which, in the words of Murray’s Dictionary, lays “stress upon that which is external to the mind” or treats “of outward things and events rather than of inward thought” or seeks “to exhibit the actual facts, not coloured by the opinions or feelings”.» — Yeats define la objetividad tomando la definición de un diccionario, no del sistema

«The antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic whereas the primary tincture is reasonable and moral. Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate.» — el reparto de las dos tinturas y los nombres de las cuatro Faculties

«It will be enough until I have explained the geometrical diagrams in detail to describe Will and Mask as the will and its object, or the Is and the Ought (or that which should be), Creative Mind and Body of Fate as thought and its object, or the Knower and the Known, and to say that the first two are lunar or antithetical or natural, the second two solar or primary or reasonable.» — las definiciones provisionales de las cuatro Faculties: voluntad y su objeto, pensamiento y su objeto, el Is y el Ought, el que conoce y lo conocido

«A particular man is classified according to the place of Will, or choice, in the diagram. At first sight there are only two Faculties, because only two of the four, Will and Creative Mind, are active, but it will be presently seen that the Faculties can be represented by two opposing cones so drawn that the Will of the one is the Mask of the other, the Creative Mind of the one the Body of Fate of the other. Everything that wills can be desired, resisted or accepted, every creative act can be seen as fact, every Faculty is alternately shield and sword.» — la regla de clasificación —el lugar del Will— y la simetría por la que el Will de un cono es la Mask del otro

«These pairs of opposites whirl in contrary directions, Will and Mask from right to left, Creative Mind and Body of Fate like the hands of a clock, from left to right.» — el sentido de giro de cada par

«The diagram is sometimes so used by my instructors and gives them a phrase which constantly occurs, “the interchange of the tinctures”, but it is inconvenient.» — de ese modo de representarlo sale la frase que Yeats dice oír a cada paso, el intercambio de las tinturas, y él la declara incómoda

«These movements are but a convenient pictorial summary of what is more properly a double movement of two gyres.» — Yeats acota el estatuto de esas figuras: resumen pictórico cómodo de un movimiento doble

«These gyres move not only forward to the primary and antithetical expansion, but have their own circular movement, the gyre of Will from right to left, that of Creative Mind from left to right.» — y añade el movimiento circular propio de cada gyre, además del avance

«The Mask and Body of Fate occupy those positions which are most opposite in character to the positions of Will and Creative Mind.» — la posición de Mask y Body of Fate respecto de las otras dos Faculties

«I have now only to set a row of numbers upon the sides to possess a classification, as I will show presently, of every possible movement of thought and of life, and I have been told to make these numbers correspond to the phases of the moon, including among them full moon and the moonless night when the moon is nearest to the sun.» — Yeats declara recibida la instrucción de hacer corresponder esos números con las fases de la luna

«The last phase is Phase 28, and the twenty-eight phases constitute a month of which each day and night constitute an incarnation and the discarnate period which follows.» — la unidad que forman las veintiocho fases: un mes en que cada día y cada noche son una encarnación y el periodo desencarnado que la sigue

«Phase 1 and Phase 1531 are not human incarnations because human life is impossible without strife between the tinctures.» — la razón por la que las fases 1 y 15 no son encarnaciones humanas

«Even when I wrote the first edition of this book I thought the geometrical symbolism so difficult, I understood it so little, that I put it off to a later section; and as I had at that time, for a reason I have explained, to use a romantic setting, I described the Great Wheel as danced on the desert sands by mysterious dancers who left the traces of their feet to puzzle the Caliph of Bagdad and his learned men.» — Yeats explica por qué 1925 aplazó el simbolismo geométrico y lo envolvió en la ficción de los bailarines del desierto

«I tried to interest my readers in an unexplained rule of thumb that somehow explained the world.» — y describe lo que ofrecía entonces al lector: una regla empírica sin explicar

«has shape or magnitude, whereas our thoughts and emotions have duration and quality, a thought recurs or is habitual, a lecture or a musical composition is measured upon the clock.» — la continuación en la plana siguiente: lo objetivo tiene forma y magnitud, y el pensamiento duración y cualidad

«At the same time pure time and pure space, pure subjectivity and pure objectivity—the plane at the bottom of the cone and the point at its apex—are abstractions or figments of the mind.» — Yeats declara abstracciones tanto el tiempo puro como el espacio puro: el plano del fondo del cono y el punto de su ápice

«Then, as though satiated by the extreme expansion of its cone, Will lets Creative Mind dominate, and is dragged by it until Creative Mind weakens once more. As Creative Mind, let us say, is dragged by Will towards the utmost expansion of its antithetical cone it is more and more contaminated by Will, while Will frees itself from contamination.» — la continuación: Will deja dominar a Creative Mind y la contaminación se invierte

«At Phases 15 and 1 respectively, the antithetical and primary tinctures come to a climax.» — las fases en que cada tintura llega a su punto máximo

«During the first months of instruction I had the Great Wheel of the lunar phases as printed at the end of this paragraph, but knew nothing of the cones that explain it, and though I had abundant definitions and descriptions of the Faculties at their different stations, did not know why they passed one another at certain points» — Yeats consigna el orden en que le llegó la enseñanza: primero la rueda y las definiciones, sin los conos que las explican

«This wheel is every completed movement of thought or life, twenty-eight incarnations, a single incarnation, a single judgment or act of thought.» — Yeats declara la rueda aplicable por igual a las veintiocho encarnaciones, a una sola y a un solo juicio o acto de pensamiento

«Man seeks his opposite or the opposite of his condition, attains his object so far as it is attainable, at Phase 15 and returnsVII to Phase 1 again.» — la ley básica del movimiento: se busca lo opuesto, se alcanza cuanto es alcanzable en la fase 15 y se vuelve a la 1

«Phase 15 is called Sun in Moon because the solar or primary tincture is consumed by the lunar, but from another point of view it is Mask consumed in Will; all is beauty. The Mask as it were wills itself as beauty, but because, as Plotinus says, things that are of one kind are unconscious, it is an ideal or supernatural incarnation.» — la fase 15 y su nombre, con la razón por la que Yeats la llama encarnación ideal o sobrenatural, tomada de Plotino

«Phase 1 is called Moon in Sun because the lunar or antithetical tincture is consumed in the primary or solar, but from another point of view it is the Body of Fate consumed in Creative Mind; man is submissive and plastic: unless where supersensual power intervenes, the steel-like plasticity of water where the last ripple has been smoothed away.» — la fase 1 y su nombre, con la imagen del agua sin la última onda

«All unity is from the Mask, and the antithetical Mask is described in the automatic script as a “form created by passion to unite us to ourselves”, the self so sought is that Unity of Being compared by Dante in the Convito to that of “a perfectly proportioned human body”.» — la definición de la Mask que Yeats atribuye al guion automático —forma creada por la pasión para unirnos a nosotros mismos— y la Unidad del Ser que Dante compara con un cuerpo bien proporcionado

«The Body of Fate is the sum, not the unity, of fact, fact as it affects a particular man.» — la definición del Body of Fate: suma y no unidad de hechos

«Only by the pursuit or acceptance of its direct opposite, that object of desire or moral ideal which is of all possible things the most difficult, and by forcing that form upon the Body of Fate, can it attain self-knowledge and expression.» — la única vía de autoconocimiento que el sistema le deja: perseguir o aceptar lo más difícil de todo e imponerle esa forma al Body of Fate

«Phase 8 and Phase 22 are phases of struggle and tragedy, the first a struggle to find personality, the second to lose it.» — las dos fases de lucha y tragedia, y su sentido opuesto

«All such abstract statements are, however, misleading, for we are dealing always with a particular man, the man of Phase 13 or Phase 17 let us say. The Four Faculties are not the abstract categories of philosophy, being the result of the four memories of the Daimon or ultimate self of that man. His Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon’s memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas—or universals—displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives.» — Yeats deriva las cuatro Faculties de las cuatro memorias del Daimon y las niega como categorías abstractas de la filosofía

«When I wish for some general idea which will describe the Great Wheel as an individual life I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte or improvised drama of Italy.39 The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or rôle as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot.» — la analogía con la commedia dell’arte: el Daimon como director que da guion y papel, y el actor que improvisa con su Creative Mind

«He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort, when his muscles are as it were all taut and all his energies active. But this is antithetical man.» — y su límite: eso vale para el hombre antithetical

«For primary man I go to the Commedia dell’ Arte in its decline.40 The Will is weak and cannot create a rôle, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon. It has perhaps no object but to move the crowd, and if it “gags” it is that there may be plenty of topical allusions.» — para el hombre primary, Yeats va a la misma comedia en decadencia, con el clown heredado y las alusiones de actualidad

«In the primary phases man must cease to desire Mask and Image by ceasing from self-expression, and substitute a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask; and when he recognises this, his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind.» — lo que el sistema pide en las fases primary: dejar la autoexpresión por el servicio y cambiar la Mask creada por una imitativa

«The Mask before Phase 15 is described as a “revelation” because through it the being obtains knowledge of itself, sees itself in personality; while after Phase 15 it is a “concealment”, for the being grows incoherent, vague and broken, as its intellect (Creative Mind) is more and more concerned with objects that have no relation to its unity but a relation to the unity of society or of material things known through the Body of Fate.» — la Mask cambia de función en la mitad de la rueda: revelación antes de la fase 15 y ocultamiento después

«The being of antithetical man is described as full of rage before Phase 12, against all in the world that hinders its expression, after Phase 12, but before Phase 15, the rage is a knife turned against itself. After Phase 15, but before Phase 19, the being is full of phantasy, a continual escape from and yet acknowledgment of all that allures in the world, a continual playing with all that must engulf it.» — el reparto de la rabia y la fantasía por tramos de fases, con el cuchillo vuelto contra sí mismo entre la 12 y la 15

«The primary is that which serves, the antithetical is that which creates.» — la fórmula más corta de la oposición

«At Phase 8 is the “Discovery of Strength”, its embodiment in sensuality.44 The imitation that held it to the enforced Mask, the norm of the race now a hated convention, has ceased and its own norm has not begun. Primary and antithetical are equal and fight for mastery; and when this fight is ended through the conviction of weakness and the preparation for rage, the Mask becomes once more voluntary.» — la fase 8 como descubrimiento de la fuerza, con las dos tinturas en igualdad y en pugna

«At Phase 22 is the “Breaking of Strength”, for here the being makes its last attempt to impose its personality upon the world before the Mask becomes enforced once more, character substituted for personality.» — la fase 22 como quebranto de la fuerza y último intento de imponer la personalidad al mundo

«To these two phases, perhaps to all phases, the being may return up to four times, my instructors say, before it can pass on. It is claimed, however, that four times is the utmost possible.» — el número de retornos que los instructores permiten a una misma fase

«By being is understood that which divides into Four Faculties, by individuality the Will analysed in relation to itself, by personality the Will analysed in relation to the free Mask, by character Will analysed in relation to the enforced Mask.» — las definiciones de ser, individualidad, personalidad y carácter según el modo de analizar el Will

«In the last phases, Phases 26, 27 and 28, the Faculties wear away, grow transparent, and man may see himself as it were arrayed against the supersensual» — las tres fases finales, donde las Faculties se desgastan y se vuelven transparentes

«The Will looks into a painted picture, the Creative Mind looks into a photograph, but both look into something that is the opposite of themselves.» — la imagen con que Yeats distingue las dos Faculties activas: cuadro frente a fotografía

«The picture is chosen, the photograph is fated, because by Fate and Necessity—for I need both words—is understood that which comes from without, whereas the Mask is predestined, Destiny being that which comes to us from within.» — y la distinción entre Fate o Necessity, que viene de fuera, y Destiny, que viene de dentro

«When the Will predominates the Mask or Image is “sensuous”; when Creative Mind predominates it is “abstract”, when Mask predominates it is “idealised”, when Body of Fate predominates it is “concrete”.» — los cuatro adjetivos que la Mask recibe según cuál Faculty predomine

«The automatic script defines “sensuous” in an unexpected way. An object is sensuous if I relate it to myself, “my fire, my chair, my sensation”, whereas “a fire, a chair, a sensation”, are all concrete or appertain to the Body of Fate; while “the fire, the chair, the sensation”, because they are looked upon as representative of their kind, are “abstract”.» — la definición de sensuous que Yeats atribuye al guion automático, hecha con los determinantes: mi fuego, un fuego, el fuego

«The descriptions should not be considered as exhaustive but as suggestions to call into imagination the Four Faculties at any particular phase.» — Yeats acota el estatuto de sus propias tablas: sugerencias para llamar la imaginación, no descripciones exhaustivas

«They were written in the automatic script sometimes two or three, sometimes eight or nine at a time. Even now after years of use I could not re-create them if the Table were lost.» — Yeats declara que no podría rehacer esas descripciones si se perdiera la tabla

«I should say they proved a use more prolonged than my own did I not remember that the creators of the script claim a rapidity of thought impossible to our minds. I think of the elaborate pictures one sees between sleeping and waking and often showing powers of design and invention that would have taken hours of an artist’s time.» — y explica esa productividad por la rapidez de pensamiento que los creadores del guion reclaman, comparándola con las imágenes del duermevela

«At Phases 11 and 12 occurs what is called the opening of the tinctures, at Phase 11 the antithetical opens, at Phase 12 the primary. A cone is for the moment substituted for the wheel, a gyre encircles the cone, ascending or descending, which completes its journey round the cone, while the larger movement completes a phase.45 The opening means the reflection inward of the Four Faculties: all are as it were mirrored in personality, Unity of Being becomes possible.» — la apertura de las tinturas en las fases 11 y 12, con las cuatro Faculties reflejadas hacia dentro

«At Phases 25 and 26 there is a new opening, and at Phases 4 and 5 a new closing, but this time the tinctures open not into personality but into its negation, the whole objectively perceived.» — la segunda apertura, que no da en personalidad sino en su negación

«During this spiritual objectivity, or spiritual primary, the Faculties “wear thin”, the Principles, which are, when evoked from the point of view of the Faculties, a sphere, shine through.» — en la objetividad espiritual las Faculties se adelgazan y los Principles traslucen

«At Phase 15 and Phase 1 occurs what is called the interchange of the tinctures, those thoughts, emotions, energies, which were primary before Phase 15 or Phase 1 are antithetical after, those that were antithetical are primary.» — el intercambio de las tinturas en las dos fases de crisis

«I was told, for instance, that before the historical Phase 15 the antithetical tincture of the average European was dominated by reason and desire, the primary by race and emotion, and that after Phase 15 this was reversed, his subjective nature had been passionate and logical but was now enthusiastic and sentimental.» — el ejemplo histórico que Yeats declara haber recibido, con el europeo medio antes y después de la fase 15 histórica

«I have made little use of this interchange in my account of the twenty-eight incarnations because when I wrote it I did not understand the relation between the change and Unity of Being.» — Yeats declara no haber usado ese intercambio en su relato de las encarnaciones, y da la razón: no entendía su relación con la Unidad del Ser

«Every phase is in itself a wheel; the individual soul is awakened by a violent oscillation (one thinks of Verlaine oscillating between the church and the brothel) until it sinks in on that Whole where the contraries are united, the antinomies resolved.» — cada fase es a su vez una rueda, y el alma se despierta por oscilación violenta hasta hundirse en el Todo donde los contrarios se unen

«When the Will is in antithetical phases the True Mask is the effect of Creative Mind of opposite phase upon that phase; and the False Mask is the effect of Body of Fate of opposite phase upon that phase.» — la regla para hallar Mask verdadera y falsa en las fases antithetical

«The True Mask of Phase 17, for instance, is “Simplification through intensity”, derived from Phase 3, modified by the Creative Mind of that phase, which is described as “Simplicity” and comes from Phase 27, which is that of the Saint.» — el ejemplo con que Yeats aplica esa regla a la fase 17

«The False Mask of Phase 17 is “Dispersal”, derived from Phase 3, modified by the Body of Fate of the phase which comes from Phase 13 and is described as “Interest”. It will be found that this word describes with great accuracy the kind of “Dispersal” which weakens men of Phase 17 when they try to live in the primary tincture.» — y el reverso: la dispersión que debilita a los hombres de la fase 17 cuando tratan de vivir en la tintura primary

«In an antithetical phase the being seeks by the help of the Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from Body of Fate. In a primary phase the being seeks by the help of the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask.» — las dos reglas breves con que Yeats resume el uso de la tabla

«The Body of Fate of any particular phase is the effect of the whole nature of its Body of Fate phase upon that particular phase. As, however, the Body of Fate is always primary it is in sympathy with the primary phase while it opposes the antithetical phase; in this it is the reverse of the Mask, which is sympathetic to an antithetical phase but opposes a» — la regla del Body of Fate y su simetría inversa con la Mask

«Excluding the four phases of crisis (Phases 8, 22, 15, 1), each quarter consists of six phases, or of two sets of three. In every case the first phase of each set can be described as a manifestation of power, the second of a code or arrangement of powers, and the third of a belief, the belief being an appreciation of, or submission to some quality which becomes power in the next phase. The reason of this is that each set of three is itself a wheel, and has the same character as the Great Wheel.» — la subdivisión de cada cuarto en dos tercias de poder, código y creencia, y la razón: cada terna es a su vez una rueda

«The Phases 1 to 8 are associated with elemental earth, being phases of germination and sprouting; those between Phase 8 and Phase 15 with elemental water, because there the image-making power is at its height; those between Phase 15 and Phase 22 with elemental air, because through air, or space, things are divided from one another, and here intellect is at its height; those between Phase 22 and Phase 1 with elemental fire, because here all things are made simple.» — el reparto de los cuatro elementos por cuartos de la rueda, cada uno con su razón

«The Will is strongest in the first quarter, Mask in second, Creative Mind in third, and the Body of Fate in fourth.» — y el reparto de las cuatro Faculties por cuartos

«The being becomes conscious of itself as a separate being, because of certain facts of Opposition and Discord, the emotional Opposition of Will and Mask, the intellectual Opposition of Creative Mind and Body of Fate, Discords between Will and Creative Mind, Creative Mind and Mask, Mask and Body of Fate, Body of Fate and Will.» — la consciencia de sí nace de las Oposiciones y las Discordias, que Yeats enumera una por una

«There is an enforced attraction between Opposites, for the Will has a natural desire for the Mask and the Creative Mind a natural perception of the Body of Fate; in one the dog bays the Moon,50 in the other the eagle stares on the Sun by natural right.» — la atracción forzada entre Opuestos, con el perro que ladra a la luna y el águila que mira al sol

«On the other hand, it may be the Mask that slips on to the Body of Fate till we confuse what we would be with what we must be.» — la confusión inversa: la Mask deslizada sobre el Body of Fate, y lo que se querría ser confundido con lo que se ha de ser

«Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for “desire”.» — Yeats declara la Deception término técnico de sus maestros y la propone como sustituto de deseo

«Life is an endeavour, made vain by the four sails of its mill, to come to a double contemplation, that of the chosen Image, that of the fated Image.» — la definición de la vida que el sistema propone: empeño que las cuatro aspas del molino hacen vano

«The Four Perfections can only be understood when their phases are studied in detail; it will be obvious for instance that self-sacrifice must be the typical virtue of phases where instinct or race is predominant, and especially in those three phases that come before reflection.» — Yeats acota que las Cuatro Perfecciones solo se entienden por sus fases, y da el sacrificio de sí como virtud típica de las fases del instinto

«Automatonism in antithetical phases arises from the Mask and Creative Mind, when separated from the Body of Fate and Will, through refusal of, or rest from conflict; and in primary phases from the Body of Fate and Will, when weary of the struggle for complete primary existence or when they refuse that struggle.» — el origen del Automatonism en cada mitad de la rueda

«It does not necessarily mean that the man is not true to phase or, as it is said, out of phase; the most powerful natures are precisely those who most often need Automatonism as a rest.» — y su acotación: el automatismo como descanso no saca de fase, y las naturalezas más poderosas son las que más lo necesitan

«It is perhaps an element in our enjoyment of art and literature, being awakened in our minds by rhythm and by pattern.» — Yeats conjetura que el automatismo interviene en el goce del arte, despertado por el ritmo y el patrón

«Each Faculty is placed after the number of the phase where it is formed, not after the phase which it affects.» — la advertencia de lectura con que Yeats encabeza la tabla de las cuatro Faculties

«26. The multiple man also called The Hunchback. True. Self-exaggeration. False. Self-abandonment. True. First perception of character. False. Mutilation. Enforced disillusionment.» — la fila de la tabla correspondiente a la fase 26, con el hombre múltiple llamado también el Jorobado; se conserva la disposición en columnas tal como la imprime el troceo

«27. The Saint. True. Self-expression. False. Self-absorption. True. Simplicity. False. Abstraction. Enforced loss.» — la fila de la fase 27, el Santo

«28. The Fool. True. Serenity. False. Self-distrust. True. Hope. False. Moroseness. Enforced illusion.» — la fila de la fase 28, el Loco, última de la tabla

«FOUR PERFECTIONS At P. 2, P. 3, P. 4 . Self-sacrifice At P. 13 . . Self-knowledge At P. 16, P. 17, P. 18 . Unity of Being At P. 27» — las Cuatro Perfecciones repartidas por fases: sacrificio de sí, conocimiento de sí, Unidad del Ser y santidad

«FOUR CONTESTS At P. 1 . . Moral At P. 8 . . Emotional At P. 15 . . Physical At P. 22 . . Spiritual or supersensual» — los Cuatro Combates asignados a las cuatro fases de crisis: moral, emocional, físico y espiritual

«RAGE, FANTASY, ETC. From P. 8 to P. 12 . Rage From P. 12 to P. 15 . Spiritual or supersensual Rage From P. 15 to P. 19 . Fantasy From P. 19 to P. 22» — el reparto de rabia, rabia supersensual, fantasía y poder por tramos de fases

«Note.—In primary phases these defects separate Mask from Body of Fate, in antithetical, Creative Mind from Body of Fate.» — la nota que acompaña a la tabla de los defectos de la Creative Mind falsa

«ELEMENTAL ATTRIBUTIONS Earth . . . First quarter Water . . . Second quarter Air . . . Third quarter Fire . . . Fourth quarter» — la atribución elemental por cuartos, dispuesta en columnas

«THREE ENERGIES Images from self give emotion. Images from world give passion. Images from the supersensual give will.» — las tres energías según la procedencia de la imagen

«In primary phases the Mask and Will are enforced, the Creative Mind and Body of Fate free. In antithetical phases the Creative Mind and Body of Fate are enforced and the Mask and Will free.» — el reparto de Faculties libres y forzadas en cada mitad de la rueda

«THE TWO CONDITIONS Primary means democratic. Antithetical means aristocratic.» — la traducción política que el propio Yeats da a las dos tinturas

«THE TWO DIRECTIONS Phase 1 to Phase 15 is towards Nature. Phase 15 to Phase 1 is towards God.» — las dos direcciones de la rueda: hacia la Naturaleza y hacia Dios

«OBJECTIVITIES From Phase 23 to Phase 25 is Physical Objectivity. From Phase 26 to Phase 28 is Spiritual Objectivity.» — el reparto de objetividad física y espiritual en las fases finales

«As will be seen, when late phases are described, every achievement of a being, after Phase 22, is an elimination of the individual intellect and a discovery of the moral life. When the individual intellect lingers on, it is arrogance, self-assertion, a sterile abstraction, for the being is forced by the growing primary tincture to accept first the service of, and later on absorption in, the primary Whole, a sensual or supersensual objectivity.» — lo que el sistema pide después de la fase 22: eliminar el intelecto individual y descubrir la vida moral

«When the old antithetical becomes the new primary, moral feeling is changed into an organisation of experience which must in its turn seek a unity, the whole of experience. When the old primary becomes the new antithetical, the old realisation of an objective moral law is changed into a subconscious turbulent instinct. The world of rigid custom and law is broken up by “the uncontrollable mystery upon the bestial floor”.» — el efecto del intercambio de tinturas sobre la ley moral, rematado con un verso propio sobre el misterio incontrolable en el suelo bestial

«Phase 1 not being human can better be described after Phase 28. None of those phases where the tinctures open into the Whole, except Phase 27, produce character of sufficient distinctiveness to become historical.» — Yeats acota qué fases no dan carácter suficientemente distintivo para hacerse históricas

«When the man lives out of phase and desires the Mask, and so permits it to dominate the Creative Mind, he copies the emotional explosion of Phase 16 in so far as difference of phase permits. He gives himself to a violent animal assertion and can only destroy; strike right and left. Incapable of sharing the spiritual absorption of Phase 28, his Creative Mind fills him with ignorance and gloom.» — el hombre de la fase 2 fuera de fase: asertividad animal que solo destruye

«But if he live according to phase, he uses the Body of Fate to clear the intellect of the influence of the Mask. He frees himself from emotion; and the Body of Fate, derived from Phase 14, pushes back the mind into its own supersensual impulse, until it grows obedient to all that recurs, and the Mask, now entirely enforced, is a rhythmical impulse.» — y en fase: se libra de la emoción y la Mask, ya del todo forzada, se vuelve impulso rítmico

«He gives himself up to Nature as the Fool (Phase 28) gave himself to God. He is neither immoral nor violent but innocent; is as it were the breath stirring on the face of the deep;59 the smile on the face of a but half-awakened child.» — la simetría entre la fase 2 y la 28, y las imágenes con que Yeats la describe

«Nobody of our age has, it may be, met him, certainly no record of such meeting exists, but, were such meeting possible, he would be remembered as a form of joy, for he would seem more entirely living than all other men, a personification or summing up of all natural life.» — Yeats declara que nadie de esta edad lo ha encontrado y que no hay registro de tal encuentro

«Here, as at Phase 16, the ordinary condition is sometimes reversed, and instead of ugliness, otherwise characteristic of this as of all primary phases, there is beauty. The new antithetical tincture (the old primary reborn) is violent. A new birth, when the product of an extreme contrast in the past life of the individual, is sometimes so violent that lacking foreign admixture it forestalls its ultimate physical destiny. It forces upon the primary and upon itself a beautiful form. It has the muscular balance and force of an animal good-humour with all appropriate comeliness as in the Dancing Faun.» — la excepción de belleza en una fase primary, explicada por un contraste extremo en la vida anterior

«Seen by those lyrical poets who draw their Masks from early phases, the man of Phase 2 is transfigured. Weary of an energy that defines and judges, weary of intellectual self-expression, they desire some “concealment”, some transcendent intoxication.» — cómo ven esa fase los poetas líricos que toman su Mask de las fases tempranas

«The Image is a myth, a woman, a landscape, or anything whatsoever that is an external expression of the Mask.» — la definición de Image que Yeats da al paso

«If on the other hand he uses his Body of Fate to purify his Creative Mind of the Mask, if he is content to permit his senses and his subconscious nature to dominate his intellect, he takes delight in all that passes; but because he claims nothing of his own, chooses nothing, thinks that no one thing is better than another, he will not endure a pang because all passes.» — y en fase: no reclama nada propio y por eso no sufre por lo que pasa

«Seen by lyrical poets, of whom so many have belonged to the fantastic Phase 17, the man of this phase becomes an Image where simplicity and intensity are united, he seems to move among yellowing corn or under overhanging grapes. He gave to Landor his shepherds and hamadryads,64 to Morris his Water of the Wondrous Isles,65 to Shelley his wandering lovers and sages,66 and to Theocritus all his flocks and pastures;67 and of what else did Bembo think when he cried, “Would that I were a shepherd that I might look daily down upon Urbino”?68 Imagined in some antithetical mind, seasonal change and bodily sanity seem images of lasting passion and the body’s beauty.» — Yeats sitúa en la fase 3 la fuente de los pastores y hamadríades de Landor, del agua de las islas maravillosas de Morris y de los rebaños de Teócrito

«When out of phase he attempts antithetical wisdom (for reflection has begun), separates himself from instinct (hence “mutilation”), and tries to enforce upon himself and others all kinds of abstract or conventional ideas which are for him, being outside his experience, mere make-believe. Lacking antithetical capacity, and primary observation, he is aimless and blundering, possesses nothing except the knowledge that there is something known to others that is not mere instinct.» — la fase 4 fuera de fase: la separación del instinto que Yeats llama mutilación

«True to phase, his interest in everything that happens, in all that excites his instinct (“search”), is so keen that he has no desire to claim anything for his own will; nature still dominates his thought as passion; yet instinct grows reflective.» — y en fase: interés tan agudo por lo que ocurre que no reclama nada para su propia voluntad

«He has “the wisdom of instinct”, a wisdom perpetually excited by all those hopes and needs which concern his well-being or that of the race (Creative Mind from Phase 12 and so acting from whatever in race corresponds to personality unified in thought).» — la sabiduría del instinto, excitada por lo que atañe al bienestar propio o de la raza

«Since Phase 26 the primary tincture has so predominated, man is so sunk in Fate, in life, that there is no reflection, no experience, because that which reflects, that which acquires experience, has been drowned. Man cannot think of himself as separate from that which he sees with the bodily eye or in the mind’s eye.» — Yeats describe el tramo en que no hay reflexión ni experiencia porque lo que reflejaría se ha ahogado

«He neither loves nor hates though he may be in hatred or in love.» — la distinción con que lo formula

«Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles (a woman of Phase 3 reflected in an antithetical mind) falls in love with her friend’s lover and he with her. There is great sorrow but no struggle, her decision to disappear is sudden as if compelled by some power over which she has no control. Has she not perhaps but decided as her unknown fathers and mothers compelled, but conformed to the lineaments of her race?» — Yeats lee un personaje de Morris como mujer de la fase 3 reflejada en una mente antithetical, y su decisión repentina como conformidad a los rasgos de su raza

«Every achievement of their souls, Phase 1 being passed, springs up out of the body, and their work is to substitute for a life where all is Fate frozen into rule and custom, a life where all is fused by instinct; with them to hunger, to taste, to desire, is to grow wise.» — lo que sustituyen esas fases: una vida donde todo es Fate congelado en regla y costumbre por otra donde todo lo funde el instinto

«Between Phase 4 and Phase 5 the tinctures ceased to be drowned in the One, and reflection begins.» — el punto de la rueda en que empieza la reflexión

«When Man identifies himself with his Fate, when he is able to say “Thy Will is our freedom” or when he is perfectly natural, that is to say, perfectly a portion of his surroundings, he is free even though all his actions can be foreseen, even though every action is a logical deduction from all that went before it.» — la libertad que el sistema concede a esas fases: identificarse con el propio Fate, aunque toda acción pueda preverse

«Out of phase, and seeking antithetical emotion, he is sterile, passing from one insincere attitude to another, moving through a round of moral images torn from their context and so without meaning. He is so proud of each separation from experience that he becomes a sort of angry or smiling Punch with a lath between his wooden arms striking here and there.» — la fase 5 fuera de fase, convertida en un Punch que golpea al azar

«True to phase, he is the direct opposite of all this. Abstraction has indeed begun, but it comes to him as a portion of experience cut off from everything but itself and therefore fitted to be the object of reflection.» — y en fase: la abstracción empieza como una porción de experiencia cortada de todo lo demás

«He no longer touches, eats, drinks, thinks and feels Nature, but sees her as something from which he is separating himself, something that he may dominate, though only for a moment and by some fragmentary violence of sensation or of thought.» — la separación de la Naturaleza que esa fase inaugura

«Nature may seem half gone, but the laws of Nature have appeared and he can change her rhythms and her seasons by his knowledge. He lives in the moment but with an intensity Phases 2, 3 and 4 have never known, the Will approaches its climax, he is no longer like a man but half-awakened. He is a corrupter, disturber, wanderer, a founder of sects and peoples, and works with extravagant energy, and his reward is but to live in its glare.» — y su ganancia: aparecen las leyes de la Naturaleza y con ellas la capacidad de cambiar sus ritmos

«Abstraction had been born, but it remained the abstraction of a community, of a tradition, a synthesis starting, not as with Phases 19, 20 and 21 with logical deduction from an observed fact, but from the whole experience or from some experience of the individual or of the community: “I have such and such a feeling. I have such and such a belief. What follows from feeling, what from belief?”» — la clase de abstracción propia de esa fase, que parte de la experiencia y no de un hecho observado

«While Thomas Aquinas, whose historical epoch was nearly of this phase, summed up in abstract categories all possible experience, not that he might know but that he might feel, Walt Whitman makes catalogues of all that has moved him, or amused his eye, that he may grow more poetical.» — Yeats sitúa la época histórica de Tomás de Aquino casi en esa fase y contrapone sus categorías al catálogo de Whitman

«Experience is all-absorbing, subordinating observed fact, drowning even truth itself, if truth is conceived of as something apart from impulse and instinct and from the Will. Impulse or instinct begins to be all in all. In a little while, though not yet, it must, sweeping away catalogue and category, fill the mind with terror.» — y anuncia el término de ese movimiento: el impulso barrerá catálogo y categoría y llenará la mente de terror

«At Phases 2, 3 and 4 the man moved within tradition or seasonable limits, but since Phase 5 limits have grown indefinite; public codes, all that depend upon habit, are all but dissolved, even the catalogues and categories of Phase 6 are no longer sufficient.» — el punto en que los códigos públicos se disuelven

«If out of phase the man desires to be the man of Phase 21; an impossible desire, for that man is all but the climax of intellectual complexity, and all men, from Phase 2 to Phase 7 inclusive, are intellectually simple.» — la fase 7 fuera de fase desea una complejidad intelectual que le está vedada

«The dissolving character, out of phase, desires the breaking personality, and though it cannot possess or even conceive of personality, seeing that its thoughts and emotions are common to all, it can create a grandiloquent phantom and by deceiving others deceive itself» — y fabrica un fantasma grandilocuente con el que se engaña a sí mismo al engañar a otros

«Alexandre Dumas was the phase in its perfection, George Borrow when it halts a little, for Borrow was at moments sufficiently out of phase to know that he was naïve and to brag of imaginary intellectual subjectivity, as when he paraded an unbelievable fit of the horrors, or his mastery of many tongues.» — el reparto de ejemplos de la fase 7 según su grado de acierto

«Carlyle like Macpherson showed the phase at its worst. He neither could nor should have cared for anything but the personalities of history, but he used them as so many metaphors in a vast popular rhetoric, for the expression of thoughts that seeming his own were the work of preachers and angry ignorant congregations.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Carlyle dentro del sistema: usó las personalidades históricas como metáforas de una retórica popular ajena

«So noisy, so threatening that rhetoric, so great his own energy, that two generations passed before men noticed that he had written no sentence not of coarse humour that clings to the memory.» — y su consecuencia, medida en generaciones

«Sexual impotence had doubtless weakened the Body of Fate and so strengthened the False Mask, yet one doubts if any mere plaster of ant’s eggs could have helped where there was so great insincerity.» — Yeats adjudica a la impotencia sexual el debilitamiento del Body of Fate en ese caso y duda de que remedio alguno bastara ante tanta insinceridad

«Out of phase, a condition of terror; when true to phase, of courage unbroken through defeat.» — la fórmula más corta con que Yeats resume la fase 8

«From Phase 1 to Phase 7, there has been a gradual weakening of all that is primary. Character (the Will analysed in relation to the enforced Mask) has become individuality (the Will analysed in relation to itself), but now, though individuality persists through another phase, personality (the Will analysed in relation to the free Mask) must predominate.» — el tránsito de carácter a individualidad y de individualidad a personalidad a lo largo del primer cuarto

«But now the bottle must be burst. The struggle of idealised or habitual theologised thought with instinct, mind with body, of the waning primary with the growing antithetical, must be decided, and the vegetative and sensitive faculties must for a while take the sway.» — el punto de crisis: la lucha entre el pensamiento habitual y el instinto ha de decidirse

«Every new modification or codification of morality has been its attempt, acting through the Creative Mind, to set order upon the instinctive and vegetative faculties, and it must now feel that it can create order no longer.» — Yeats presenta toda codificación moral como intento del Will de ordenar las facultades instintivas, y sitúa aquí su fracaso

«Here for the most part are those obscure wastrels who seem powerless to free themselves from some sensual temptation—drink, women, drugs—and who cannot in a life of continual crisis create any lasting thing.» — los que la fase 8 sí produce, según Yeats

«The being clings like a drowning man to every straw, and it is precisely this clinging, this seemingly vain reaching forth for strength, amidst the collapse of all those public thoughts and habits that are the support of primary man, that enables it to enter at last upon Phase 9.» — y lo que de ese aferrarse resulta: es justamente eso lo que permite pasar de fase

«The man is inseparable from his fate, he cannot see himself apart, nor can he distinguish between emotion and intellect. He is will-less, dragged hither and thither, and his unemotionalised intellect, gathered up into the mathematical Phase 22, shows him perpetually for object of desire, an emotion that is like a mechanical energy, a thought that is like wheel and piston.» — el estado de la fase 8: no distingue emoción de intelecto, y su intelecto le muestra un deseo que parece energía mecánica

«he must dissolve thought into mere impersonal instinct, into mere race, that he may discover the dramatising Mask: he chooses himself and not his Fate.» — el movimiento que le queda: disolver el pensamiento en instinto para descubrir la Mask dramatizadora

«When his fingers close upon a straw, that is courage, and his versatility is that any wave may float a straw.» — la traducción concreta de las dos virtudes de esa fase

«Only a shock resulting from the greatest possible conflict can make the greatest possible change, that from primary to antithetical or from antithetical to primary again.» — la ley del cambio de tintura: solo el choque del mayor conflicto posible produce el mayor cambio posible

«Out of phase, blundering and ignorant, the man becomes when in phase powerful and accomplished; all that strength as of metallic rod and wheel discovered within himself.» — el contraste de la fase 9 dentro y fuera de fase

«All these phases of incipient personality when out of phase are brutal, but after Phase 12, when true personality begins, brutality gives place to an evasive capricious coldness—“false, fleeting, perjured Clarence”—a lack of good faith in their primary relation, often accompanied in their antithetical relation by the most self-torturing scruples.» — Yeats fecha en la fase 12 el paso de la brutalidad a una frialdad caprichosa, y cita a Shakespeare al paso

«When an antithetical man is out of phase, he reproduces the primary condition, but with an emotional inversion, love for Image or Mask becomes dread, or after Phase 15, hatred, and the Mask clings to the man or pursues him in the Image.» — la inversión emocional del hombre antithetical fuera de fase: el amor a la Imagen se vuelve pavor, y después de la fase 15, odio

«Hence one finds at this phase, more often than at any other, men who dread, despise and persecute the women whom they love.» — lo que Yeats adjudica a esa fase con más frecuencia que a ninguna otra

«It is said of it, “The soul having found its weakness at Phase 8 begins the inward discipline of the soul in the fury of Phase 9”. And again, “Phase 9 has the most sincere belief any man has ever had in his own desire”.» — las dos sentencias que Yeats cita como recibidas sobre la fase 9

«There is a certain artist who said to a student of these symbols, speaking of a notable man, and his mistress and their children, “She no longer cares for his work, no longer gives him the sympathy he needs, why does he not leave her, what does he owe to her or to» — el ejemplo vivo de la fase 9, referido por un estudioso de los símbolos, con el pintor cubista sin nombre

«If he live like the opposite phase, conceived as primary condition—the phase where ambition dies—he lacks all emotional power (False Mask: “Inertia”), and gives himself up to rudderless change, reform without a vision of form. He accepts what form (Mask and Image) those about him admire and, on discovering that it is alien, casts it away with brutal violence, to choose some other form as alien.» — la fase 10 fuera de fase: reforma sin visión de la forma

«If, on the other hand, he be true to phase, and use his intellect to liberate from mere race (Body of Fate at Phase 6 where race is codified), and so create some code of personal conduct, which implies always “divine right”, he becomes proud, masterful and practical.» — y en fase: un código de conducta personal que implica siempre derecho divino

«As Body of Fate phase and Mask phase approach one another they share somewhat of each other’s nature» — la regla general que Yeats extrae al paso: al acercarse las fases del Body of Fate y de la Mask, comparten algo de su naturaleza

«This sacrifice is code, personality no longer perceived as power only. He seeks by its help to free the creative power from mass emotion, but never wholly succeeds, and so the life remains troubled, a conflict between pride and race, and passes from crisis to crisis.» — el conflicto entre orgullo y raza que Yeats deja sin resolver en esa fase

«John Morley says of Parnell, whose life proves him of the phase, that he had the least discursive mind he had ever known, and that is always characteristic of a phase where all practical curiosity has been lost wherever some personal aim is not involved, while philosophical and artistic curiosity are still undiscovered.» — Yeats adjudica a Parnell la fase 10 y toma de John Morley el rasgo que la prueba

«He made upon his contemporaries an impression of impassivity, and yet a follower has recorded that, after a speech that seemed brutal and callous, his hands were full of blood because he had torn them with his nails.» — el contraste entre la impasibilidad aparente y las manos ensangrentadas, que Yeats consigna como testimonio de un seguidor

«One of his followers was shocked during the impassioned discussion in Committee Room No. 15 that led to his abandonment,98 by this most reticent man’s lack of reticence in allusion to the operations of sex, an indifference as of a mathematician dealing with some arithmetical quantity, and yet Mrs. Parnell tells how upon a night of storm on Brighton pier, and at the height of his power, he held her out over the waters and she lay still, stretched upon his two hands, knowing that if she moved, he would drown himself and her.» — las dos escenas contrapuestas con que Yeats cierra el retrato: la indiferencia de matemático y el episodio del muelle de Brighton

«While Phase 9 was kept from its subjectivity by personal relations, by sensuality, by various kinds of grossness; and Phase 10 by associations of men for practical purposes, and by the emotions that arise out of such associations, or by some tragic love where there is an element of common interest; Phase 11 is impeded by the excitement of conviction, by the contagion of organised belief, or by its interest in organisation for its own sake.» — lo que impide su subjetividad a cada una de las tres fases, y en la 11 el contagio de la creencia organizada

«The man of the phase is a half-solitary, one who defends a solitude he cannot or will not inhabit, his Mask being from a phase of abstract belief, which offers him always some bundle of mathematical formulae, or its like, opposed to his nature.» — la definición de la fase 11: quien defiende una soledad que no puede o no quiere habitar

«It will presently be seen that the man of Phase 25, where the Mask is, creates a system of belief, just as Phase 24 creates a code, to exclude all that is too difficult for dolt or knave; but the man of Phase 11 systematises, runs to some frenzy of conviction, to make intellect, intellect for its own sake, possible, and perhaps, in his rage against rough-and-ready customary thought, to make all but intellect impossible.» — la diferencia entre el sistema de creencias de la fase 25 y la sistematización de la 11, hecha para volver posible el intelecto por sí mismo

«In Spinoza one finds the phase in its most pure and powerful shape. He saw the divine energy in whatever was the most individual expression of the soul, and spent his life in showing that such expression was for the world’s welfare and not, as might seem, a form of anarchy.» — el ejemplo mayor de la fase 11, con la tarea que Yeats le atribuye

«His Mask, under the influence of his Body of Fate, would force him to seek happiness in submission to something hard and exterior; but the Mask, set free by a Creative Mind that would destroy exterior popular sanction, makes possible for the first time the solitary conception of God.» — el juego de Mask y Creative Mind que Yeats adjudica a Spinoza, y lo que de él resulta

«One imagines him among the theologians of his time, who sought always some formula perhaps, some sheep-dog for common minds, turning himself into pure wolf, and making for the wilderness.» — la imagen con que Yeats lo separa de los teólogos de su tiempo

«Through all his cold definitions, on whose mathematical form he prided himself, one divines a quarrel with the thought of his fathers and his kin, forced upon him perhaps almost to the breaking of his heart: no nature without the stroke of fate divides itself in two.» — y la sentencia con que cierra: ninguna naturaleza se parte en dos sin un golpe del destino

«The man of this phase, out of phase, is always in reaction, is driven from one self-conscious pose to another, is full of hesitation; true to phase, he is a cup that remembers but its own fullness.» — la fase 12 dentro y fuera de fase

«His phase is called the “Forerunner” because fragmentary and violent. The phases of action where the man mainly defines himself by his practical relations are finished, or finishing, and the phases where he defines himself mainly through an image of the mind begun or beginning; phases of hatred for some external fate are giving way to phases of self-hatred.» — el nombre de la fase y su razón: aquí el odio a un destino externo cede al odio de sí

«It is a phase of immense energy because the Four Faculties are equidistant. The oppositions (Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate) are balanced by the discords, and these, being equidistant between identity and opposition, are at their utmost intensity.» — la razón geométrica de la energía de esa fase: las cuatro Faculties equidistantes

«It is therefore before all else the phase of the hero, of the man who overcomes himself, and so no longer needs, like Phase 10, the submission of others, or, like Phase 11, conviction of others to prove his victory.» — la fase 12 como fase del héroe, que se vence a sí mismo y no necesita ni sumisión ni convicción ajenas

«Solitude has been born at last, though solitude invaded, and hard to defend. Nor is there need any longer of the bare anatomy of Phase 11; every thought comes with sound and metaphor, and the sanity of the being is no longer from its relation to facts, but from its approximation to its own unity» — aquí nace la soledad, y la cordura deja de venir de la relación con los hechos

«If, however, he meets these accidents by the awakening of his antithetical being, there is a noble extravagance, an overflowing fountain of personal life. He turns towards the True Mask and having by philosophic intellect (Creative Mind) delivered it from all that is topical and temporary, announces a philosophy which is the logical expression of a mind alone with the object of its desire.» — y la salida contraria: una filosofía que es la expresión lógica de una mente a solas con el objeto de su deseo

«The True Mask, derived from the terrible Phase 26, called the phase of the Hunchback, is the reverse of all that is emotional, being emotionally cold; not mathematical, for intellectual abstraction ceased at Phase 11, but marble pure.» — la Mask de esa fase, fría y no matemática

«In the presence of the Mask, the Creative Mind has the isolation of a fountain under moonlight; yet one must always distinguish between the emotional Will —now approaching the greatest subtlety of sensitiveness, and more and more conscious of its frailty—and that which it would be, the lonely, imperturbable, proud Mask, as between the Will and its discord in the Creative Mind where is no shrinking from life.» — la distinción entre el Will emocional, cada vez más consciente de su fragilidad, y la Mask que quisiera ser

«This is said to be the only phase where entire sensuality is possible, that is to say, sensuality without the intermixture of any other element.» — lo que Yeats declara recibido sobre la fase 13

«There is now a possible complete intellectual unity, Unity of Being apprehended through the images of the mind; and this is opposed by the Fate (Phase 3 where body becomes deliberate and whole) which offers an equal roundness and wholeness of sensation.» — la unidad intelectual posible en esa fase y lo que se le opone desde el Body of Fate

«If it live objectively, that is to say, surrender itself to sensation, it becomes morbid, it sees every sensation separate from every other under the light of its perpetual analysis» — el riesgo de esa fase: cada sensación separada de las demás bajo el análisis perpetuo

«Phase 13 is a phase of great importance, because the most intellectually subjective phase, and because only here can be achieved in perfection that in the antithetical life which corresponds to sanctity in the primary: not self-denial but expression for expression’s sake.» — lo que la fase 13 permite en la vida antithetical, que Yeats hace corresponder con la santidad en la primary

«Its influence indeed upon certain writers has caused them in their literary criticism to exalt intellectual sincerity to the place in literature which is held by sanctity in theology.» — y su efecto sobre cierta crítica literaria, que eleva la sinceridad intelectual al lugar de la santidad

«Self-hatred now reaches its height, and through this hatred comes the slow liberation of intellectual love.» — el odio de sí llega aquí a su punto más alto y de él sale la liberación lenta del amor intelectual

«From now, if not from Phase 12, and until Phase 17 or Phase 18 has passed, happy love is rare, for seeing that the man must find a woman whose Mask falls within or but just outside his Body of Fate and Mask, if he is to find strong sexual attraction, the range of choice grows smaller, and all life grows more tragic.» — la consecuencia amorosa que Yeats deriva del estrechamiento de las combinaciones posibles

«Lacking suitable objects of desire, the relation between man and Daimon becomes more clearly a struggle or even a relation of enmity.» — y su efecto sobre la relación con el Daimon

«As we approach Phase 15 personal beauty increases and at Phase 14 and Phase 16 the greatest human beauty becomes possible.» — el reparto de la belleza física en torno a la fase 15

«It is this act of the intellect, begun at conception, which has given the body its beauty.» — Yeats adjudica la belleza del cuerpo a un acto del intelecto empezado en la concepción

«The images of Phase 13 and even of Phase 12 have in a lesser degree this character. When we compare these images with those of any subsequent phase, each seems studied for its own sake; they float as in serene air, or lie hidden in some valley, and if they move it is to music that returns always to the same note, or in a dance that so returns into itself that they seem immortal.» — el carácter de las imágenes de esas fases: estudiadas cada una por sí, flotando en aire sereno

«When the being is out of phase, when it is allured by primary curiosity, it is aware of its primary feebleness and its intellect becomes but a passion of apprehension, or a shrinking from solitude; it may even become mad; or it may use its conscious feebleness and its consequent terror as a magnet for the sympathy of others, as a means of domination.» — la fase 14 fuera de fase: la debilidad consciente convertida en imán de la simpatía ajena

«At Phase 16 will be discovered a desire to accept every possible responsibility; but now responsibility is renounced and this renunciation becomes an instrument of power, dropped burdens being taken up by others.» — el contraste con la fase siguiente: aquí la renuncia a la responsabilidad se vuelve instrumento de poder

«Here are born those women who are most touching in their beauty. Helen was of the phase; and she comes before the mind’s eye elaborating a delicate personal discipline, as though she would make her whole life an image of a unified antithetical energy. While seeming an image of softness and of quiet, she draws perpetually upon glass with a diamond.» — Yeats adjudica a la fase 14 a Helena y la describe elaborando una disciplina personal delicada

«Yet she will not number among her sins anything that does not break that personal discipline, no matter what it may seem according to others’ discipline; but if she fail in her own discipline she will not deceive herself, and for all the languor of her movements, and her indifference to the acts of others, her mind is never at peace.» — el criterio moral que Yeats le atribuye: solo cuenta como falta lo que rompe su propia disciplina

«The greater the peril the nearer has she approached to the final union of primary and antithetical, where she will desire nothing; already perhaps, through weakness of desire, she understands nothing yet seems to understand everything; already serves nothing, while alone seeming of service.» — la paradoja con que Yeats la describe cerca de la unión final: no entiende nada y parece entenderlo todo

«Is it not because she desires so little, gives so little that men will die and murder in her service?» — y la pregunta con que Yeats la remata

«One thinks of the Eternal Idol of Rodin: that kneeling man with hands clasped behind his back in humble adoration, kissing a young girl a little below the breast, while she gazes down, without comprehending, under her half-closed eyelids.» — la escultura de Rodin que Yeats trae como imagen de esa fase

«Perhaps, could we see her a little later, with flushed cheeks casting her money upon some gaming-table, we would wonder that action and form could so belie each other, not understanding that the Fool’s Mask is her chosen motley, nor her terror before death and stillness.» — y el contraste que Yeats predice: la misma figura arrojando su dinero en una mesa de juego

«One thinks too of the women of Burne-Jones, but not of Botticelli’s women, who have too much curiosity, nor Rossetti’s women, who have too much passion» — el reparto de pintores que Yeats hace para esa fase: las mujeres de Burne-Jones sí, las de Botticelli con demasiada curiosidad y las de Rossetti con demasiada pasión

«In the poets too, who are of the phase, one finds the impression of the Body of Fate as intoxication or narcotic. Wordsworth, shuddering at his solitude, has filled his art in all but a few pages with common opinion, common sentiment» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Wordsworth dentro del sistema

«while in the poetry of Keats there is, though little sexual passion, an exaggerated sensuousness that compels us to remember the pepper on the tongue as though that were his symbol.» — y sobre Keats, con la pimienta en la lengua por símbolo

«Thought is disappearing into image; and in Keats, in some ways a perfect type, intellectual curiosity is at its weakest; there is scarcely an image, where his poetry is at its best, whose subjectivity has not been heightened by its use in many great poets, painters, sculptors, artificers.» — Yeats declara la curiosidad intelectual de Keats en su punto más débil y adjudica la subjetividad de sus imágenes al uso que otros les dieron antes

«All born at antithetical phases before Phase 15 are subject to violence, because of the indeterminate energy of the Body of Fate; this violence seems accidental, unforeseen and cruel—and here are women carried off by robbers and ravished by clowns.» — la violencia que el sistema adjudica a las fases antithetical anteriores a la 15

«Body of Fate and Mask are now identical; and Will and Creative Mind identical; or rather the Creative Mind is dissolved in the Will and the Body of Fate in the Mask. Thought and will are indistinguishable, effort and attainment are indistinguishable; and this is the consummation of a slow process; nothing is apparent but dreaming Will and the Image that it dreams.» — la fase 15 descrita por identidades: pensamiento y voluntad indistinguibles, esfuerzo y logro indistinguibles

«The words “musical”, “sensuous”, are but descriptions of that converging process. Thought has been pursued, not as a means but as an end—the poem, the painting, the reverie has been sufficient of itself.» — Yeats explica dos adjetivos suyos como descripciones de esa convergencia

«Without Mask and Body of Fate the Will would have nothing to desire, the Creative Mind nothing to apprehend.» — y el límite: sin Mask ni Body of Fate no habría qué desear ni qué aprehender

«Now contemplation and desire, united into one, inhabit a world where every beloved image has bodily form, and every bodily form is loved. This love knows nothing of desire, for desire implies effort, and though there is still separation from the loved object, love accepts the separation as necessary to its own existence.» — el amor de la fase 15, que no sabe nada del deseo porque el deseo implica esfuerzo

«Fate is known for the boundary that gives our Destiny its form, and—as we can desire nothing outside that form—as an expression of our freedom. Chance and Choice have become interchangeable without losing their identity.» — y la libertad de esa fase: el Fate como límite que da forma al Destiny, y azar y elección vueltos intercambiables

«and every image is separate from every other, for if image were linked to image, the soul would awake from its immovable trance.» — la razón por la que ahí ninguna imagen se enlaza con otra

«Its own body possesses the greatest possible beauty, being indeed that body which the soul will permanently inhabit, when all its phases have been repeated according to the number allotted: that which we call the clarified or Celestial Body.» — el cuerpo de esa fase, que Yeats identifica con el Celestial Body

«Even for the most perfect, there is a time of pain, a passage through a vision, where evil reveals itself in its final meaning. In this passage Christ, it is said, mourned over the length of time and the unworthiness of man’s lot to man, whereas his forerunner mourned and his successor will mourn over the shortness of time and the unworthiness of man to his lot; but this cannot yet be understood.» — el paso doloroso que Yeats atribuye incluso a los más perfectos, con Cristo lamentando la longitud del tiempo y su sucesor lamentando su brevedad

«Phase 16 is in contrast to Phase 14, in spite of their resemblance of extreme subjectivity, in that it has a Body of Fate from the phase of the Fool, a phase of absorption, and its Mask from what might have been called the phase of the Child, a phase of aimless energy, of physical life for its own sake; whereas Phase 14 had its Body of Fate from the phase of the Child and its Mask from that of the Fool.» — la simetría cruzada entre las fases 14 y 16

«They are both illusions, because, so small is the primary nature, sense of fact is an impossibility.» — por qué las dos son ilusión en esa fase

«If, however, it subordinate its intellect to the Body of Fate, all the cruelty and narrowness of that intellect are displayed in service of preposterous purpose after purpose till there is nothing left but the fixed idea and some hysterical hatred.» — la fase 16 fuera de fase, con la idea fija y el odio histérico

«Capable of nothing but an incapable idealism (for it has no thought but in myth, or in defence of myth), it must, because it sees one side as all white, see the other side all black; what but a dragon could dream of thwarting a St. George?» — por qué esa fase no puede sino repartir el mundo en blanco y negro

«In men of the phase there will commonly be both natures, for to be true to phase is a ceaseless struggle. At one moment they are full of hate —Blake writes of “Flemish and Venetian demons”117 and of some picture of his own destroyed “by some vile spell of Stoddart’s”118—and their hate is always close to madness; and at the next they produce the comedy of Aretino and of Rabelais or the mythology of Blake, and discover symbolism to express the overflowing and bursting of the mind.» — Yeats consigna las dos caras de la fase 16 en un mismo hombre, con Blake y su odio junto a la comedia de Rabelais

«There is always an element of frenzy, and almost always a delight in certain glowing or shining images of concentrated force: in the smith’s forge; in the heart; in the human form in its most vigorous development; in the solar disc; in some symbolical representation of the sexual organs; for the being must brag of its triumph over its own incoherence.» — las imágenes de fuerza concentrada que la fase 16 prefiere: la fragua, el corazón, el disco solar

«Since Phase 8 the man has more and more judged what is right in relation to time: a right action, or a right motive, has been one that he thought possible or desirable to think or do eternally; his soul would “come into possession of itself for ever in one single moment”; but now he begins once more to judge an action or motive in relation to space.» — el cambio de criterio moral que Yeats sitúa aquí: del tiempo al espacio

«Hitherto an action, or motive, has been right precisely because it is exactly right for one person only, though for that person always. After the change, the belief in the soul’s immortality declines, though the decline is slow, and it may only be recovered when Phase 1 is passed.» — y su consecuencia sobre la creencia en la inmortalidad del alma

«Among those who are of this phase may be great satirists, great caricaturists, but they pity the beautiful, for that is their Mask, and hate the ugly, for that is their Body of Fate, and so are unlike those of the primary phases, Rembrandt for instance, who pity the ugly, and sentimentalise the beautiful, or call it insipid, and turn away or secretly despise and hate it.» — el cruce de piedad y odio que Yeats adjudica a los satíricos de esa fase, y su reverso en las fases primary

«Here too are beautiful women, whose bodies have taken upon themselves the image of the True Mask, and in these there is a radiant intensity, something of “The Burning Babe” of the Elizabethan lyric.121 They walk like queens, and seem to carry upon their backs a quiver of arrows, but they are gentle only to those whom they have chosen or subdued, or to the dogs that follow at their heels.» — las mujeres de la fase 16, con el carcaj a la espalda

«Indeed, perhaps if the body have great perfection, there is always something imperfect in the mind, some rejection of or inadequacy of Mask: Venus out of phase chose lame Vulcan.» — la conjetura con que Yeats compensa la perfección del cuerpo

«This is indeed the only antithetical phase where ugliness is possible, it being complementary to Phase 2, the only primary phase where beauty is possible.» — la simetría entre las fases 16 y 2 en cuanto a fealdad y belleza

«From this phase on we meet with those who do violence, instead of those who suffer it; and prepare for those who love some living person, and not an image of the mind, but as yet this love is hardly more than the “fixed idea” of faithfulness. As the new love grows the sense of beauty will fade.» — el punto en que se pasa de padecer violencia a hacerla, y el precio del amor a una persona viva

«He is called the Daimonic man because Unity of Being, and consequent expression of Daimonic thought, is now more easy than at any other phase.» — la razón del nombre de la fase 17

«As contrasted with Phase 13 and Phase 14, where mental images were separated from one another that they might be subject to knowledge, all now flow, change, flutter, cry out, or mix into something else; but without, as at Phase 16, breaking and bruising one another, for Phase 17, the central phase of its triad, is without frenzy.» — el contraste con las fases 13 y 14 y con la 16: aquí las imágenes fluyen y se mezclan sin frenesí

«The Will is falling asunder, but without explosion and noise. The separated fragments seek images rather than ideas, and these the intellect, seated in Phase 13, must synthesise in vain, drawing with its compass-point a line that shall but represent the outline of a bursting pod.» — la imagen con que Yeats describe la tarea imposible del intelecto en esa fase

«The being has for its supreme aim, as it had at Phase 16 (and as all subsequent antithetical phases shall have), to hide from itself and others this separation and disorder, and it conceals them under the emotional Image of Phase 3; as Phase 16 concealed its greater violence under that of Phase 2.» — el fin supremo que Yeats atribuye a todas las fases antithetical posteriores a la 15: ocultarse a sí mismas su propia dispersión

«It finds, not the impassioned myth that Phase 16 found, but a Mask of simplicity that is also intensity. This Mask may represent intellectual or sexual passion; seem some Ahasuerus or Athanase;127 be the gaunt Dante of the Divine Comedy;128 its corresponding Image may be Shelley’s Venus Urania,129 Dante’s Beatrice, or even the Great Yellow Rose of the» — la Mask de la fase 17, con Ahasuerus, el Dante de la Comedia y la Venus Urania de Shelley por figuras

«The being, through the intellect, selects some object of desire for a representation of the Mask as Image, some woman perhaps, and the Body of Fate snatches away the object.» — el mecanismo de la fase 17: se elige un objeto de deseo y el Body of Fate lo arrebata

«If it be out of phase it will avoid the subjective conflict, acquiesce, hope that the Body of Fate may die away; and then the Mask will cling to it and the Image lure it. It will feel itself betrayed, and persecuted till, entangled in primary conflict, it rages against all that destroys Mask and Image.» — y la fase 17 fuera de fase, que se siente traicionada y perseguida

«Because of the habit of synthesis, and of the growing complexity of the energy, which gives many interests, and the still faint perception of things in their weight and mass, men of this phase are almost always partisans, propagandists and gregarious; yet because of the Mask of simplification, which holds up before them the solitary life of hunters and of fishers and “the groves pale passion loves”, they hate parties, crowds, propaganda.» — la contradicción que Yeats adjudica a esa fase: partidarios y gregarios por temperamento, y enemigos de partidos y multitudes por su Mask

«Shelley out of phase writes pamphlets, and dreams of converting the world, or of turning man of affairs and upsetting governments,132 and yet returns again and again to these two images of solitude, a young man whose hair has grown white from the burden of his thoughts,133 an old man in some shell-strewn cave whom it is possible to call, when speaking to the Sultan, “as inaccessible as God or thou”.» — el ejemplo de Shelley fuera de fase, con las dos imágenes de soledad a las que vuelve

«On the other hand, how subject he is to nightmare! He sees the devil leaning against a tree, is attacked by imaginary assassins,135 and, in obedience to what he considers a supernatural voice, creates The Cenci that he may give to Beatrice Cenci her incredible father.» — y las pesadillas que Yeats le atribuye, hasta la creación de The Cenci por obedecer a una voz que tuvo por sobrenatural

«Dante, who lamented his exile as of all possible things the worst for such as he, and sighed for his lost solitude, and yet could never keep from politics, was, according to a contemporary, such a partisan, that if a child, or a woman, spoke against his party he would pelt this child or woman with» — el ejemplo de Dante en la misma fase, con el testimonio de un contemporáneo sobre su partidismo

«Yet Dante, having attained, as poet, to Unity of Being, as poet saw all things set in order, had an intellect that served the Mask alone, that compelled even those things that opposed it to serve, and was content to see both good and evil.» — y lo que Yeats le concede como poeta, frente a lo que le niega como partidario

«He lacked the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a continual conflict, so, though great poet he certainly was, he was not of the greatest kind.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Shelley, formulado con la Visión del Mal por medida

«Dante suffering injustice and the loss of Beatrice, found divine justice and the heavenly Beatrice, but the justice of Prometheus Unbound is a vague propagandist emotion and the women that await its coming are but clouds.» — y la comparación con Dante que lo sostiene

«This is in part because the age in which Shelley lived was in itself so broken that true Unity of Being was almost impossible, but partly because, being out of phase so far as his practical reason was concerned, he was subject to an automatonism which he mistook for poetical invention, especially in his longer poems.» — las dos razones que Yeats da de ese límite: la época quebrada y el automatismo que Shelley habría tomado por invención poética

«Antithetical men (Phase 15 once passed) use this automatonism to evade hatred, or rather to hide it from their own eyes; perhaps all at some time or other, in moments of fatigue, give themselves up to fantastic, constructed images, or to an almost mechanical laughter.» — el uso que Yeats atribuye al automatismo en las fases antithetical: evadir el odio u ocultarlo de los propios ojos

«Landor has been examined in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.141 The most violent of men, he uses his intellect to disengage a visionary image of perfect sanity (Mask at Phase 3) seen always in the most serene and classic art imaginable. He had perhaps as much Unity of Being as his age permitted, and possessed, though not in any full measure, the Vision of Evil.» — Yeats remite el examen de Landor a un libro suyo anterior y le concede la Visión del Mal, aunque no en plenitud

«The antithetical tincture closes during this phase, the being is losing direct knowledge of its old antithetical life. The conflict between that portion of the life of feeling which appertains to his unity, and that portion he has in common with others, coming to an end, has begun to destroy that knowledge.» — el cierre de la tintura antithetical en la fase 18

«He can hardly, if action and the intellect that concerns action are taken from him, recreate his dream life; and when he says “Who am I?”, he finds it difficult to examine his thoughts in relation to one another, his emotions in relation to one another, but begins to find it easy to examine them in relation to action.» — y su consecuencia: las emociones ya solo se examinan en relación con la acción

«Meanwhile the antithetical tincture begins to attain, without previous struggle or self-analysis, its active form which is love—love being the union of emotion and instinct—or when out of phase, sentimentality.» — la definición del amor que el sistema da en esa fase: unión de emoción e instinto

«Its object of desire is no longer a single image of passion, for it must relate all to social life; the man seeks to become not a sage, not Ahasuerus, but a wise king, and seeks a woman who looks the wise mother of children.» — el cambio de objeto de deseo en la fase 18: no el sabio sino el rey sabio, y una mujer que parezca madre sensata

«Perhaps now, and for the first time, the love of a living woman (“disillusionment” once accepted) as apart from beauty or function, is an admitted aim, though not yet wholly achieved.» — y con él, por primera vez, el amor a una mujer viva como fin admitido

«Goethe did not, as Beddoes said, marry his cook, but he certainly did not marry the woman he had desired, and his grief at her death showed that, unlike Phase 16 or Phase 17, which forget their broken toys, he could love what disillusionment gave.» — el ejemplo de Goethe, que según Yeats pudo amar lo que la desilusión le dio

«When he seeks to live objectively, he will substitute curiosity for emotional wisdom, he will invent objects of desire artificially, he will say perhaps, though this was said by a man who was probably still later in phase, “I was never in love with a serpent-charmer before”;147 the False Mask will press upon him, pursue him, and, refusing conflict, he will fly from the True Mask at each artificial choice.» — y la fase 18 fuera de fase, que inventa objetos de deseo artificiales

«The nightingale will refuse the thorn and so remain among images instead of passing to ideas.» — la imagen con que Yeats cierra esa deriva

«The Will is near the place marked Head upon the great chart, which enables it to choose its Mask even when true to phase almost coldly and always deliberately, whereas the Creative Mind is derived from the place marked Heart, and is therefore more impassioned and less subtle and delicate than if Phase 16 or Phase 17 were the place of the Will, though not yet argumentative or heated.» — las posiciones de Head y Heart en la carta y su efecto sobre el modo de elegir la Mask

«This phase is the beginning of the artificial, the abstract, the fragmentary, and the dramatic. Unity of Being is no longer possible, for the being is compelled to live in a fragment of itself and to dramatise that fragment.» — la fase 19 como comienzo de lo artificial y lo dramático, con la Unidad del Ser ya imposible

«When the man lives according to phase, he is now governed by conviction, instead of by a ruling mood, and is effective only in so far as he can find this conviction. His aim is so to use an intellect which turns easily to declamation, emotional emphasis, that it serves conviction in a life where effort, just in so far as its object is passionately desired, comes to nothing.» — el hombre de la fase 19 en fase: gobernado por convicción y eficaz solo mientras la halle

«His thought is immensely effective and dramatic, arising always from some immediate situation, a situation found or created by himself, and may have great permanent value as the expression of an exciting personality.» — el valor que Yeats concede a ese pensamiento: dramático, nacido de una situación, y duradero como expresión de una personalidad

«The Creative Mind being derived from Phase 11, he is doomed to attempt the destruction of all that breaks or encumbers personality, but this personality is conceived of as a fragmentary, momentary intensity.» — y su condena: destruir cuanto estorbe a una personalidad concebida como intensidad momentánea

«Vitality from dreams has died out, and a vitality from fact has begun which has for its ultimate aim the mastery of the real world. The watercourse after an abrupt fall continues upon a lower level; ice turns to water, or water to vapour: there is a new chemical phase.» — la imagen química con que Yeats marca el cambio de nivel

«When lived out of phase there is a hatred or contempt of others, and instead of seeking conviction for its own sake, the man takes up opinions that he may impose himself upon others. He is tyrannical and capricious, and his intellect is called “The Unfaithful”, because, being used for victory alone, it will change its ground in a moment and delight in some new emphasis, not caring whether old or new have consistency.» — la fase 19 fuera de fase, y la razón del nombre que se da a su intelecto

«Whether the man be in or out of phase, there is the desire to escape from Unity of Being or any approximation towards it, for Unity can be but a simulacrum now. And in so far as the soul keeps its memory of that potential Unity there is conscious antithetical weakness.» — el deseo de escapar de la Unidad del Ser en esa fase, porque ya solo puede ser simulacro

«A certain actress is typical, for she surrounds herself with drawings by Burne-Jones in his latest period, and reveres them as they were holy pictures, while her manners are boisterous, dominating and egotistical.» — el ejemplo sin nombre que Yeats da para la fase 19

«yet these faces are not, as I once thought, the True Mask but a part of that incoherence the True Mask must conceal. Were she to surrender to their influence she would become insincere in her art and exploit an emotion that is no longer hers.» — Yeats corrige aquí una lectura suya anterior sobre ese mismo caso

«I find in Wilde, too, something pretty, feminine, and insincere, derived from his admiration for writers of the 17th and earlier phases, and much that is violent, arbitrary and insolent, derived from his desire to escape.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Wilde dentro del sistema

«The antithetical Mask comes to men of Phase 17 and Phase 18 as a form of strength, and when they are tempted to dramatise it, the dramatisation is fitful, and brings no conviction of strength, for they dislike emphasis; but now the weakness of the antithetical has begun, for though still the stronger it cannot ignore the growing primary. It is no longer an absolute monarch, and it permits power to pass to statesman or demagogue, whom, however, it will constantly change.» — el cambio de régimen que Yeats describe: lo antithetical deja de ser monarca absoluto

«Here one finds men and women who love those who rob them or beat them, as though the soul were intoxicated by its discovery of human nature, or found even a secret delight in the shattering of the image of its desire. It is as though it cried, “I would be possessed by” or “I would possess that which is Human. What do I care if it is good or bad?” There is no “disillusionment”, for they have found that which they have sought, but that which they have sought and found in a fragment.» — lo que la fase 19 produce, y la fórmula con que Yeats la resume: han hallado lo que buscaban, y lo han hallado en un fragmento

«He no longer seeks to unify what is broken through conviction, by imposing those very convictions upon himself and others, but by projecting a dramatisation or many dramatisations. He can create, just in that degree in which he can see these dramatisations as separate from himself, and yet as an epitome of his whole nature.» — y el modo de lograrla: proyectar dramatizaciones y verlas a la vez separadas de sí y como epítome de la propia naturaleza

«The Body of Fate is called “enforced success”, a success that rolls out and smooths away, that dissolves through creation, that seems to delight in all outward flowing, that drenches all with grease and oil; that turns dramatisation into desecration: “I have made myself a motley to the view”.» — el Body of Fate de la fase 20, con el verso de Shakespeare por remate

«Unlike Phase 19 he fails in situations wholly created by himself, or in works of art where character or story has gained nothing from history.» — y su límite: fracasa en las situaciones enteramente inventadas

«His phase is called “The Concrete Man”, because the isolation of parts that began at Phase 19 is overcome at the second phase of the triad; subordination of parts is achieved by the discovery of concrete relations.» — la razón del nombre de la fase 20

«There is a delight in concrete images that, unlike the impassioned images of Phase 17 and Phase 18, or the declamatory images of Phase 19, reveal through complex suffering the general destiny of man.» — las imágenes de esa fase, que revelan por el sufrimiento el destino común

«In a man of action this multiplicity gives the greatest possible richness of resource where he is not thwarted by his horoscope, great ductability, a gift for adopting any rôle that stirs imagination, a philosophy of impulse and audacity; but in the man of action a part of the nature must be crushed, one main dramatisation or group of images preferred to all others.» — y su precio en el hombre de acción: una parte de la naturaleza ha de aplastarse

«Napoleon sees himself as Alexander moving to the conquest of the East, Mask and Image must take an historical and not a mythological or dream form, a form found but not created; he is crowned in the dress of a Roman Emperor.» — el ejemplo de Napoleón, cuya Mask ha de ser histórica y no mitológica

«Shakespeare, the other supreme figure of the phase, was—if we may judge by the few biographical facts, and by such adjectives as “sweet” and “gentle” applied to him by his contemporaries—a man whose actual personality seemed faint and passionless.» — el retrato de Shakespeare que Yeats deduce de los pocos datos biográficos

«Unlike Ben Jonson he fought no duels;156 he kept out of quarrels in a quarrelsome age; not even complaining when somebody pirated his sonnets;157 he dominated no Mermaid Tavern,158 but—through Mask and Image, reflected in a multiplying mirror—he created the most passionate art that exists.» — el contraste entre la persona apagada y el arte apasionado

«He was the greatest of modern poets, partly because entirely true to phase, creating always from Mask and Creative Mind, never from situation alone, never from Body of Fate alone» — la razón que Yeats da de esa grandeza dentro del sistema

«Both Shakespeare and Balzac used the False Mask imaginatively, explored it to impose the True, and what Thomas Lake Harris,XI the half-charlatan American visionary, said of Shakespeare might be said of both: “Often the hair of his head stood up and all life became the echoing chambers of the tomb”.» — el uso imaginativo de la Mask falsa que Yeats atribuye a los dos, con una frase de Thomas Lake Harris a quien llama medio charlatán

«The antithetical tincture has a predominance so slight that the Creative Mind and Body of Fate almost equal it in control of desire. The Will can scarcely conceive of a Mask separate from or predominant over Creative Mind and Body of Fate, yet because it can do so there is personality not character.» — el equilibrio de fuerzas en la fase 21

«It is better, however, to use a different word, and therefore Phases 21, 22 and 23 are described as, like the phases opposite, phases of individuality where the Will is studied less in relation to the Mask than in relation to itself.» — y por qué Yeats llama a esas fases de individualidad y no de personalidad

«The antithetical tincture is noble, and, judged by the standards of the primary, evil, whereas the primary is good and banal; and this phase, the last before the antithetical surrenders its control, would be almost wholly good did it not hate its own banality.» — el juicio cruzado que Yeats formula entre las dos tinturas, cada una medida por la otra

«When we contemplate Napoleon we can see ourselves, perhaps even think of ourselves as Napoleons, but a man of Phase 21 has a personality that seems a creation of his circumstance and his faults, a manner peculiar to himself and impossible to others.» — el contraste entre la fase 20 y la 21 en cuanto a imitabilidad

«In theory whatever one has chosen must be within the choice of others, at some moment or for some purpose, but we find in practice that nobody of this phase has personal imitators, or has given his name to a form of manners.» — y su comprobación práctica: nadie de esa fase deja imitadores

«The Will has driven intellectual complexity into its final entanglement, an entanglement created by the continual adaptation to new circumstances of a logical sequence; and the aim of the individual, when true to phase, is to realise, by his own complete domination over all circumstance, a self-analysing, self-conscious simplicity.» — el fin del hombre de la fase 21 en fase: una simplicidad autoconsciente conquistada por dominio de las circunstancias

«Phase 7 shuddered at its intellectual simplicity, whereas he must shudder at his complexity.» — la simetría entre las dos fases opuestas

«If he is a novelist, his characters must go his road, and not theirs, and perpetually demonstrate his thesis» — lo que esa fase hace con sus propios personajes

«Style exists now but as a sign of work well done, a certain energy and precision of movement; in the artistic sense it is no longer possible, for the tension of the will is too great to allow of suggestion. Writers of the phase are great public men and they exist after death as historical monuments, for they are without meaning apart from time and circumstance.» — y lo que le ocurre al estilo: existe como señal de trabajo bien hecho y no como sugerencia

«Once balance has been reached, the aim must be to use the Body of Fate to deliver the Creative Mind from the Mask, and not to use the Creative Mind to deliver the Mask from the Body of Fate. The being does this by so using the intellect upon the facts of the world that the last vestige of personality disappears.» — el giro de la fase 22, en que el fin se invierte y la personalidad se borra

«The Will, engaged in its last struggle with external fact (Body of Fate), must submit, until it sees itself as inseparable from nature perceived as fact, and it must see itself as merged into that nature through the Mask, either as a conqueror lost in what he conquers, or dying at the moment of conquest, or as renouncing conquest, whether it come by might of logic, or might of drama, or might of hand.» — las tres salidas que Yeats deja a esa lucha final

«It has become abstract, and the more it has sought the whole of natural fact, the more abstract it has become. One thinks of some spilt liquid which grows thinner the wider it spreads till at last it is but a film.» — la imagen del líquido derramado con que Yeats describe esa abstracción

«That which at Phase 21 was a longing for self-conscious simplicity, as an escape from logical complication and subdivision, is now (through the Mask from Phase 8) a desire for the death of the intellect.» — y su término: el deseo de la muerte del intelecto

«At Phase 21 it still sought to change the world, could still be a Shaw, a Wells, but now it will seek to change nothing, it needs nothing but what it may call “reality”, “truth”, “God’s Will”: confused and weary, through trying to grasp too much, the hand must loosen.» — el contraste con la fase anterior, que aún quería cambiar el mundo

«Here takes place an interchange between portions of the mind which resembles the interchange between the old and new primary, the old and new antithetical at Phase 1 and Phase 15. It is reflected, however, from the Wheel of the Principles I shall describe in Book II. The mind that has shown a predominantly emotional character, called that of the Victim, through the antithetical phases, now shows a predominantly intellectual character, called that of the Sage (though until Phase 1 has been passed it can but use intellect when true to phase to eliminate intellect); whereas the mind that has been predominantly that of the Sage puts on Victimage.» — el intercambio entre la Víctima y el Sabio que Yeats sitúa en esa fase

«An element in the nature is exhausted at the point of balance, and the opposite element controls the mind. One thinks of the gusts of sentimentality that overtake violent men, the gusts of cruelty that overtake the sentimental.» — y su forma corriente: las rachas de sentimentalismo en los violentos y de crueldad en los sentimentales

«A man of Phase 22 will commonly not only systematise, to the exhaustion of his will, but discover this exhaustion of will in all that he studies. If Lamarck, as is probable, was of Phase 21, Darwin was probably a man of Phase 22, for his theory of development by the survival of fortunate accidental varieties seems to express this exhaustion.» — Yeats adjudica a Darwin la fase 22 y lee su teoría como expresión de ese agotamiento de la voluntad

«The man himself is never weak, never vague or fluctuating in his thought, for if he brings all to silence, it is a silence that results from tension, and till the moment of balance, nothing interests him that is not wrought up to the greatest effort of which it is capable.» — y acota que ese agotamiento no es debilidad: el silencio de esa fase resulta de la tensión

«One never doubts for a moment that Flaubert was of the phase; all must be impersonal;166 he must neither like nor dislike character or event; he is “the mirror dawdling down a road” of Stendhal, with a clear brightness that is not Stendhal’s; and when we make his mind our own, we seem to have renounced our own ambition under the influence of some strange, far-reaching, impartial gaze.» — el ejemplo de Flaubert para la fase 22, con el espejo paseado por el camino de Stendhal

«We feel too that this man who systematised by but linking one emotional association to another has become strangely hard, cold and invulnerable, that this mirror is not brittle but of unbreakable steel. “Systematised” is the only word that comes to mind, but it implies too much deliberation, for association has ranged itself by association as little bits of paper and little chips of wood cling to one another upon the water in a bowl.» — Yeats corrige la palabra que usa: sistematizar implica demasiada deliberación para lo que describe

«In Dostoyevsky the “amalgamation” is less intellectual, less orderly, he, one feels, has reached the point of balance through life, not through the deliberate process of his art; his Whole will, not merely his intellectual will, has been shaken. His characters, in whom is reflected this broken will, are aware, unlike those of Bouvard and Pécuchet, those of the Temptation even, of some ungraspable Whole to which they have given the name of God. For a moment that fragment, that relation, which is our very being, is broken; they are at Udan Adan “wailing upon the edge of nonentity, wailing for Jerusalem, with weak voices almost inarticulate”; yet full submission has not come.» — el caso de Dostoyevski, cuya voluntad entera y no solo la intelectual quedó quebrada, con una cita de Blake por remate

«Swedenborg passes through his balance after fifty, a mind incredibly dry and arid, hard, tangible and cold, like the minerals he assayed for the Swedish government, studies a new branch of science: the economics, the natural history of Heaven; notes that there nothing but emotion, nothing but the ruling love exists.» — el caso de Swedenborg: pasado el punto de equilibrio, estudia la historia natural del cielo

«The desire to dominate has so completely vanished, “amalgamation” has pushed its way so far into the subconscious, into that which is dark, that we call it a vision.» — y por qué Yeats llama visión a ese resultado

«In the world of action such absurdity may become terrible, for men will die and murder for an abstract synthesis, and the more abstract it is the further it carries them from compunction and compromise; and as obstacles to that synthesis increase, the violence of their will increases.» — lo que la fase 22 produce en el terreno de la acción: se mata y se muere por una síntesis abstracta

«It is a phase as tragic as its opposite, and more terrible, for the man of this phase may, before the point of balance has been reached, become a destroyer and persecutor, a figure of tumult and of violence; or as is more probable—for the violence of such a man must be checked by moments of resignation or despair, premonitions of balance—his system will become an instrument of destruction and of persecution in the hands of others.» — y la forma más probable de ese daño: no el hombre sino su sistema en manos ajenas

«The seeking of Unity of Fact by a single faculty, instead of Unity of Being by the use of all, has separated a man from his genius.» — la fórmula con que Yeats separa la Unidad del Hecho de la Unidad del Ser

«A Landor, or a Morris, however violent, however much of a child he seem, is always a remarkable man; in Phases 19, 20 and 21 genius grows professional, something taken up when work is taken up, it begins to be possible to record the stupidities of men of genius in a scrapbook» — y su consecuencia visible: a partir de cierta fase el genio se vuelve profesional

«In the man of action, in a Napoleon, let us say, the stupidities lie hidden, for action is a form of abstraction that crushes everything it cannot express.» — por qué en el hombre de acción esa estupidez queda oculta

«At Phase 22 stupidity is obvious, one finds it in the correspondence of Karl Marx,171 in his banal abusiveness, while to Goncourt, Flaubert, as man, seemed full of unconsidered thought.172 Flaubert, says Anatole France, was not intelligent.» — los ejemplos con que Yeats la hace visible en la fase 22

«Dostoyevsky, to those who first acclaimed his genius, seemed when he laid down his pen an hysterical fool.» — otro ejemplo de esa estupidez visible en la fase 22

«carpet with an inky cork that he might tint them to his favourite colour, “impure purple”.» — y la anécdota de Herbert Spencer y las uvas, cuya primera mitad se corta antes de un compuesto partido por el salto de renglón

«Now that Will and Body of Fate are one, Creative Mind and Mask one also, we are no longer four but two; and life, the balance reached, becomes an act of contemplation.» — el resultado geométrico de la fase 22: de cuatro Faculties quedan dos, y la vida se hace contemplación

«There is no longer a desired object, as distinct from thought itself, no longer a Will, as distinct from the process of nature seen as fact; and so thought itself, seeing that it can neither begin nor end, is stationary. Intellect knows itself as its own object of desire; and the Will knows itself to be the world; there is neither change nor desire of change. For the moment the desire for reform has ceased and an absolute realism becomes possible.» — y el realismo absoluto que de ahí resulta, con el pensamiento inmóvil porque no puede ni empezar ni acabar

«The clock has run down and must be wound up again. The primary tincture is now greater than the antithetical, and the man must free the intellect from all motives founded upon personal desire, by the help of the external world, now for the first time studied and mastered for its own sake.» — la imagen con que Yeats marca el arranque del último cuarto

«He must kill all thought that would systematise the world, by doing a thing, not because he wants to, or because he should, but because he can; that is to say, he sees all things from the point of view of his own technique, touches and tastes and investigates technically.» — el modo propio de esa fase: hacer algo porque se puede, y ver todo desde la técnica propia

«Because he is without systematisation he is without a master, and only by his technical mastery can he escape from the sense of being thwarted and opposed by other men; and his technical mastery must exist, not for its own sake, though for its own sake it has been done, but for that which it reveals, for its laying bare—to hand and eye, as distinguished from thought and emotion—general humanity.» — y el fin al que esa maestría técnica sirve: poner al descubierto la humanidad general

«The True Mask is from the frenzied Phase 9 where personal life is made visible for the first time, but from that phase mastered by its Body of Fate, “enforced sensuality”, derived from Phase 7 where the instinctive flood is almost above the lips. It is called “wisdom” and this wisdom (personality reflected in a primary mirror) is general humanity experienced as a form of involuntary emotion and involuntary delight in the “minute particulars” of life.» — la Mask de la fase 23 y su nombre, con la fórmula de Blake por definición

«That whole must not be instinctive, bodily, natural, however, though it may seem so, for in reality he cares only for what is human, individual and moral.» — y su corrección: pese a las apariencias, a esa fase solo le importa lo humano, individual y moral

«if he is Rembrandt he discovers his Christ through anatomical curiosity, or through curiosity as to light and shade,177 and if he is Synge he takes a malicious pleasure in the contrast between his hero, whom he discovers through his instinct for comedy, and any hero in men’s minds.» — los dos ejemplos con que Yeats la ilustra: Rembrandt hallando a su Cristo por curiosidad anatómica y Synge por instinto de comedia

«He is never the mere technician that he seems, though when you ask his meaning he will have nothing to say, or will say something irrelevant or childish.» — y la advertencia con que cierra el retrato

«Synge must find rhythm and syntax in the Aran Islands,179 Rembrandt delight in all accidents of the visible world; yet neither, no matter what his delight in reality, shows it without exaggeration, for both delight in all that is wilful, in all that flouts intellectual coherence, and conceive of the world as if it were an overflowing cauldron.» — el modo de trabajar que Yeats atribuye a la fase 23: se halla, no se crea, y aun así se exagera

«Both will work in toil and in pain, finding what they do not seek, for, after Phase 22, desire creates no longer, will has taken its place; but that which they reveal is joyous.» — y la ley que rige después de la fase 22: el deseo ya no crea, crea la voluntad

«Whereas Shakespeare showed, through a style full of joy, a melancholy vision sought from afar; a style at play, a mind that served; Synge must fill many notebooks, clap his ear to that hole in the ceiling;180 and what patience Rembrandt must have spent in the painting of a lace collar though to find his subject he had but to open his eyes.» — el contraste de método entre Shakespeare y los hombres de la fase 23

«Phase 9 was dominated by desire, was described as having the greatest belief in its own desire possible to man, yet from it Phase 23 receives not desire but pity, and not belief but wisdom. Pity needs wisdom as desire needs belief, for pity is primary, whereas desire is antithetical.» — el trueque entre fases opuestas: donde había deseo y creencia hay ahora piedad y sabiduría

«When pity is separated from wisdom we have the False Mask, a pity like that of a drunken man, self-pity, whether offered in seeming to another or only to oneself: pity corrupted by desire.» — y la forma corrompida de esa piedad

«In the works of Synge there is much self-pity, ennobled to a pity for all that lived; and once an actress, playing his Deirdre, put all into a gesture. Concubar, who had murdered Deirdre’s husband and her friends, was in altercation with Fergus, who had demanded vengeance; “Move a little further off”, she cried, “with the babbling of fools”; and a moment later, moving like a somnambulist, she touched Concubar upon the arm, a gesture full of gentleness and compassion, as though she had said, “You also live”.» — el ejemplo que Yeats da de esa piedad ennoblecida, con el gesto de una actriz en su Deirdre

«In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he found the dialects of Aran and of Wicklow, there is brooding melancholy and morbid self-pity.183 He had to undergo an aesthetic transformation, analogous to religious conversion, before he became the audacious, joyous, ironical man we know.» — Yeats describe la transformación de Synge como conversión estética

«This transformation must have seemed to him a discovery of his true self, of his true moral being; whereas Shelley’s came at the moment when he first created a passionate image which made him forgetful of himself.» — y la compara con el momento equivalente en Shelley

«Primary art values above all things sincerity to the self or Will but to the self active, transforming, perceiving.» — lo que el arte primary valora, según Yeats

«The quarter of Intellect was a quarter of dispersal and generalisation, a play of shuttlecock with the first quarter of animal burgeoning, but the fourth quarter is a quarter of withdrawal and concentration, in which active moral man should receive into himself, and transform into primary sympathy the emotional self-realisation of the second quarter.» — el oficio que el sistema asigna al último cuarto: recibir y transformar en simpatía lo que el segundo realizó como emoción

«If he does not so receive and transform he sinks into stupidity and stagnation, perceives nothing but his own interests, or becomes a tool in the hands of others» — y lo que ocurre si no lo hace

«Rembrandt pitied ugliness, for what we call ugliness was to him an escape from all that is summarised and known, but had he painted a beautiful face, as antithetical man understands beauty, it would have remained a convention, he would have seen it through a mirage of boredom.» — por qué Rembrandt compadecía la fealdad, según el sistema

«When one compares the work of Rembrandt with that of David,185 whose phase was Phase 21; the work of Synge with that of Mr. Wells;186 one compares men whose antithetical tincture is breaking up and dissolving, with men in whom it is, as for a last resistance, tightening, concentrating, levelling, transforming, tabulating. Rembrandt and Synge but look on and clap their hands.» — el contraste entre las fases 21 y 23 medido en artistas

«All phases after Phase 15 and before Phase 22 unweave that which is woven by the equivalent phases before Phase 15 and after Phase 8.» — la simetría de destejido que Yeats enuncia para toda la rueda

«The Creative Mind, a discord to the Will, is from a phase of instinctive dispersal, and must turn the violent objectivity of the self or Will into a delight in all that breathes and moves: “The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew”.» — el oficio de la Creative Mind en la fase 23, rematado con un verso de Blake

«As the Mask now seems the natural self, which he must escape, the man labours to turn all within him that is from Phase 10 into some quality of Phase 24. At Phase 23, when in what seemed the natural self, the man was full of gloomy self-absorption and its appropriate abstractions, but now the abstractions are those that feed self-righteousness and scorn of others, the nearest the natural self can come to the self-expressing mastery of Phase 10. Morality, grown passive and pompous, dwindles to unmeaning forms and formulae.» — la fase 24 y su trabajo: las abstracciones que alimentan la propia rectitud

«This mill, created by the freed intellect, is a code of personal conduct, which, being formed from social and historical tradition, remains always concrete in the mind.» — el molino como código de conducta personal, hecho de tradición social e histórica

«All is sacrificed to this code; moral strength reaches its climax; the rage of Phase 10 to destroy all that trammels the being from without is now all self-surrender.» — el punto máximo de la fuerza moral, alcanzado por entrega

«The code must rule, and because that code cannot be an intellectual choice, it is always a tradition bound up with family, or office, or trade, always a part of history.» — por qué ese código no puede ser elección intelectual

«Unmerciful to those who serve and to himself, merciful in contemplating those who are served, he never wearies of forgiveness.» — el reparto de la misericordia en esa fase

«Men and women of the phase create an art where individuals only exist to express some historical code, or some historical tradition of action and of feeling, things written in what Raftery called the Book of the People, or settled by social or official station, even as set forth in Directory or Peerage.» — el arte que esa fase produce, con los individuos reducidos a su código histórico

«They submit all their actions to the most unflinching examination, and yet are without psychology, or self-knowledge, or self-created standard of any kind, for they but ask without ceasing, “Have I done my duty as well as So-and-so?”195 “Am I as unflinching as my fathers before me?” and though they can stand utterly alone, indifferent though all the world condemn, it is not that they have found themselves, but that they have been found faithful.» — la forma de su examen de conciencia, sin psicología ni norma propia

«Out of phase, seeking emotion instead of impersonal action, there is—desire being impossible—self-pity, and therefore discontent with people and with circumstance, and an overwhelming sense of loneliness, of being abandoned. All criticism is resented, and small personal rights and predilections, especially if supported by habit or position, are asserted with violence; there is great indifference to others’ rights and predilections; we have the bureaucrat or the ecclesiastic of satire, a tyrant who is incapable of insight or of hesitation.» — la fase 24 fuera de fase: el burócrata o el eclesiástico de la sátira

«That which characterises all phases of the last quarter, with an increasing intensity, begins now to be plain: persecution of instinct—race is transformed into a moral conception—whereas the intellectual phases, with increasing intensity as they approached Phase 22, persecuted emotion. Morality and intellect persecute instinct and emotion respectively, which seek their protection.» — el reparto de persecuciones a lo largo de la rueda: la moral persigue al instinto y el intelecto a la emoción

«Born as it seems to the arrogance of belief, as Phase 24 was born to moral arrogance, the man of the phase must reverse himself, must change from Phase 11 to Phase 25; use the Body of Fate to purify the intellect from the Mask, till this intellect accepts some social order, some condition of life, some organised belief: the convictions of Christendom perhaps.» — el trabajo de la fase 25: purificar el intelecto de la Mask hasta aceptar un orden social o una creencia organizada

«He must eliminate all that is personal from belief; eliminate the necessity for intellect by the contagion of some common agreement, as did Phase 23 by its technique, Phase 24 by its code.» — y el modo de hacerlo: por el contagio de un acuerdo común, como la 23 por la técnica y la 24 por el código

«It is called the Conditional Man, perhaps because all the man’s thought arises out of some particular condition of actual life, or is an attempt to change that condition through social conscience.» — la razón del nombre de la fase 25

«but his object is to limit and bind, to make men better, by making it impossible that they should be otherwise, to so arrange prohibitions and habits that men may be naturally good, as they are naturally black, or white, or yellow.» — y el fin que Yeats le atribuye: hacer buenos a los hombres volviéndoles imposible ser otra cosa

«No man of any other phase can produce the same instant effect upon great crowds; for codes have passed, the universal conscience takes their place.» — el efecto de esa fase sobre las multitudes, y por qué

«He has but one overwhelming passion, to make all men good, and this good is something at once concrete and impersonal; and though he has hitherto given it the name of some church, or state, he is ready at any moment to give it a new name, for, unlike Phase 24, he has no pride to nourish upon the past.» — y su desprendimiento respecto del nombre que ese bien lleve

«Moved by all that is impersonal, he becomes powerful as, in a community tired of elaborate meals, that man might become powerful who had the strongest appetite for bread and water.» — la comparación con que Yeats explica esa fuerza

«When out of phase he may, because Phase 11 is a phase of diffused personality and pantheistic dreaming, grow sentimental and vague, drift into some emotional abstract, his head full of images long separated from life, and ideas long separated from experience, turn tactless and tasteless, affirm his position with the greatest arrogance possible to man.» — la fase 25 fuera de fase, con las imágenes separadas de la vida y las ideas separadas de la experiencia

«Even when nearly wholly good he can scarce escape from arrogance; what old friend did Cardinal Newman cut because of some shade of theological difference?» — y la pregunta con que Yeats la ilustra, sin resolverla

«Living in the False Creative Mind produces, in all primary phases, insensitiveness, as living in the False Mask produces emotional conventionality and banality, because that False Creative Mind, having received no influence from the Body of Fate, no mould from individuals and interests, is as it were self-suspended.» — la explicación general de la insensibilidad en las fases primary

«At Phase 25 this insensitiveness may be that of a judge who orders a man to the torture, that of a statesman who accepts massacre as an historical necessity. One thinks of Luther’s apparent indifference to atrocities committed, now by the peasants, now against them, according to the way his incitements veered.» — y su forma en la fase 25, con Lutero por ejemplo

«The first phase of a triad is an expression of unrelated power. They surprised the multitude, they did not seek to master it; while those chosen for examples of Phase 24 turn the multitude into a moral norm. At Phase 25 men seek to master the multitude, not through expressing it, nor through surprising it, but by imposing upon it a spiritual norm.» — el reparto de las tres fases del tercer cuarto según el trato con la multitud

«Synge, reborn at Phase 25, might interest himself, not in the primary vigour and tragedy or his Aran Island countrymen, but in their conditions, their beliefs, and through some eccentricity (not of phase but horoscope), not in those shared with fellow Catholics, as Newman would, but in those shared with Japanese peasants, or in their belief as a part of all folk belief considered as religion and philosophy.» — el ejercicio hipotético con que Yeats explica la diferencia entre las fases 23 y 25

«Poets of this phase are always stirred to an imaginative intensity by some form of propaganda.» — lo que mueve a los poetas de la fase 25

«Neither Russell’s visionary painting nor his visions of “nature spirits” are, upon this supposition, true to phase.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre la pintura visionaria de George Russell dentro del sistema

«This painting is like many of his “visions”, an attempt to live in the Mask, caused by critical ideas founded upon antithetical art.» — y la explicación que le da: un intento de vivir en la Mask por ideas críticas ajenas a su fase

«His False Mask showed him what purport to be “nature spirits” because all phases before Phase 15 are in nature, as distinguished from God, and at Phase 11 that nature becomes intellectually conscious of its relations to all created things. When he desires the Mask, instead of flying that it may follow, it gives, instead of the intuition of God, a simulated intuition of nature.» — Yeats explica los espíritus de la naturaleza de Russell como intuición simulada, producida por desear la Mask en vez de huirla

«The most difficult of the phases, and the first of those phases for which one can find few or no examples from personal experience. I think that in Asia it might not be difficult to discover examples at least of Phases 26, 27 and 28, final phases of a cycle. If such embodiments occur in our present European civilisation they remain obscure, through lacking the instruments for self-expression. One must create the type from its symbols without the help of experience.» — Yeats declara la fase 26 la más difícil y la primera sin ejemplos de experiencia propia

«Desiring emotion the man becomes the most completely solitary of all possible men, for all normal communion with his kind, that of a common study, that of an interest in work done, that of a condition of life, a code, a belief shared, has passed; and without personality he is forced to create its artificial semblance.» — la soledad completa de la fase 26 fuera de fase, que fabrica un semblante artificial de personalidad

«It is perhaps a slander of history that makes us see Nero so, for he lacked the physical deformity which is, we are told, first among this phase’s inhibitions of personality.» — Yeats duda del ejemplo de Nerón por faltarle la deformidad física

«The deformity may be of any kind, great or little, for it is but symbolised in the hump that thwarts what seems the ambition of a Caesar or of an Achilles.» — y acota que la deformidad es cualquiera, simbolizada en la joroba

«If he live amid a theologically minded people, his greatest temptation may be to defy God, to become a Judas, who betrays, not for thirty pieces of silver, but that he may call himself creator.» — y su tentación mayor en un pueblo teológico: un Judas que traiciona para poder llamarse creador

«All phases from Phase 26 to Phase 11 inclusive should be gregarious; and from Phase 26 to Phase 28 there is, when the phase is truly lived, contact with supersensual life, or a sinking-in of the body upon its supersensual source, or desire for that contact and sinking.» — el contacto con la vida supersensual que el sistema asigna a las tres fases finales

«If the man of this phase seeks, not life, but knowledge of each separated life in relation to supersensual unity; and above all of each separated physical life, or action,—that alone is entirely concrete—he will, because he can see lives and actions in relation to their source and not in their relations to one another, see their deformities and incapacities with extraordinary acuteness.» — lo que la fase 26 puede ver, y por qué: cada vida en relación con su fuente y no con las otras

«His own past actions also he must judge as isolated and each in relation to its source; and this source, experienced not as love but as knowledge, will be present in his mind as a terrible unflinching judgment. Hitherto he could say to primary man, “Am I as good as So-and-so?” and when still antithetical he could say, “After all I have not failed in my good intentions taken as a whole”; he could pardon himself; but how pardon where every action is judged alone and no good action can turn judgment from the evil action by its side?» — y su efecto sobre el juicio de sí: no cabe perdón donde cada acto se juzga solo

«From Phase 22 to Phase 25, man is in contact with what is called the physical primary, or physical objective; from Phase 26 and Phase 4, the primary is spiritual; then for three phases, the physical primary returns. Spiritual, in this connection, may be understood as a reality known by analogy alone.» — el reparto de lo primary físico y lo primary espiritual en el último cuarto

«In the first and in the last crescents lunar nature is but a thin veil; the eye is fixed upon the sun and dazzles.» — la imagen con que Yeats cierra ese tramo

«In his seemingly natural man, derived from Mask, there is an extreme desire for spiritual authority; and thought and action have for their object display of zeal or some claim of authority. Emulation is all the greater because not based on argument but on psychological or physiological difference. At Phase 27, the central phase of the soul, of a triad that is occupied with the relations of the soul, the man asserts when out of phase his claim to faculty or to supersensitive privilege beyond that of other men; he has a secret that makes him better than other men.» — la fase 27 fuera de fase: la emulación por privilegio supersensible

«True to phase, he substitutes for emulation an emotion of renunciation, and for the old toil of judgment and discovery of sin, a beating upon his breast and an ecstatical crying out that he must do penance, that he is even the worst of men.» — y en fase: la renunciación en lugar de la emulación

«If he possess intellect he will use it but to serve perception and renunciation. His joy is to be nothing, to do nothing, to think nothing; but to permit the total life, expressed in its humanity, to flow in upon him and to express itself through his acts and thoughts.» — el oficio que el santo da al intelecto, si lo tiene

«He is not identical with it, he is not absorbed in it, for if he were he would not know that he is nothing, that he no longer even possesses his own body, that he must renounce even his desire for his own salvation, and that this total life is in love with his nothingness.» — la distinción que Yeats mantiene entre el santo y la vida total, y el límite que la sostiene

«Before the self passes from Phase 22 it is said to attain what is called the “Emotion of Sanctity”, and this emotion is described as a contact with life beyond death.» — la Emoción de Santidad y dónde la sitúa el sistema

«It comes at the instant when synthesis is abandoned, when fate is accepted.» — y el instante preciso en que se produce

«At Phases 23, 24 and 25 we are said to use this emotion, but not to pass from Phase 25 till we have intellectually realised the nature of sanctity itself, and sanctity is described as the renunciation of personal salvation.» — la definición de santidad que el sistema da: renuncia a la salvación personal

«After Phase 22 the man becomes aware of something which the intellect cannot grasp, and this something is a supersensual environment of the soul.» — lo que el hombre advierte después de la fase 22 y el intelecto no alcanza

«At Phases 26, 27 and 28 he permits those senses and those faculties to sink in upon their environment. He will, if it be possible, not even touch or taste or see: “Man does not perceive the truth; God perceives the truth in man”.» — el hundimiento de los sentidos en su ambiente, rematado con una sentencia sobre quién percibe la verdad

«The natural man, the Fool desiring his Mask, grows malignant, not as the Hunchback, who is jealous of those that can still feel, but through terror and out of jealousy of all that can act with intelligence and effect.» — la malignidad del Loco y su diferencia con la del Jorobado

«It is his true business to become his own opposite, to pass from a semblance of Phase 14 to the reality of Phase 28, and this he does under the influence of his own mind and body—he is his own Body of Fate—for having no active intelligence he owns nothing of the exterior world but his mind and body.» — el oficio del Loco: volverse su propio opuesto, sin más mundo exterior que su mente y su cuerpo

«He is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called “The Child of God”.» — la imagen de la paja llevada por el viento y el otro nombre de la fase

«At his worst his hands and feet and eyes, his will and his feelings, obey obscure subconscious fantasies, while at his best he would know all wisdom if he could know anything.» — los dos extremos del Loco

«The physical world suggests to his mind pictures and events that have no relation to his needs or even to his desires; his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts; and it is in this aimlessness that he finds his joy.» — y su alegría, hallada justamente en la falta de fin

«This is a supernatural incarnation, like Phase 15, because there is complete objectivity, and human life cannot be completely objective. At Phase 15 mind was completely absorbed by being, but now body is completely absorbed in its supernatural environment.» — la fase 1 como encarnación sobrenatural, simétrica de la 15

«The images of mind are no longer irrelevant even, for there is no longer anything to which they can be relevant, and acts can no longer be immoral or stupid, for there is no one there that can be judged.» — por qué en esa fase los actos no pueden ser inmorales ni estúpidos

«Mind has become indifferent to good and evil, to truth and falsehood; body has become undifferentiated, dough-like; the more perfect be the soul, the more indifferent the mind, the more dough-like the body; and mind and body take whatever shape, accept whatever image is imprinted upon them, transact whatever purpose is imposed upon them, are indeed the instruments of supernatural manifestation, the final link between the living and more powerful» — la plasticidad completa de la fase 1, con mente y cuerpo como instrumentos de manifestación sobrenatural

«There may be great joy; but it is the joy of a conscious plasticity; and it is this plasticity, this liquefaction, or pounding up, whereby all that has been knowledge becomes instinct and faculty.» — y su alegría: la de una plasticidad consciente por la que el saber se hace instinto

«All plasticities do not obey all masters, and when we have considered cycle and horoscope it will be seen how those that are the instruments of subtle supernatural will differ from the instruments of cruder energy; but all, highest and lowest, are alike in being automatic.» — y el rasgo común a todas ellas

«Finished at Thoor Ballylee, 1922, in a time of Civil War.» — el colofón con que se cierra el Libro I, fechado y situado por el propio Yeats

«In an essay called “The Friends of the People of Faery” in my Celtic Twilight I describe such an ascent and descent. I found the same movement in some story I picked up at Kiltartan, and suspected a mediaeval symbolism unknown to me at the time.» — en una nota propia, Yeats remite el ascenso y descenso de los ángeles a un ensayo suyo anterior y a un relato oído en Kiltartan

«Giovanni Gentile summarises Kant on time and space as follows: “Kant said that space is a form of external sense, time a form of internal sense. He meant that we represent nature, that is what we call the external world and think of as having been in existence before our knowledge and spiritual life began, in space, then we represent the multiplicity of the objects of our internal experience, or what we distinguish as diverse and manifold in the development of our spiritual life, not in space but in time” (Theory of Mind as Pure Act, chap. ix, H. Wildon Carr’s translation). He thinks these definitions which seem to separate time and space from one another require re-statement. It will be seen, however, when I come to what I have called the Four Principles, that my symbols imply his description of time as a spatialising act.» — en otra nota, Yeats toma de Gentile el resumen de Kant sobre tiempo y espacio y declara que sus propios símbolos implican el tiempo como acto espacializador

«Though reality is not logical it becomes so in our minds if we discover logical refutations of the writer or movement that is going out of fashion. There is always error, which has nothing to do with “the conflict” which creates all life. Croce in his study of Hegel identifies error with negation.» — una nota donde Yeats separa el error de lo que él llama el conflicto, que es lo que crea la vida

«A similar circular movement fundamental in the works of Giovanni Gentile is, I read somewhere» — en una nota propia, Yeats adjudica a Gentile un movimiento circular semejante al suyo

«foundation of the political thought of modern Italy. Individuals and classes complete their personality and then sink back to enrich the mass. Government must, it is held, because all good things have been created by class war, recognise that class war though it may be regulated must never end. It is the old saying of Heraclitus, “War is God of all, and Father of all, some it has made Gods and some men, some bond and some free”, and the converse of Marxian Socialism.» — y lo pone como fundamento del pensamiento político italiano de su tiempo, con la guerra de clases que nunca debe acabar y la sentencia de Heráclito por remate

«The Four Faculties somewhat resemble the four moments to which Croce has dedicated four books; that the resemblance is not closer is because Croce makes little use of antithesis and antinomy.» — y en otra, mide la distancia con Croce por el uso de la antítesis y la antinomia

«I give the Four Types of Wisdom as they were given. I have more than once transposed Heart and Intellect, suspecting a mistake; but have come to the conclusion that my instructors placed them correctly, the nature of the wisdom depending upon the position of the Creative Mind.» — Yeats consigna en nota que sospechó un error en la tabla, transpuso Heart e Intellect más de una vez y acabó dando por correctos a sus instructores

«This and the following Table are divided into ten divisions because they were given me in this form, and I have not sufficient confidence in my knowledge to turn them into the more convenient twelvefold divisions.» — y que conserva la división decimal de dos tablas por no fiarse de su propio conocimiento

«I quote from a book circulated privately among his followers. I saw it years ago but seem to remember it as now vague, now vulgar, and now magnificent in style.» — la nota con que Yeats sitúa la fuente de la cita de Thomas Lake Harris y juzga el libro de memoria

«I knew nothing of the Four Principles when I wrote the last Book: a script had been lost through frustration, or through my own carelessness.» — Yeats declara el orden en que le llegó el material y la pérdida de un guion por frustración o descuido propio

«The whole system is founded upon the belief that the ultimate reality, symbolised as the Sphere, falls in human consciousness, as Nicholas of Cusa was the first to demonstrate, into a series of antinomies.» — el fundamento que Yeats declara para todo el sistema, con Nicolás de Cusa como primero en demostrarlo

«The Principles are the Faculties transferred, as it were, from a concave to a convex mirror, or vice versa. They are Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit and Celestial Body.» — la imagen del espejo cóncavo y convexo, y los nombres de los cuatro Principles

«The Principles through their conflict reveal reality but create nothing. They find their unity in the Celestial Body. The Faculties find theirs in the Mask.» — el reparto de oficios: los Principles revelan sin crear, y cada cuaternidad halla su unidad en un lugar distinto

«The wheel or cone of the Faculties may be considered to complete its movement between birth and death, that of the Principles to include the period between lives as well. In the period between lives, the Spirit and the Celestial Body prevail, whereas Husk and Passionate Body prevail during life.» — los dos periodos que abarca cada rueda: la de las Faculties entre nacimiento y muerte, la de los Principles también entre vidas

«Behind the Husk (or sense) is the Daimon’s hunger to make apparent to itself certain Daimons, and the organs of sense are that hunger made visible.» — el origen que el sistema da a los órganos de los sentidos: el hambre del Daimon vuelta visible

«The Spirit, upon the other hand, is the Daimon’s knowledge, for in the Spirit it knows all other Daimons as the Divine Ideas in their unity. They are one in the Celestial Body.» — el Spirit como conocimiento del Daimon, donde las Ideas Divinas se dan en su unidad

«The Celestial Body is identified with necessity; when we perceive the Daimons as Passionate Body, they are subject to time and space, cause and effect; when they are known to the Spirit, they are known as intellectual necessity, because what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself.» — las dos maneras de percibir a los Daimons: bajo tiempo y espacio, o como necesidad intelectual

«The Spirit cannot know the Daimons in their unity until it has first perceived them as the objects of sense, the Passionate Body exists that it may “save the Celestial Body from solitude”.» — la razón de ser del Passionate Body según el sistema

«In the symbolism the Celestial Body is said to age as the Passionate Body grows young, sometimes the Celestial Body is a prisoner in a tower rescued by the Spirit.8 Sometimes, grown old, it becomes the personification of evil. It pursues, persecutes and imprisons the Daimons.» — las figuras con que el simbolismo trata al Celestial Body: prisionero en una torre, o envejecido y vuelto personificación del mal

«And because the Daimon seeks through the Husk that in Passionate Body which it needs, when Passionate Body predominates all is Destiny; the man dominated by his Daimon acts in spite of reason; whereas the man finds through reason or through the direct vision of the Spirit Fate or Necessity, which lies outside himself in Body of Fate or Celestial Body.» — el reparto entre Destiny y Fate según qué domine, y el hombre dominado por su Daimon que actúa contra la razón

«The Passionate Body is in another of its aspects identical with physical light; not the series of separated images we call by that name, but physical light, as it was understood by mediaeval philosophers, by Berkeley in Siris, by Balzac in Louis Lambert, the creator of all that is sensible.» — la identificación del Passionate Body con la luz física en el sentido de los filósofos medievales, de Berkeley y de Balzac

«It is because of the identification of light with nature that my instructors make the antithetical or lunar cone of the Faculties light and leave the solar dark. In the cone of the Principles, the solar cone is light and the other dark, but their light is thought not nature.» — por qué el sombreado de los conos se invierte al pasar de las Faculties a los Principles

«Spirit is the future, Passionate Body the present, Husk the past, deriving its name from the husk that is abandoned by the sprouting seed.» — el reparto temporal de los Principles y la etimología que Yeats da al Husk

«Husk is the past not merely because the objects are passed before we can know their images, but because those images fall in patterns and recurrences shaped by a past life or lives.» — y la segunda razón por la que el Husk es el pasado: sus imágenes caen en patrones formados por vidas anteriores

«I am not, however, certain that I understand the statement that Spirit is the future.15 I would have understood had my instructors said that Celestial Body was the future, for the ideal forms are only apparent through hope; perhaps they mean that we do not in reality seek these forms, that while separate from us they are illusionary, but that we do seek Spirit as complete self-realisation, and do not spirits sometimes say, “We have no present,VI we are the future”, meaning that they are reality as we perceive it under the category of the future?» — Yeats declara no estar seguro de entender que el Spirit sea el futuro, y ensaya dos lecturas sin decidirse

«My teachers do not characterise the Celestial Body, but it is doubtless the timeless. There seems to be a reversed attribution in the Faculties.» — y consigna otro hueco: sus maestros no caracterizan el Celestial Body

«Memory is a series of judgments and such judgments imply a reference to something that is not memory, that something is the Daimon, which contains within it, co-existing in its eternal moment, all the events of our life, all that we have known of other lives, or that it can discover within itself of other Daimons.» — la memoria como serie de juicios que remiten al Daimon, donde coexisten en su momento eterno todos los sucesos

«The ultimate reality because neither one nor many, concord nor discord, is symbolised as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into a series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what I shall presently describe as the thirteenth cone.» — la realidad última simbolizada como esfera sin fase, que al ser pensada se vuelve el Thirteenth Cone

«All things are present as an eternal instant to our Daimon (or Ghostly Self as it is called, when it inhabits the sphere), but that instant is of necessity unintelligible to all bound to the antinomies.» — y su límite: ese instante es por necesidad ininteligible para quien está atado a las antinomias

«My instructors have therefore followed tradition by substituting for it a Record where the images of all past events remain for ever “thinking the thought and doing the deed”.19 They are in popular mysticism called “the pictures in the astral light”, a term that became current in the middle of the nineteenth century, and what Blake called “the bright sculptures of Los’s Hall”.20 We may describe them as the Passionate Body lifted out of time.» — el Record que los instructores ponen en su lugar, que Yeats identifica con las imágenes de la luz astral y con las esculturas de Los en Blake

«My instructors, keeping as far as possible to the phenomenal world, have spent little time upon the sphere, which can be symbolised but cannot be known, though certain chance phrases show that they have all the necessary symbols.» — Yeats consigna qué parte del sistema quedó sin desarrollar, y por qué

«But this diagram implies a descent from Principle to Principle, a fall of water from ledge to ledge, whereas a system symbolising the phenomenal world as irrational because a series of unresolved antinomies, must find its representation in a perpetual return to the starting-point. The resolved antinomy appears not in a lofty source but in the whirlpool’s motionless centre, or beyond its edge.» — Yeats objeta su propio diagrama por implicar un descenso, y sitúa la antinomia resuelta en el centro inmóvil del remolino

«The emotions are formed by Will, acted upon by Mask and Celestial Body, or by Mask and Passionate Body. When Will, Passionate Body and Mask act together there is pleasure and pain in the act itself, but when Will acts alone all is abstract utility, economics, a mechanism to prolong existence.» — el reparto de combinaciones que producen las emociones, y lo que queda cuando el Will actúa solo

«When Passionate Body and Celestial Body give way to Mask we dwell in aesthetic process, so much skill in bronze or paint, or on some symbol that rouses emotion for emotion’s sake. When Mask and Passionate Body are in unison we desire emotion that excites the senses.» — las combinaciones que dan el proceso estético y el deseo sensual

«When Creative Mind is separated from Spirit there is abstract thought, classification, syllogism, number, everything whereby the fact is established, and the sum of such facts is the world of science and common sense. Creative Mind united to Spirit brings not fact but truth, not science but philosophy.» — la diferencia entre ciencia y filosofía que el sistema deriva de la unión o separación de Creative Mind y Spirit

«The Principles alone cannot distinguish between fact and hallucination. Ruskin, according to Frank Harris, saw a phantom cat at the end of the room and stooped to fling it out of the window.» — el límite que Yeats reconoce a los Principles, con la anécdota del gato fantasma de Ruskin referida por Frank Harris

«That cat may have had more significant form than the house cat; displayed all cat nature as if it were the work of some great artist; symbolised with every movement Spirit and Celestial Body; been visible to others—there are houses haunted by animals—but it was never littered, could not overset the jug, had no settled place in that continuity of images, that sum of facts that has yet no value in itself.» — y el modo en que Yeats la resuelve sin negarla: la forma pudo ser más significativa y aun así el gato no tenía sitio en la continuidad de los hechos

«There is no reason why March, June, etc., should have one phase, all others three; it is classification not symbolism.» — y su acotación: eso es clasificación y no simbolismo

«The relation between the wheel of twenty-eight phases and that of twelve months has turned out as insoluble to the symbolist as was that between the solar and lunar year to the ancient astronomers.» — el problema que Yeats declara insoluble, comparándolo con el del año solar y el lunar

«At the Ides of March, at the full moon in March, is the Vernal Equinox, symbolical of the first degree of Aries, the first day of our symbolical or ideal year, and at the middle of each month the sign changes.» — el punto de arranque del año simbólico y el momento en que cambia el signo

«A solar period is a day from sunrise to sunrise, or a year from March to March, a month from full moon to full moon. On the other hand a lunar period is a day from sunset to sunset, a year from September to September, a month from moonless night to» — las definiciones de periodo solar y lunar que el sistema usa

«In other words every month or phase when we take it as a whole is a double vortex moving from Phase 1 to Phase 28, or two periods, one solar and one lunar, which in the words of Heraclitus “live each other’s death, die each other’s life”.» — cada fase entera como doble vórtice, con la fórmula de Heráclito por remate

«My instructors fixed this upon my mind by saying that the man of a solar wheel stood upright whereas the man of a lunar lay horizontal like a sleeping man.» — la imagen con que los instructores le fijaron la diferencia entre rueda solar y lunar

«There is only one gyre because, whereas Husk faces an object alien to itself, Spirit’s object is of like nature to itself.» — por qué el cono del Spirit lleva un solo gyre

«The diamond is a convenient substitute for a sphere, the hour-glass for two meeting spheres.» — el valor que Yeats da a esas dos figuras: sustitutos cómodos de la esfera

«Taken in relation to the wheel, the diamond and the hour-glass are two pulsations, one expanding, one contracting. I can see them like jelly fish in clear water.» — y la imagen con que las ve

«Sometimes the automatic script substitutes this figure for the wheel itself, the revolving cones drawn without any containing circle, roughly indicating the phase by their position in relation to one another. The Communicators often scribbled it on margins, or on scraps of paper, without relation to the text as if to remind themselves of some phase they would speak of later.» — Yeats consigna la práctica de los comunicadores de garabatear la figura en los márgenes

«Death which comes when the Spirit gyre is at Aries is symbolised as spring or dawn; and birth which comes when the Spirit gyre is at Libra, as autumn or sunset. Incarnate life is night or winter, discarnate life is day or summer.» — la inversión de las estaciones que el sistema aplica a la vida y a la muerte

«A Great Wheel of twenty-eight incarnations is considered to take, if no failure compels repetition of a phase, some two thousand odd years, and twelve such wheels or gyres constitute a single great cone or year of some twenty-six thousand years.» — las medidas del ciclo grande: la rueda de veintiocho encarnaciones y el Gran Año

«But these twenty-six thousand yearsIX are but a norm, a convenient measure, much may shorten or lengthen the whole or some part of the whole.» — y su acotación: es norma y medida cómoda, no plazo fijo

«All men, it is assumed, once passed through their year at the same pace; all were at the same moment, at the same phase, but gradually some fell behind, and some ran ahead, and now there is a year that ends when the life-period of the individual winds itself up, and a Great Year which is a norm or average struck among the individual years.» — el desfase entre los años individuales y el Gran Año como promedio

«Hegel identifies Asia with Nature; he sees the whole process of civilisation as an escape from Nature; partly achieved by Greece, fully achieved by Christianity. Oedipus—Greece —solved the riddle of the Sphinx—Nature—compelled her to plunge from the precipice, though man himself remained ignorant and blundering. I accept his definition.» — Yeats acepta de Hegel la identificación de Asia con la Naturaleza y la civilización como fuga de ella

«When my great diagram of the wheel was first drawn for me, all from Phase 1 to Phase 15 had the word “Nature” written beside it; all from Phase 15 to Phase 1 the word “God”.» — y la hace coincidir con lo que su propio diagrama traía escrito

«I reject, however, his description of Nature in the Philosophy of History, a description that seems applicable to the first eight phases alone. Nor do I see Asia as he sees it. Asia is primary, solar, and only becomes Nature at Phase 1.» — y a la vez rechaza la descripción hegeliana de la Naturaleza y su lectura de Asia

«A wheel of the Great Year must be thought of as the marriage of symbolic Europe and symbolic Asia, the one begetting upon the other.X When it commenced at its symbolic full moon in March—Christ or Christendom was begotten by the West upon the East.» — la figura con que Yeats concibe el Gran Año: el matrimonio de una Europa y un Asia simbólicas

«This begetting has been followed by a spiritual predominance of Asia.43 After it must come an age begotten by the East upon the West that will take after its Mother in turn.» — y la alternancia que de ahí deriva, con una edad engendrada por Oriente sobre Occidente todavía por venir

«The Lunar Months of 2200 years apiece, in a year of 26,000 years, are years of civilisation, while the Solar Months of a similar symbolical lengthXI correspond to periods of religion.» — el reparto entre meses lunares de civilización y meses solares de religión

«For instance, classical civilisation—1000 B.C. to A.D. 1000 let us say—is represented by the movement of Will from Phase 1, the place of birth, to Phase 15, the place of death, and our own civilisation is now almost midway in the movement of the Will from Phase 15 to Phase 1.» — el ejemplo con que Yeats sitúa la civilización clásica y la propia en la rueda

«The student of ancient symbolism discovers the darkening and brightening fortnights of Brahminical symbolism, the fortnight during which the moon increases in light and represents an antithetical civilisation, and that during which it decreases and represents a primary civilisation.» — y la correspondencia que halla con las quincenas clara y oscura del simbolismo brahmánico

«At or near the central point of a lunar month of classical civilisation—the first degree of Aries on the Great Wheel—came the Christian primary dispensation, the child born in the Cavern.» — el lugar que el sistema da a la dispensación cristiana

«At or near the central point of our civilisation must come antithetical revelation, the turbulent46 child of the Altar.» — y la revelación antithetical que anuncia para el centro de la civilización presente

«Is that marriage of Europe and Asia a geographical reality? Perhaps, yet the symbolic wheel is timeless and spaceless.» — la pregunta que Yeats se hace sobre el estatuto geográfico de esa figura, y la respuesta que le da

«When I look in history for the conflict or union of antithetical and primary I seem to discover that conflict or union of races stated by Petrie and Schneider as universal law.49 A people who have lived apart and so acquired unity of custom and purity of breed unite with some other people through migration, immigration or conquest.» — Yeats toma de Petrie y de Schneider la ley de conflicto y unión de razas

«A race (the new antithetical) emerges that is neither the one nor the other, after somewhere about 500 years it produces, or so it seems, its particular culture or civilisation. This culture lives only in certain victorious classes; then comes a period of revolution (Phase 22) terminated by a civilisation of policemen, schoolmasters, manufacturers, philanthropists, a second soon exhausted blossoming of the race.» — y el ciclo que de ahí deriva: cultura, revolución y un segundo florecimiento de policías, maestros y filántropos

«All these cultures, as I am directed to see them, having attained some Achilles in the first blossoming, find pious Aeneas in their second, and that second is preceded by Utopian dreams that come to little because no civilisation can spend what it has not earned.» — la fórmula con que Yeats resume ese doble florecimiento, con Aquiles y Eneas por figuras

«The historian thinks of Greece as an advance on Persia, of Rome as in something or other an advance of Greece, and thinks it impossible that any man could prefer the hunter’s age to the agricultural. I, upon the other hand, must think all civilisations equal at their best; every phase returns, therefore in some sense every civilisation.» — Yeats niega el progreso entre civilizaciones y las declara iguales en su punto mejor, porque toda fase vuelve

«I think of the hunter’s age and that which followed immediately as a time when man’s waking consciousness had not reached its present complexity and stability. There was little fear of death, sometimes men lay down and died at will, the world of the gods could be explored easily whether through some orgiastic ceremony or in the trance of the ascetic. Apparitions came and went, bringing comfort in the midst of tragedy.» — lo que Yeats atribuye a la edad del cazador: poco miedo a la muerte y trato fácil con el mundo de los dioses

«I shall write little of the Principles except when writing of the life after death. They inform the Faculties and it is the Faculties alone that are apparent and conscious in human history.» — Yeats acota el papel de los Principles en su exposición histórica

«Vico said that we know history because we create it, but as nature was created by God only God can know it.» — y toma de Vico la razón por la que la historia se conoce y la naturaleza no

«I must now explain a detail of the symbolism which has come into my poetry and, in ways I am not yet ready to discuss, into my life.» — Yeats anuncia un detalle del simbolismo que pasó a su poesía y a su vida, y declara no estar listo para explicar lo segundo

«These two conjunctions which express so many things are certainly, upon occasion» — las dos conjunciones planetarias que el sistema pone a guardar la fase 15

«mind, love and its lure, contrasted with introspective knowledge of the mind’s self-begotten unity, an intellectual excitement.» — y lo que oponen: el amor y su señuelo frente al saber introspectivo de la unidad que la mente se engendra

«They stand, so to speak, like heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase.» — la figura con que Yeats las sitúa

«In certain lines written years ago in the first excitement of discovery I compared one to the Sphinx and one to Buddha. I should have put Christ instead of Buddha, for according to my instructors Buddha was a Jupiter-Saturn influence.» — Yeats corrige aquí un verso propio anterior: debió poner a Cristo donde puso a Buda

«As a religious dispensation begins and ends at Phase 15, a Mars-Venus conjunction presides over its beginning and a Saturn-Jupiter over its close.» — el reparto de conjunciones sobre el comienzo y el fin de una dispensación

«The influx that dominates a primary dispensation comes a little after the start of the dispensation itself, at its Phase 16 perhaps, and that which dominates an antithetical dispensation a considerable time before the close of the preceding primary dispensation, its Phase 26 let us say; it is, as it were, not so much a breaking out of new life as the vivification of old intellect.» — la diferencia de tiempo con que llega el influjo en cada tipo de dispensación

«Leibniz, whose logical monads resemble somewhat my perceptive Daimons, thought there must be many monads much greater than those of individual men and women.» — y compara sus Daimons con las mónadas de Leibniz, señalando la diferencia

«Lionel Johnson was fond of quoting from Dionysius the Areopagite, “He has set the borders of his nations according to his angels”, but Swedenborg thought that all angels had once been men.» — las dos autoridades que Yeats pone una junto a otra sin armonizarlas: los ángeles de las naciones y la tesis de Swedenborg de que todo ángel fue hombre

«The passage from Phase 1 to Phase 15 is always, whether we call it a month or six months or twelve months, or an individual life, set over against a passage from Phase 15 to Phase 1; and whether we consider the cone that of incarnate or that of discarnate life, the gyre of Husk or Will cuts the gyre of Spirit or Creative Mind with the same conflict of seasons,XV a being racing into the future passes a being racing into the past, two footprints perpetually obliterating one another, toe to heel, heel to toe.» — la imagen de las dos huellas que se borran una a otra, con que Yeats describe el cruce de los gyres

«that month of the other cone which corresponds to ours is always called by my instructors the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone, for every month is a cone.» — el nombre que los instructores dan al mes correspondiente del cono contrario

«It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve cycles of time and space. The cone which intersects ours is a cone in so far as we think of it as the antithesis to our thesis, but if the time has come for our deliverance it is the phaseless sphere, sometimes called the Thirteenth Sphere, for every lesser cycle contains within itself a sphere that is, as it were, the reflection or messenger of the final deliverance.» — el Thirteenth Cone como cono o como esfera sin fase, según haya llegado o no la hora de la liberación

«Within it live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self; our expanding cone seems to cut through its gyre; spiritual influx is from its circumference, animate life from its centre.» — quiénes viven en esa esfera y de dónde viene cada influjo

«Eternity also”, says Hermes in the Asclepius dialogue, “though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”» — la frase del Asclepio que Yeats trae para esa esfera

«When Shelley’s Demogorgon—eternity—comes from the centre of the earth it may so come because Shelley substituted the earth for such a sphere.» — y la conjetura con que lee al Demogorgon de Shelley

«All these symbols can be thought of as the symbols of the relations of men and women and of the birth of children. We can think of the antithetical and primary cones, or wheels, as the domination, now by the man, now by the woman, and of a child born at Phase 15 or East as acquiring a primary character from its father who is at Phase 1 or West and of a child born at Phase 1 or West as acquiring an antithetical character from its father at Phase 15, or East, and so on, man and woman being alternately Western and Eastern.» — la lectura sexual y generativa que Yeats propone para todo el simbolismo

«When we so think of it we recreate the lives of Christ and St. John as they are symbolised in the Christian year, Christ begotten in spring and brought forth in midwinter, begotten in joy and brought forth in sorrow, and St. John begotten in autumn and brought forth in midsummer, begotten in sorrow and brought forth in joy.» — la simetría entre Cristo y san Juan que de ahí sale, engendrado uno en primavera y el otro en otoño

«Coventry Patmore claimed the Church’s authority for calling Christ supernatural love and St. John natural love, and took pleasure in noticing that Leonardo painted a Dionysus like a St. John, a St. John like a Dionysus.» — y la autoridad que Coventry Patmore reclamaba para llamar a uno amor sobrenatural y al otro amor natural

«But I need not go further, for all the symbolism of this book applies to begetting and birth, for all things are a single form which has divided and multiplied in time and space.» — la razón que Yeats da para no seguir: todo el simbolismo del libro es de engendramiento y nacimiento

«There are certain numbers, certain obscure calculations in Plato’s Republic meant to suggest and hide the methods adopted by the ruling philosophers to secure that the right parents shall beget the right children, and it is foretold that when these numbers and calculations are forgotten the Republic must decay.» — los números ocultos de la República y la decadencia que su olvido acarrea

«If I may think of those days or incarnations as periods wherein symbolic man grows old and young alternately, as he does in certain other Platonic periods, I have, but for a different length and enumeration, my Great Wheel of twelve cycles.» — Yeats aproxima el Número de Oro a su propia Gran Rueda, con la salvedad de la longitud

«Plato may have brought such an ideal year into the story, its periods all of exactly the same length, to remind us that he dealt in myth.» — y la conjetura de que Platón lo trajera para recordar que trataba en mito

«Will some mathematician some day question and understand, as I cannot, and confirm all, or have I also dealt in myth?» — y la pregunta con que Yeats deja abierto el estatuto de todo eso

«When my instructors see woman as man’s goal and limit, rather than as mother, they symbolise her as Mask and Body of Fate, object of desire and object of thought, the one a perpetual rediscovery of what the other destroys; the seventh house of the horoscope where one finds friend and enemy» — cómo simbolizan a la mujer los instructores cuando no la ven como madre

«I have now described many symbols which seem mechanical because united in a single structure, and of which the greater number, precisely because they tell always the same story, may seem unnecessary. Yet every symbol, except where it lies in vast periods of time and so beyond our experience, has evoked for me some form of human destiny, and that form, once evoked, has appeared everywhere, as if there were but one destiny, as my own form might appear in a room full of mirrors.» — Yeats reconoce el aire mecánico de su simbolismo y lo defiende por lo que cada símbolo le ha evocado

«The present Pope has said in his last Encyclical that the natural union of man and woman has a kind of sacredness.70 He thought doubtless of the marriage of Christ and the Church, whereas I see in it a symbol of that eternal instant where the antinomy is resolved.» — Yeats consigna la enseñanza papal sobre la unión natural y le da un sentido distinto, sin discutirla

«My instructors identify consciousness with conflict, not with knowledge, substitute for subject and object and their attendant logic a struggle towards harmony, towards Unity of Being.» — la definición de conciencia que Yeats atribuye a sus instructores: conflicto y no conocimiento

«That bird signifies truth when it eats, evacuates, builds its nest, engenders, feeds its young; do not all intelligible truths lie in its passage from egg to dust?» — y la pregunta con que la remata

«Passages written by Japanese monks on attaining Nirvana, and one by an Indian, run in my head. “I sit upon the side of the mountain and look at a little farm. I say to the old farmer, ‘How many times have you mortgaged your farm and paid off the mortgage?’ I take pleasure in the sound of the rushes.”» — el primero de los pasajes zen que Yeats declara recordar de memoria

«You ask me what is my religion and I hit you upon the mouth.” “Ah! Ah! The lightning crosses the heavens, it passes from end to end of the heavens. Ah! Ah!”» — los dos últimos de esa serie, que Yeats trae sin comentario

«In the following passage from The Friend Coleridge writes “reason” where I write “mind”. “I shall have no objection to define reason with Jacobi, with my friend Helvetius, as an organ bearing the same relation to its spiritual object, the universal, the eternal, the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. But then it must be added that it is an organ identical with its appropriate objects. Thus God, the soul, eternal truth etc. are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason . . . whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason.” Later on he distinguishes between “the outward sense and the mind’s eye which is reason”; on the next page between mind and its object, or as we put it Spirit and Celestial Body, “reasoning (or reason in this its secondary sense) does not consist in the ideas or in their clearness but simply, when they are in the mind, in seeing whether they coincide with each other or no”.» — en nota propia, Yeats hace equivaler la razón de Coleridge a lo que él llama mente, y la distinción entre razón y su objeto a la de Spirit y Celestial Body

«See Blake’s Mental Traveller. Neither Edwin Ellis nor I, nor any commentator has explained the poem, though one or another has explained certain passages. The student of A Vision will understand it at once. Did Blake and my instructors draw upon some unknown historical source, some explanation perhaps of the lunar circuit?» — en otra nota, Yeats declara sin explicar el poema de Blake y sostiene que el lector de este libro lo entenderá de inmediato; la pregunta sobre una fuente común queda abierta

«The Hermetic Fragments draw somewhat the same distinction. Necessity comes, they say, upon us through the events of life and must be obeyed. Destiny sows the seeds of those events and impels evil men. One fragment adds “Order” connecting “Necessity” and “Destiny” and identifies it with the Cosmos. The three seem to constitute a Hegelian triad. I am summarising from Scott’s Hermetics Exc. vii. Exc. viii. and Asclepius iii. Section 39. The difference between their point of view and mine is that I cannot consider that Destiny inspires only evil men. The Hermetic Fragments are full of Platonic Intellectualism. Destiny becomes evil when the Passionate Body is subject to Necessity.» — Yeats coteja su distinción entre Necessity y Destiny con la de los fragmentos herméticos y marca dónde discrepa: él no acepta que el Destino inspire solo a los malos

«Collyns Simon in his index to The Principles of Human Knowledge calls Light a “Sensation, not the condition or cause of one, as some physicists endeavour to teach”. Berkeley, according to Hone and Rossi, meant by Light not “Sensation” but that which “brings out Sensation . . . a semi-material agent” discoverable by mind alone; but Simon is right, for Berkeley speaks of Light as discoverable by animals, where all to us seems dark, and uses this argument to prove that Light is all-pervading. In the Commonplace Book he warned himself to avoid the theologically dangerous theme of personality. Did he in his private thoughts come to regard Light as the creative act of a universal self dwelling in all selves? Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, described Light as corporeality itself, and thought that in conjunction with the first matter, it engendered all bodies. Pierre Duhem analyses his philosophy in Le Système du Monde, vol. v, pp. 356, 357, 358. Plotinus describes the Light seen with our eyes open and that seen when we rub our closed eyes, as a light coming from the soul itself. The modern term “Astral Light” implies this source and is probably derived from some seventeenth-century Platonist, who symbolised the soul as a star, but the popular writers who employ it seem to think that the Light seen in Spiritual Vision alone is from that star.» — la nota más larga del Libro II, donde Yeats reúne a Berkeley, Grosseteste, Duhem y Plotino sobre la luz, y sitúa el origen del término luz astral en algún platónico del XVII

«Dante describes the spirits in the Inferno as having no present, as they approach the present all grows dim. Their future is not, however, the future of spiritual freedom.» — una nota que trae a Dante sobre los espíritus sin presente, y acota que ese futuro no es el de la libertad espiritual

«My instructors are playing with the period necessary to complete the precession of the Equinox from Aries to Aries. It has been a part of literary tradition since Edmund Spenser described it in The Faerie Queene, Book V, Introd. stanzas i–ii. They have, however, adopted the twenty-six thousand years of modern astronomy instead of the thirty-six thousand years Spenser took from the Platonic Year.» — Yeats consigna en nota que sus instructores adoptaron los veintiséis mil años de la astronomía moderna en lugar de los treinta y seis mil del Año Platónico

«Flinders Petrie in The Revolutions of Civilisation says that the Eastern phase is five hundred years ahead of Europe, and draws attention to the coincidence between the rise of Arabian civilisation and the fall of that of Europe. My system seems to imply that the rise of Arabian civilisation and that of Christianity are the same phenomena. European art did not cast off the influence of Eastern art, as the Japanese interpreter of Botticelli has shown, until the establishment of “tonal values” after the Renaissance as a principal vehicle of expression. They have been accompanied by the decline of Christianity. It is not, however, easy to say how far I should interpret my symbols according to the letter.» — y en otra nota, tras derivar de Petrie que el auge árabe y el cristiano son un mismo fenómeno, declara no saber hasta dónde leer sus símbolos al pie de la letra

«I thought I discovered this antithesis of the seasons when some countryman told me that he heard the lambs of Faery bleating in November, and, read in some heroic tale of supernatural flowers in midwinter. I may have deceived myself, but if I did I got out of the deception the opening passage in my play The Hour-Glass: “Where is the passage I am to explain to my pupils to-day? Here it is, and the book says that it was written by a beggar on the walls of Babylon: ‘There are two living countries, the one visible and the other invisible; and when it is winter with us it is summer in that country» — en nota, Yeats fecha en un dicho campesino el hallazgo de la antítesis de las estaciones, admite que pudo engañarse y dice qué sacó de ese engaño

«I have compared these memories with their source in Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism, an admirable and exciting book, and find that they are accurate except that I have substituted here and there better sounding words.» — la nota en que Yeats declara haber sustituido palabras de su fuente por otras que le sonaban mejor

«Paul Valéry in the “Cimetière Marin” describes a seaside cemetery, a recollection, some commentator explains, of a spot known in childhood.2 The midday light is the changeless absolute and its reflection in the sea “les œuvres purs d’une cause éternelle”.3 The sea breaks into the ephemeral foam of life; the monuments of the dead take sides as it were with the light and would with their inscriptions and their sculptured angels persuade the poet that he is the light, but he is not persuaded.» — Yeats resume el poema de Valéry y el rechazo del poeta a dejarse persuadir por los monumentos

«Then after certain poignant stanzas and just when I am deeply moved he chills me. This metropolitan, who has met so many reformers, who has learnt as a part of good manners to deny what has no remedy, cries out “Cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Elée!”, condemning that problem of a tortoise and Achilles because it suggested that all things only seemed to pass; and in a passage of great eloquence rejoices that human life must pass.» — el punto en que Yeats se aparta de ese poema

«My imagination goes some years backward, and I remember a beautiful young girl singing at the edge of the sea in Normandy words and music of her own composition. She thought herself alone, stood barefooted between sea and sand; sang with lifted head of the civilisations that there had come and gone, ending every verse with the cry: “O Lord, let something remain”.» — la escena que Yeats opone al poema de Valéry

«I cannot imagine an age without metropolitan poet and singing girl, though I am convinced that the Upanishads—somebody had already given her the Pyramids—were addressed to the girl.» — la fórmula con que Yeats reparte los destinatarios

«Certain Upanishads describe three states of the soul, that of waking, that of dreaming, that of dreamless sleep, and say man passes from waking through dreaming to dreamless sleep every night and when he dies.7 Dreamless sleep is a state of pure light, or of utter darkness according to our liking, and in dreams “the spirit serves as light for itself”. “There are no carts, horses, roads, but he makes them for himself.”» — los tres estados del alma que Yeats toma de los Upanishads

«I am convinced that this ancient generalisation, in so far as it saw analogy between a “separated spirit”, or phantom and a dream of the night, once was a universal belief, for I find it, or some practice founded upon it, everywhere. Certainly I find it in old Irish literature, in modern Irish folk-lore, in Japanese plays, in Swedenborg, in the phenomena of spiritualism, accompanied as often as not by the belief that the living can assist the imaginations of the dead.» — Yeats declara universal la analogía entre el fantasma y el sueño, y enumera dónde la encuentra

«A farmer near Doneraile once told me that an aunt of his own appeared stark naked after her death and complained that she could not go about with the other spirits unless somebody cut a dress to her measure and gave it to a poor woman in her name.11 This done she appeared wearing the dress and gave thanks for it.» — el primero de los testimonios que Yeats trae, referido por un campesino de Doneraile

«Once an old woman came to Coole Park, when I was there, to tell Lady Gregory that Sir William Gregory’s ghost had a tattered sleeve and that a coat must be given to some beggar in his name.» — y el segundo, oído en Coole Park

«May I not use such tales to interpret all those model houses, boats, weapons, slaves, all those portraits and statues buried in ancient tombs?» — la pregunta con que Yeats enlaza esos relatos con los ajuares de las tumbas antiguas

«Certain London spiritualists for some years past have decked out a Christmas tree with presents that have each the names of some dead child upon it, and sitting in the dark on Christmas night they hear the voice of some grown-up person, who seems to take the presents from the tree, and the clamorous voices of the children as they are distributed.15 Yet the presents still hang there and are given next day to an hospital.» — el rito de espiritistas londinenses que Yeats describe, con los regalos que siguen colgados

«It was essential that the clothes should be given in the name of the dead, that the portrait should be the ghost’s own portrait, that the presents for the children should be dedicated or given, not merely hung there; in dreams we finish what we began awake or what the waking suggest.» — la condición común que Yeats extrae de todos esos casos

«I think of two ghost lovers in a Japanese play asking a wandering Buddhist priest to marry them, of two that appeared to a Catholic priest in Aran, according to an Aran tale, with a like object,16 of a young spirit medium who promised that she would marry a certain old man after death but was compelled by her controls to withdraw the promise because, though she had not meant it, she might have had to fulfil it, of an Indian who told Florence Farr17 that he hated acting, for if a man died playing Hamlet he would be Hamlet after death.» — la serie de casos con que lo ilustra, del Japón a Aran y a la médium que hubo de retirar su promesa

«Upon the other hand a spirit may meet some spirit in the séance-room to ask forgiveness for something done in life, a forgiveness not always granted, and once at the request of a certain dead Sister of Mercy I discovered where the Mother Superior she had served under in the Crimea lived and died, and she came again to thank me.» — el caso en que Yeats se declara parte, con la Hermana de la Caridad y la Madre Superiora de Crimea

«Because I had connected their lives here she had found her there, though not to share her state, being less holy. I had suggested away the nightmare as though sitting by the bedside of a somnambulist.» — y el modo en que lo interpreta

«Because we no longer discover the still unpurified dead through our own and others’ dreams, and those in freedom through contemplation, religion cannot answer the atheist, and philosophy talks about a first cause or a final purpose, when we would know what we were a little before conception, what we shall be a little after burial.» — la consecuencia que Yeats saca de haber perdido ese trato: ni la religión ni la filosofía contestan lo que se pregunta

«The period between death and birth is divided into states analogous to the six solar months between Aries and Libra.IV,22 The first state is called The Vision of the Blood Kindred, a vision of all those bound to us through Husk and Passionate Body.» — el reparto del periodo entre muerte y nacimiento, y el nombre del primer estado

«The Spirit has its first vision and understanding of the Celestial Body, but that it may do so, it requires the help of the incarnate, for without them it is without language and without will.» — y la dependencia que el sistema establece: sin los encarnados el Spirit queda sin lengua y sin voluntad

«If the Husk so persist, the Spirit still continues to feel pleasure and pain, remains a fading distortion of living man, perhaps a dangerous succuba or incubus, living through the senses and nerves of others.» — lo que queda si el Husk persiste, que Yeats nombra sin suavizarlo

«If there has been great animal egotism, heightened by some moment of tragedy, the Husk may persist for centuries, recalled into a sort of life, and united to its Spirit, at some anniversary, or by some unusually susceptible person or persons connected with its past life.» — y las condiciones en que ese resto puede durar siglos

«Leap Castle, though burnt down during our Civil War and still a ruin, is haunted by what is called an evil spirit which appears as a sheep with short legs and decaying human head.» — el caso de Leap Castle, con la figura que describe

«I suggest that some man with the Husk exaggerated and familiar with religious symbolism, torn at the moment of death between two passions, terror of the body’s decay with which he identified himself, and an abject religious humility, projected himself in this image.» — y la explicación que Yeats propone para ella, formulada como conjetura

«If the Passionate Body does not disappear, the Spirit finds the Celestial Body, only after long and perhaps painful dreams of the past, and it is because of such dreams that the second state is sometimes called the Dreaming Back.» — el nombre del segundo estado y su razón

«If death has been violent or tragic the Spirit may cling to the Passionate Body for generations. A gambler killed in a brawl may demand his money,VI a man who has believed that death ends all may see himself as a decaying corpse,VII,30 nor is there any reason why some living man might not see reflected in a mirror or otherwise some beloved ghost, thinking herself unobserved, powdering her face as in Mr. Davies’ poem.» — lo que el sistema admite tras una muerte violenta, con tres ejemplos y un poema

«The true name of the second state,IX that of Taurus, is the Return and it has for its object the Spirit’s separation from the Passionate Body, considered as nature, and from the Husk considered as pleasure and pain.» — el nombre verdadero del segundo estado y su objeto

«In the Dreaming Back, the Spirit is compelled to live over and over again the events that had most moved it; there can be nothing new, but the old events stand forth in a light which is dim or bright according to the intensity of the passion that accompanied them. They occur in the order of their intensity or luminosity, the more intense first, and the painful are commonly the more intense, and repeat themselves again and again.» — el orden en que se repiten los sucesos en el Dreaming Back, y por qué los dolorosos vuelven más

«In the Return, upon the other hand, the Spirit must live through past events in the order of their occurrence, because it is compelled by the Celestial Body to trace every passionate event to its cause until all are related and understood, turned into knowledge, made a part of itself.» — y el orden contrario en el Return, donde cada suceso se traza hasta su causa y se vuelve conocimiento

«All that keeps the Spirit from its freedom may be compared to a knot that has to be untied or to an oscillation or a violence that must end in a return to equilibrium.» — las dos imágenes con que Yeats describe lo que retiene al Spirit

«I think of the Homeric contrast between Heracles passing through the night, bow in hand, and Heracles, the freed spirit, a happy god among the gods.» — el contraste homérico entre las dos figuras de Heracles

«And Heracles the mighty I saw when these went by; His image indeed: for himself mid the gods that never die Sits glad at the feast, and Hebe fair-ankled there doth hold, The daughter of Zeus the mighty and Hera shod with gold.» — los versos de Morris con que lo cita

«After its imprisonment by some event in the Dreaming Back, the Spirit relives that event in the Return and turns it into knowledge, and then falls into the Dreaming Back once more.» — la alternancia entre los dos estados

«The Spirit finds the concrete events in the Passionate Body, but the names and words of the drama it must obtain, the Faculties having gone when the Husk and Passionate Body disappeared, from some incarnate Mind, and this it is able to do because all spirits inhabit our unconsciousness or, as Swedenborg said, are the Dramatis Personae of our dreams.» — de dónde saca el Spirit el lenguaje del drama, con la fórmula de Swedenborg

«Though only visible to the seer when Spirit and Passionate Body are joined, they are constantly repeated until, at last forgotten by the Spirit, they fade into the Thirteenth Cone.» — cuándo son visibles esas apariciones y en qué acaban

«The more complete the Dreaming Back the more complete the Return and the more happy or fortunate the next incarnation.XII After each event of the Dreaming Back the Spirit explores not merely the causes but the consequences of that event.» — la relación entre los dos estados y la encarnación siguiente

«Where the soul has great intensity and where those consequences affected great numbers, the Dreaming Back and the Return may last with diminishing pain and joy for centuries.» — el plazo que el sistema admite para esos estados

«If the event was shared by many, those many may seem present and yet be but the figures of the dream. Each must dream the event alone.» — la soledad del sueño, aunque el suceso haya sido compartido

«Sometimes the Spirit under the influence of the Celestial Body and what are called Teaching Spirits—Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone—may not merely dream through the consequences of its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the living.» — la intervención que el sistema permite a los Teaching Spirits

«I have found a belief among Irish country people that the death of father or mother may sometimes bring good luck to child or family. Upon the other hand our actions affect the dead.» — la creencia campesina irlandesa que Yeats consigna, y la reciprocidad que de ahí deriva

«Some years ago there were various small inexplicable noises and movements in my house, and I was told that a certain Spirit wanted to discover certain facts necessary to her Dreaming Back by creating discussion, or that Teaching Spirits wished to assist her by creating that discussion.» — el caso doméstico que Yeats refiere sin arbitrar entre las dos explicaciones que le dieron

«It is from the Dreaming Back of the dead, though not from that of persons associated with our past, that we get the imagery of ordinary sleep. Much of a dream’s confusion comes from the fact that the image belongs to some unknown person, whereas emotion, names, language, belong to us alone.» — el origen que Yeats atribuye a las imágenes del sueño común

«Having kept a steady watch upon my dreams for years I know that so long as I dream in words I know that my father, let us say, was tall and bearded. If, on the other hand, I dream in images and examine the dream immediately upon waking I may discover him there represented by a stool or the eyepiece of a telescope, but never in his natural shape, for we cast off the concrete memory (lose contact with the Record as it affects ourselves) but not the abstract memory when we sleep.» — la observación de sus propios sueños con que lo sostiene, y la distinción entre memoria concreta y abstracta

«Teaching Spirits are Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, or their representatives who may be chosen from any state, and are those who substitute for Husk and Passionate Body supersensual emotion and imagery; the “unconscious” or unapparent for that which has disappeared; the Spirit itself being capable of knowledge only.» — la definición de los Teaching Spirits y el oficio que cumplen

«We must, however, avoid attributing to them the pure benevolence our exhausted Platonism and Christianity attribute to an angelical being. Our actions, lived in life, or remembered in death, are the food and drink of the Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone, that which gives them separation and solidity.» — la advertencia de Yeats contra atribuirles benevolencia, y lo que dice que se alimentan

«The physical and moral life is completed, without the addition of any new element that the objects of hope may be completed, for only that which is completed can be known and dismissed.» — por qué la vida se completa ahí: solo lo completo puede conocerse y despedirse

«Houses appear built by thought in a moment, the spirit seems to eat, drink and smoke, the child appears to grow to maturity, or perhaps with the help of Teaching Spirits a Christmas Tree is created, Christ or some saint or angel descends, dressed as in statue or picture; if the life was evil, then the Phantasmagoria is evil, the criminal completes his crime.» — lo que ocurre en ese estado, incluido el caso en que la vida fue mala

«It is indeed a necessary act of the human soul that has cut off the incarnate and discarnate from one another, plunging the discarnate into our “unconsciousness”. The Phantasmagoria completes not only life but imagination.» — Yeats atribuye a un acto necesario del alma la separación entre encarnados y desencarnados

«Cornelius Agrippa speaks of those among the dead who imagine themselves “surrounded by flames and persecuted by demons” and, according to his seventeenth-century translator, confers upon them the name “Hobgoblin”.» — Yeats trae a Agrippa sobre los muertos que se creen rodeados de llamas, y el nombre que les da su traductor del XVII

«The various legends of spirits that appear under the impulse of moral and emotional suffering must be attributed to this state and not to the Dreaming Back, where the constraint is physical.» — la distinción con que Yeats reparte esas leyendas entre dos estados: constricción moral y constricción física

«I think of a girl in a Japanese play whose ghost tells a priest of a slight sin, if indeed it was sin, which seems great because of her exaggerated conscience. She is surrounded by flames, and though the priest explains that if she but ceased to believe in those flames they would cease to exist, believe she must, and the play ends in an elaborate dance, the dance of her agony.» — el ejemplo del teatro japonés, donde el sacerdote explica que las llamas cesarían si ella dejara de creer en ellas y ella no puede dejar de creer

«At the end of the second state, the events of the past life are a whole and can be dismissed; the emotional and moral life, however, is but a whole according to the code accepted during life.» — el balance del segundo estado y lo que queda pendiente

«The Spirit is still unsatisfied, until after the third state, which corresponds to Gemini,XV called the Shiftings, where the Spirit is purified of good and evil.» — el nombre del tercer estado y su oficio

«In so far as the man did good without knowing evil, or evil without knowing good, his nature is reversed until that knowledge is obtained.» — la inversión que ese estado impone

«The Spirit lives—I quote the automatic script —“The best possible life in the worst possible surroundings” or the contrary of this; yet there is no suffering: “For in a state of equilibrium there is neither emotion nor sensation”.» — la fórmula que Yeats cita del guion automático, con la ausencia de sufrimiento por equilibrio

«This state is described as a true life, as distinguished from the preceding states; the soul is free in the sense that it is subject to necessary truth alone, the Celestial Body is described as present in person instead of through “Messengers”.» — cómo describe el sistema ese estado: vida verdadera, sujeta solo a la verdad necesaria

«It is followed by a state corresponding to Cancer which is said to pass in unconsciousness, or in a moment of consciousness called the Marriage or the Beatitude.54 It is complete equilibrium after the conflict of the Shiftings; good and evil vanish into the whole.» — el cuarto estado y sus dos nombres

«My instructors have described the Marriage as follows: “The Celestial Body is the Divine Cloak lent to all, it falls away at the consummation and Christ is revealed”, words which seem to echo Bardesan’s “Hymn of the Soul”, where a King’s son asleep in Egypt (physical life) is sent a cloak which is also an image of his body.» — la fórmula con que los instructores describen ese estado, y el himno con que Yeats la enlaza

«In the Purification (corresponding to the sign Leo) a new Husk and Passionate Body take the place of the old; made from the old, yet, as it were, pure. All memory has vanished, the Spirit no longer knows what its name has been, it is at last free and in relation to Spirits free like itself.» — el quinto estado: un Husk y un Passionate Body nuevos, y la desaparición de toda memoria

«The Spirit must substitute for the Celestial Body, seen as a Whole, its own particular aim.» — lo que el Spirit ha de hacer en el quinto estado: sustituir el Todo por su propio fin particular

«self-moving, plastic to itself, as that self has been shaped by past lives.» — y lo que de ahí resulta, con el yo ya formado por las vidas anteriores

«It may stay in the Purification for centuries—become, if it died amidst some primitive community, the guardian of well or temple or be called by the Thirteenth Cone to the care of the newly dead.» — los oficios que el sistema asigna a quien permanece en ese estado

«We have no power”, said an inhabitant of the state, “except to purify our intention”, and when I asked of what, replied: “Of complexity”.» — el intercambio que Yeats consigna con un habitante de ese estado

«Because only the living create it may seek the assistance of those living men into whose “unconsciousness” or incarnate Daimon, some affinity of aim, or the command of the Thirteenth Cone, permits it to enter. Those who taught me this system did so, not for my sake, but their own.» — la razón que Yeats da del trato entre esos espíritus y los vivos, y la conclusión que saca sobre sus propios instructores

«In piecing together detached statements, I remember that some spirit once said to me: “We do nothing singly, every act is done by a number at the same instant.”» — otra frase que Yeats recuerda de ellos, sobre el modo colectivo de sus actos

«Their perfection is a shared purpose or idea. I connect them in my imagination with an early conviction of mine, that the creative power of the lyric poet depends upon his accepting some one of a few traditional attitudes, lover, sage, hero, scorner of life.» — y la convicción propia con que Yeats la enlaza: el poeta lírico crea aceptando una de unas pocas actitudes tradicionales

«The sixth and final state (corresponding to Scorpio60) called the Foreknowledge must substitute the next incarnation, as fate has decreed it, for that form of perfection. The Spirit cannot be reborn until the vision of that life is completed and accepted.» — el sexto estado y la condición que impone al renacer

«In trying to prevent them it may become one of those frustrators dreaded by certain spirit mediums.» — y el origen que Yeats da a los frustrators

«It cannot, however, without the assistance of the Thirteenth Cone affect life in any way except to delay its own rebirth. With that assistance it can so shape circumstances as to make possible the rebirth of a unique nature.» — el límite de su poder y lo que puede con ayuda

«During its sleep in the womb the Spirit accepts its future life, declares it just.» — el acto con que se cierra el ciclo antes del nacimiento

«The Spirits before the Marriage are spoken of as the dead. After that they are spirits, using that word as it is used in common speech.» — la distinción de vocabulario que Yeats fija entre muertos y espíritus

«In the Meditation it wears the form it had immediately before death; in the Dreaming Back and the Phantasmagoria, should it appear to the living, it has the form of the dream, in the Return the form worn during the event explored, in the Shiftings whatever form was most familiar to others during its life; in the Purification whatever form it fancies, for it is now the Shape-changer of legend» — el reparto de formas que el Spirit toma en cada estado, hasta el Shape-changer de la leyenda

«If a Spirit cannot escape from its Dreaming Back to complete its expiation, a new life may come soon and be, as it were, a part of its Dreaming Back and so repeat the incidents of the past life.» — el caso en que la vida nueva repite los incidentes de la anterior

«Neither the Phantasmagoria, nor the Purification, nor any other state between death and birth should be considered as a reward or paradise.» — la advertencia con que Yeats niega valor de premio a esos estados

«We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother or sister of the next.» — la familia de dos o tres personas que vuelven vida tras vida hasta agotar toda relación pasional

«Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again, especially, my instructors say, where there has been strong sexual passion. All such passions, they say, contain “cruelty and deceit”64—I think of similar statements in D. H. Lawrence’s Rainbow and in his Women in Love65—and this antithetical cruelty and deceit must be expiated in primary suffering and submission» — la repetición de una sola relación, y lo que los instructores dicen que contiene toda pasión de ese tipo

«They are expiated between birth and death because they are actions, but their victim must expiate between death and birth the ignorance that made them possible.» — el reparto de expiaciones entre los dos periodos: los actos entre nacimiento y muerte, la ignorancia entre muerte y nacimiento

«The victim must, in the Shiftings, live the act of cruelty, not as victim but as tyrant; whereas the tyrant must by a necessity of his or her nature become the victim.» — la inversión de papeles que el sistema impone en el tercer estado

«The expiation, because offered to the living for the dead, is called “expiation for the dead” but is in reality expiation for the Daimon, for passionate love is from the Daimon which seeks by union with some other Daimon to reconstruct above the antinomies its own true nature.» — el nombre y el destinatario verdadero de esa expiación, que Yeats sitúa en el Daimon

«The souls of victim and tyrant are bound together and, unless there is a redemption through the intercommunication of the living and the dead, that bond may continue life after life, and this is just, for there had been no need of expiation had they seen in one another that other and not something else.» — la duración del vínculo y la justicia que Yeats le atribuye

«Victimage for the Dead arises through such act as prevents the union of two incarnate Daimons and is therefore the prevention or refusal of a particular experience, but Victimage for a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone results from the prevention or refusal of experience itself.» — la distinción entre las dos formas de victimaje

«This refusal may arise from pride, from the fear of injuring another or oneself, from something which we call asceticism; it may have any cause, but the Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone is starved. Such Spirit may itself create the events that incited the man to refuse experience, St. Simeon may be driven to his pillar.» — las causas posibles de ese rechazo y el efecto que el sistema le atribuye, con san Simeón por ejemplo

«In the whirling of the gyres the incarnate Daimon is starved in its turn, but starved not of natural experience, but of supernatural; for, compelled to take the place of the Spirit, it transforms its natural craving—Eli! Eli! Lama Sabacthani!?69—and this state is called Victimage for the Ghostly Self, and is described as the sole means for acquiring a supernatural guide.» — el nombre del tercer victimaje y el oficio que se le adjudica

«So closely do all the bonds resemble each other that in the most ascetic schools of India the novice tortured by his passion will pray to the God to come to him as a woman and have with him sexual intercourse; nor is the symbol subjective, for in the morning his pillow will be saturated with temple incense, his breast yellow with the saffron dust of some temple offering.» — el caso indio con que Yeats sostiene que el símbolo no es subjetivo

«Sometimes, however, Victimage for the Ghostly Self and Victimage for the Dead coincide and produce lives tortured throughout by spirituality and passion.» — la coincidencia de dos victimajes y la clase de vida que produce

«Cruelty and ignorance, which echo the Sage and Victim of Book I, constitute evil as my instructors see it, and are that which makes possible the conscious union of the Daimons of Man and Woman or that of the Daimon of the Living and a Spirit of the Thirteenth Cone, which is the deliverance from birth and death.» — la definición del mal que Yeats atribuye a sus instructores: crueldad e ignorancia

«The Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by Man it is a cone. It becomes even conscious of itself as so seen, like some great dancer, the perfect flower of modern culture, dancing some primitive dance and conscious of his or her own life and of the dance.» — la doble naturaleza del Thirteenth Cone y la imagen del bailarín con que Yeats la explica

«There is a mediaeval story of a man persecuted by his Guardian Angel because it was jealous of his sweetheart, and such stories seem closer to reality than our abstract theology.» — el relato medieval que Yeats prefiere a la teología abstracta

«I only speak of the Thirteenth Cone as a sphere and yet I might say that the gyre or cone of the Principles is in reality a sphere, though to Man, bound to birth and death, it can never seem so, and that it is the antinomies that force us to find it a cone. Only one symbol exists, though the reflecting mirrors make many appear and all different.» — y la sentencia con que cierra el Libro III: solo existe un símbolo

«Professor Bradley believed also that he could stand by the death-bed of wife or mistress and not long for an immortality of body and soul. He found it difficult to reconcile personal immortality with his form of Absolute idealism, and besides he hated the common heart; an arrogant, sapless man.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Bradley en nota al pie, con su dificultad para conciliar inmortalidad personal y idealismo absoluto

«An automatic script describes this Meditation as lasting until burial and as strengthened by the burial service and by the thoughts of friends and mourners. I left this statement out of the text because it did not so much seem a necessary deduction from the symbol as an unverifiable statement of experience. The meaning is doubtless that the ceremonial obliteration of the body symbolises the Spirit’s separation from the Husk. Another automatic script describes the Spirit as rising from the head at death, Celestial Body from the feet, the Passionate Body from the genitals, while the Husk remains prone in the body (the Husk itself seen objectively) and shares its form. The Spirit is described as awakened from its sleep in the dead body.» — la nota en que Yeats declara haber dejado fuera del texto un dato del guion automático por no parecerle deducción necesaria del símbolo, y da la otra versión del guion sobre la salida de cada Principle del cuerpo

«The late Dr. Abraham Wallace told me that he brought a medium to a haunted house and had a conversation with just such a ghost. He afterwards found, in an Annual Register for somewhere about 1770, a record of just such a brawl at that very house.» — el testimonio que Yeats consigna en nota, con la comprobación documental posterior

«This would be one of the most poignant poems in the language had not Mr. Davies in a verse I have not quoted made an inexplicable transition from “thou” to “you”.» — la objeción de Yeats al poema que acaba de citar, en nota

«My instructors said once that under certain circumstances a Spirit can draw knowledge of such things as language from the Husks of the other dead, but only if those Husks are separated from their Spirits. It seems that a mind must, as it were, release a thought before it becomes general property. Somebody years ago, at, I think, a meeting of the Society of Psychical Research, suggested that we transferred thought at some moment when we ceased to think of it.» — una nota sobre de dónde puede un Spirit tomar el lenguaje, y la condición que Yeats infiere: la mente ha de soltar el pensamiento antes de que se vuelva propiedad común

«See An Adventure (Faber & Faber). This anonymous book was the work of two women, one the Head of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, the other her predecessor. It describes with minute detail a vision of Marie Antoinette and her Court, and of the gardens of the Petit Trianon as they were before the Revolution, and the research that proved the vision’s accuracy. The two ladies walking in the garden of the Petit Trianon shared the same vision. I have confirmed, as far as the meagre records permitted, a similar vision in my own family, and Sligo pilots and Galway farmers have told me of visions that seem to reproduce the costumes of past times.» — en nota, Yeats identifica a las autoras del libro anónimo sobre la visión del Petit Trianon y consigna casos suyos y de campesinos irlandeses

«Compare the account of the Dreaming Back in Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell. My account differs from his mainly because he denied or ignored rebirth. Somebody has suggested that he kept silent deliberately, that it was amongst those subjects that he thought forbidden. It is more likely that his instructors were silent. They spoke to the Christian Churches, explaining the “linen clothes folded up”, and even what they said or sought to say was half-transformed into an opium dream by the faith of those Churches in the literal inspiration of the Bible.» — en nota, Yeats mide su Dreaming Back contra el de Swedenborg y explica la diferencia por el renacimiento, sin arbitrar entre las dos conjeturas sobre el silencio de aquel

«If I assume that the Thirteenth Cone can send the forms from any incarnation which correspond to the place of Faculty or Principle, whether in the present or an earlier cycle, I have an explanation of that emergence during vision of an old Cretan myth described in my book Autobiographies.» — en nota, Yeats explica con el Thirteenth Cone la emergencia de un mito cretense en una visión propia

«They say that only the words spoken in trance or written in the automatic script assist them. They belong to the “unconscious” and what comes from them alone serves. My interpretations do not concern them.» — en nota, Yeats consigna que a sus instructores solo les sirve lo dicho en trance o escrito en el guion, y no sus propias interpretaciones

«When a religious-minded Roman of the first century before Christ thought of the first month of a new Great Year, did he think of some ideal king such as Virgil foretold, or think of Attis who died and rose again at the beginning of their old lunar year?2 Which did he prefer of those incompatible ideas, Triumph or Sacrifice, Sage or Victim?» — Yeats abre el Libro IV preguntando qué esperaba un romano del primer siglo antes de Cristo del comienzo de un Gran Año

«To the time when Marius sat at home planning a sedition that began the Roman civil wars, popular imagination attributed many prodigies; the wooden support of the eagles burst into flames; three ravens brought their young into the open field, picked their bones and carried the bones back into the nest; a mouse gnawed the consecrated corn in the temple and when caught brought forth five young and devoured them; and, greatest marvel of all, out of the calm and clear sky came the sound of a trumpet. The Etruscans declared that this trumpet meant “the mutation of the age and a general revolution of the world”.» — los prodigios que la imaginación popular atribuyó a los días de Mario, y la lectura que los etruscos dieron a la trompeta

«Some nine months before the assassination of Caesar his image was carried among the images of the gods in a procession at the Ludi Circenses, and a rumour, afterwards disproved, reached Cicero that Cotta, the official exponent of the Oracles, proposed announcing to the Senate “That he whom we really had as King should be given the title of King if we desired to remain safe”.» — el rumor sobre los Libros Sibilinos que llegó a Cicerón, y que Yeats consigna como después desmentido

«Cicero thought such books were so written that they could fit any time or man, and adds: “Let us ask their Priests to produce anything out of those books rather than a King”.» — el juicio de Cicerón sobre esos libros, citado por su letra

«Had what Cicero calls elsewhere “the religious party of the Sibyl” found that prophecy Virgil was to sing in the next generation?7 Did they expect a mystic king to restore justice, “the girl Astraea”?» — las preguntas que Yeats deja abiertas sobre esa expectativa

«Caesar was killed on the 15th day of March, the month of victims and of saviours. Two years before he had instituted our solar Julian Year, and in a few generations the discovery of the body of Attis among the reeds would be commemorated upon that day, though, before “Ides” lost its first meaning, the ceremony needed a full moon or the fifteenth day of a lunar March.» — las coincidencias de calendario que Yeats reúne en torno al 15 de marzo

«It seemed as if the magical character of the full moon was transferred to a day and night where the moon had as it were a merely legal or official existence. One thinks of Mommsen’s conviction that though Caesar chose the lesser of two evils the Roman State was from his day to the end a dead thing, a mere mechanism.» — y el juicio de Mommsen con que cierra el tramo

«By common consent men measure the year”, wrote Cicero, “by the return of the sun, or in other words by the revolution of one star. But when the whole of the constellations shall return to the positions from which they once set forth, thus after a long interval» — la definición del Gran Año que Yeats toma de Cicerón; la frase se corta antes de un compuesto partido por el salto de renglón

«the first map of the heavens, that may indeed be called the Great Year wherein I scarce dare say how many are the generations of men.”» — y su cierre, con las generaciones de hombres que el orador no se atreve a contar

«But that Great or Greatest Year was sometimes divided into lesser periods by the return of the sun and moon to some original position,14 by the return of a planet or of all the planets to some original position, or by their making an astrological aspect with that position; and sometimes it was dissociated from the actual position of the stars and divided into twelve months, each month a brightening and a darkening fortnight, and at the same time perhaps a year with its four seasons.» — las maneras en que ese Gran Año se dividía

«I do not remember the brightening and darkening fortnights in any classical author, but they are in the Upanishads and in the Laws of Manu for the Great Year and its Months pervaded the ancient world.15 Perhaps at the start a mere magnification of the natural year, it grew more complicated with the spread of Greek astronomy, but it is always the simpler, more symbolic form, with its conflict of light and dark, heat and cold, that concerns me most.» — Yeats declara no recordar las quincenas clara y oscura en autor clásico alguno y las sitúa en los Upanishads y en las Leyes de Manú

«Anaximander, a pre-Socratic philosopher, thought there were two infinities» — las dos infinitudes que Yeats atribuye a Anaximandro; la primera se nombra con un compuesto que el salto de renglón parte y se corta antes

«where nothing ages, the other of succession and mortality, world coming after world and lasting always the same number of years.» — y la segunda: sucesión y mortalidad, con mundos que se siguen unos a otros y duran siempre lo mismo

«Love and Discord, Fire and Water, dominate in turn, Love making all things One, Discord separating all, but Love no more than Discord the changeless eternity.» — y su acotación: ni el Amor ni la Discordia son la eternidad inmutable

«Here originated perhaps the symbol expounded in this book of a phaseless sphere that becomes phasal in our thought, Nicholas of Cusa’s undivided reality which human experience divides into opposites, and here too, as Pierre Duhem points out, we discover for the first time the Platonic doctrine of imitation—the opposing states copy eternity.» — Yeats sitúa ahí el origen posible de su propio símbolo, y con Duhem la primera aparición de la doctrina platónica de la imitación

«But when the age of Fire or that of Water returns, did the same man return, or a new man who resembled him, and if the same man, must he have the old wart upon his nose? Some thought one thing and some another.» — la pregunta antigua que Yeats consigna sin resolver, con la verruga en la nariz por prueba

«Was the world completely destroyed at the solstice or did it but acquire a new shape? Philolaus thought the fire and water but destroyed the old shape and nourished the new. Did one world follow another without a break? Empedocles thought there must be an intermediate state of rest.» — y las respuestas divergentes de Filolao y de Empédocles, consignadas sin armonizar

«So far the Ideas had been everything, the individual nothing; beauty and truth alone had mattered to Plato and Socrates,21 but Plotinus thought that every individual had his Idea, his eternal counterpart; the Greatest Year and the Great Years that were its Months became a stream of souls.» — el cambio que Yeats adjudica a Plotino: cada individuo con su Idea, y el Gran Año vuelto corriente de almas

«To the next generation it seemed plain that the Eternal Return,23 though it remained for the stream as a whole, had ceased for the wise man, for the wise man could withdraw from the circuit.» — y el paso siguiente: el Eterno Retorno cesa para el sabio, que puede retirarse del circuito

«Proclus discovered in the Golden Number of the Republic a Greatest Year, that is “the least common number of all revolutions visible and invisible”, and in the Timaeus a much smaller year, “which is the least common multiple” of the revolutions of the eight spheres, and thought this smaller year alone calculable by reason.» — los dos años que Proclo distingue, y cuál declara calculable

«Yet Plato’s statements are there that scholars may solve the Golden Number, and they have found fourteen different solutions.» — el estado de la cuestión que Yeats consigna: catorce soluciones distintas

«Proclus thought the duration of the world is found “when we bring into contemplation the numerical unity, the one self-unfolding power, the sole creation that completes its work, that which fills all things with universal life. One must see all things wind up their careers and come round again to the beginning; one must see everything return to itself and so complete by itself the circle allotted to that number; or that unity which encloses an infinity of numbers, contains within itself the instability of the Duad and yet determines the whole movement, its end and its beginning, and is for that reason called the Number and the Perfect Number.”» — el pasaje de Proclo sobre el Número Perfecto, citado por extenso

«My instructors offer for a symbol the lesser unities that combine into a work of art and leave no remainder, but we may substitute if we will the lesser movements which combine into the circle that in Hegel’s Logic unites not summer solstice to summer solstice but absolute to absolute.» — los dos símbolos que Yeats ofrece para ese Número Perfecto: las unidades menores de una obra de arte o el círculo de la Lógica de Hegel

«A doctrine which showed all things returning to the seed of Fire at the midsummer of the Great Year may have sounded the more natural to a Greek because Athenian years began at midsummer.30 But from somewhere in Asia Minor, Persia perhaps, spread a doctrine which transferred attention from Cancer and Capricorn to Aries, from the extremes where the world was destroyed to the midway point where it was restored, where Love began to prevail over Discord, Day over Night.» — el desplazamiento de atención que Yeats fecha desde Asia Menor: de los extremos donde el mundo se destruye al punto medio donde se restaura

«The destroying flood rose in Capricorn but lasted through the two succeeding signs, only disappearing when the World-restorer appeared; the creation itself had been but a restoration.» — y su consecuencia doctrinal: la creación misma como restauración

«To many Christians and Jews, though the doctrine soon ceased to be orthodox, not the Messiah alone but the Spirit that moved upon the Waters, and Noah on Mount Ararat, seemed such world-restorers.» — quiénes ocuparon ese lugar entre cristianos y judíos

«Certain Christians”, wrote Nemesius, Bishop of Emessa, “would have us consider the Resurrection linked to the restoration of the world, but they deceive themselves strangely, for it is proved by the words of Christ that the Resurrection could not happen more than once, that it came not from a periodical revolution but from the Will of God.”» — la objeción de Nemesio de Emesa a esa doctrina, citada por su letra

«The doctrine, however, reappears in various forms as a recognised heresy until the thirteenth century, though that learned scholar, great poet and devout man, Francis Thompson, did not recognise it as such when he wrote: Not only of cyclic Man Thou here discern’st the plan, Not only of cyclic Man, but of the cyclic Me, Not solely of Mortalities great years The reflex just appears, But thine own bosom’s year, still circling round In ample and in ampler gyre Towards the far completion, wherewith crowned, Love unconsumed shall chant in his own funeral pyre.» — Yeats sigue la herejía hasta el siglo XIII y trae unos versos de Francis Thompson, señalando que el poeta no la reconoció como tal

«Christ rose from the dead at a full moon in the first month of the year, the month that we have named from Mars the ruler of the first of the twelve signs.» — la fecha de la resurrección leída dentro del sistema

«They have much the same character, being respectively particular and universal, as the circles of the Other and the Same in the Timaeus.» — y hace corresponder los dos zodiacos con los círculos de lo Otro y lo Mismo del Timeo

«There was little agreement as to the length of the Great Year, every philosopher had a different calculation, but the majority divided it into 360 days or 365 days according to the prevailing view as to the number of days in the year. The Stoics of Cicero’s time thought it was divided into 365 days of 15,000 years apiece.» — el desacuerdo antiguo sobre la duración del Gran Año, consignado sin arbitrar

«Cicero thought it began with an eclipse at the time of Romulus, or wished men to think so to confound the local Mother Shipton who had gone over to his enemies; and why did Virgil make that prophecy accepted all through the Middle Ages as prophesying Christ?» — Yeats consigna la datación de Cicerón y la sospecha de un motivo político, y deja la pregunta sobre Virgilio abierta

«There were similar prophecies elsewhere, for the world felt itself at the beginning of a great change, but I know no book that has studied them and traced them to their origin.» — y declara no conocer libro que haya rastreado esas profecías hasta su origen

«In the second century before Christ, Hipparchus discoveredV that the Zodiacal constellations were moving, that in a certain number of years the sun would no longer rise at the Vernal Equinox in the constellation Aries, but his discovery seems to have been little noticed until the third century after Christ when Ptolemy fixed the rate of movement at 100 yearsVI for each degree, that Aries might return to its original position every 36,00038 years, the 360 incarnations of a man of Ur.39 He named these 36,000 years the Platonic Year and by that name they were known henceforth.» — la precesión de los equinoccios, de Hiparco a Ptolomeo, y el nombre de Año Platónico

«But if the eighth sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars, moved, it was necessary to transfer the diurnal movement to a ninth sphere or abstract zodiac divided into twelve equal parts; the first month of the year must, no matter where the constellations went, retain its martial energy of the Ram, midwinter its goatish cold and wet even if the constellations of Goat had strayed.40 So too must each individual life retain to the end the seal set upon it at birth.» — la consecuencia técnica de esa precesión: hizo falta una novena esfera, un zodiaco abstracto de doce partes iguales

«Ptolemy must have added new weight to the conviction of Plotinus that the stars did not themselves affect human destiny but were pointers which enabled us to calculate the condition of the universe at any particular moment and therefore its effect on the individual life.» — la lectura de la astrología que Yeats atribuye a Plotino: las estrellas no obran, señalan

«But nations also were sealed at birth with a character derived from the whole, and had, like individuals, their periods of increase and decrease.» — y la extensión de ese sello a las naciones

«When the trumpet sounded in the sky in Sulla’s time the Etruscan sages, according to Plutarch, declared the Etruscan cycle of 11,000 years at an end, and that “another sort of men were coming into the world.”» — la declaración etrusca que Yeats cita por Plutarco

«Syncellus said that a new epoch began when the constellation Aries returned to its original position, and that this was the doctrine of “Greeks and Egyptians . . . as stated in the Genetica of Hermes and in the Cyrannic books”.» — la doctrina que Yeats atribuye a Sincelo, con sus fuentes nombradas

«Was Ptolemy the first to give a date to that return? The inventor of the ninth sphere, whether Ptolemy or another, was bound to make that calculation.47 What was the date? I have not read his Almagest, nor am I likely to, and no historian or commentator on his discoveries known to me has given it.» — Yeats declara no haber leído el Almagesto ni ser probable que lo lea, y consigna que ningún comentarista conocido da esa fecha

«It would depend on the day he selected for the equinox (at Rome March 25th), and upon what star seemed to mark the end of Aries and the beginning of Pisces.» — y enumera de qué dependería la fecha

«It was certainly near enough to the assassination of Caesar to make the Roman Empire seem miraculous, near enough to the Crucifixion to confer upon the early Church, had it not been committed to its war with Grecian fatalism, the greatest of its miracles» — la coincidencia que Yeats señala, y lo que la Iglesia primitiva no pudo aprovechar por su guerra con el fatalismo griego

«Then did all the Muses sing Of Magnus Annus at the spring.» — los versos propios con que Yeats remata ese pasaje

«It is the position that will be occupied by the vernal equinox at the central moment of the next religious era, or at the beginning of the succeeding antithetical civilisation, for the position of the equinox marks the phase of Will in the wheel of 26,000 years.» — y lo que ese signo marca

«At present it approaches the central point of Phase 17 where the next influx must take place. It passed into Phase 16 at the end of the eleventh century when our civilisation began.» — la posición presente del equinoccio en la rueda, según Yeats

«That position between Phases 18 and 19 is said to define the greatest possible intellectual power because it is the centre of that quarter of the Wheel symbolical of the logical intellect, and because it is one of the four moments where the Faculties are at equal distance from one another: conflict, and therefore intensity of consciousness, apportioned out through the whole being.» — por qué esa posición define el mayor poder intelectual posible

«The corresponding moment in the lesser wheel of our Gothic civilisation came near the close of the seventeenth century just before that first decade of the eighteenth where Oliver thinks the European intellect reached its climax in power and authority.» — el momento correspondiente en la rueda menor, situado con una autoridad citada

«An historical symbolism which covers too great a period of time for imagination to grasp or experience to explain may seem too theoretical, too arbitrary, to serve any practical purpose; it is, however, necessary to the myth if we are not to suggest, as Vico did, civilisation perpetually returning to the same point.» — Yeats reconoce lo arbitrario que puede parecer su simbolismo histórico y da la razón por la que lo mantiene

«At the opening of Book V is a diagram where every date was fixed by my instructors.55 They have adopted a system of cones not used elsewhere in this exposition. If one ignores the black numbers it is simple enough. It shows the gyre of religion expanding as that of secular life contracts, until at the eleventh century the movements are reversed.» — el diagrama del Libro V y lo que muestra: la religión expandiéndose mientras la vida secular se contrae, hasta la inversión del siglo XI

«My instructors scrawled a figure with a line so marked once or twice upon the margin of the automatic script while writing of something else, and left me to guess its relevance.» — el modo en que Yeats dice haber recibido esa figura

«When one examines the line so divided one discovers that at the present moment, although we are passing into Phase 23 on the cone of civilisation, we are between Phases 25 and 26 on the cone of the era.» — las dos posiciones simultáneas que Yeats calcula para el momento presente

«Its Four Faculties so found are four periods of time eternally co-existent, four co-existent acts; as seen in time we explain their effect by saying that the spirits of the three periods that seem to us past are present among us, though unseen.» — y la lectura que da a esas cuatro periodos: los espíritus de los tres que parecen pasados están presentes sin verse

«When our historical era approaches Phase 1, or the beginning of a new era, the antithetical East will beget upon the primary West and the child or era so born will be antithetical.» — el modo en que Yeats anuncia el cambio de era, con el Oriente antithetical engendrando sobre el Occidente primary

«That most philosophical of archaeologists Josef Strzygowski haunts my imagination.58 To him the East, as certainly to my instructors, is not India or China, but the East that has affected European civilisation, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt.» — Yeats declara la deuda con Strzygowski y acota qué Oriente es el suyo

«From the Semitic East he derives all art which associates Christ with the attributes of royalty. It substitutes Christ Pantokrator for the bearded mild Hellenic Christ, makes the Church hierarchical and powerful.» — lo que Strzygowski deriva del Oriente semítico, según Yeats

«The East, in my symbolism, whether in the circle of the Principles or the Faculties, is always human power, whether Will or Spirit, stretched to its utmost.» — el valor que el Oriente tiene en el simbolismo propio de Yeats

«He finds amid the nomad Aryans of northern Europe and Asia the source of all geometrical ornament, of all non-representative art. It is only when he comes to describe such art as a subordination of all detail to the decoration of some given surface, and to associate it with domed and arched buildings where nothing interferes with the effect of the building as a whole, and with a theology which so exalts the Deity that every human trait disappears» — lo que Strzygowski atribuye al Norte, y la teología que Yeats le ve asociada

«that I begin to wonder whether the non-representative art of our own time may not be but a first symptom of our return to the primary tincture.» — y la conjetura que Yeats saca de ahí sobre el arte no figurativo de su tiempo

«If I translate his geographical symbolism into the language of the system I say that South and East are human form and intellectual authority, whereas North and West are superhuman form and emotional freedom.» — la traducción de esa geografía al vocabulario del sistema

«The German traveller Frobenius discovered among the African natives two symbolical forms, one founded upon the symbol of the Cavern, one upon that of a central Altar and sixteen roads radiating outward; and the races of the Cavern seemed of eastern origin while the races of the roads had moved eastward from the Atlantic seaboard.» — los dos símbolos que Yeats atribuye a Frobenius y las direcciones de sus razas

«Spengler continually refers to the symbol of the Cavern and gives Frobenius as his authority, but, as I think, inverts his meaning; he never refers to the Altar and the radiating roads but shows in all his interpretations of the Faustian or modern mind that he is thinking of them.» — y adjudica a Spengler haber invertido el sentido de esos símbolos

«The Cavern is identified in the Hermetic Fragments with the Heavens, and it is so identified by Spengler, but to the Hermetic writer the Heavens were the orbit of the stars and planets, the source of all calendars, the symbol of the soul’s birth and rebirth.» — el sentido que Yeats da a la Caverna en los fragmentos herméticos

«The Cavern is Time, and to call it Space, as Spengler does, is to suffer the modern conception of a finite space always returning to itself to obsess one’s thought; and nothing but a like obsession with what somebody has called the “Time philosophy” of our day can have made Spengler identify the Faustian soul, which, as he points out, has created the great windows of the cathedrals and is always moving outwards, always seeking the unlimited, with Time.» — y la objeción que le hace a Spengler, con la razón que le atribuye

«Though Spengler inverted the meaning of his symbols, he has so constantly described them as if he had not, that I find, putting aside his great learning, and my lack of any, that our thoughts run together.» — Yeats mide su distancia y su cercanía con Spengler, y consigna la desigualdad de erudición

«He probably kept silent about the Altar and the radiating roads through the scholar’s dread that a too simplifying metaphor might cast doubt upon the sincerity of his research.» — y la conjetura con que explica el silencio de Spengler sobre el Altar

«Only the later Upanishads, according to certain scholars, were aware of the soul’s rebirth. They substituted the doctrine of Karma for sacrifice and ritual purgation.» — el cambio doctrinal que Yeats sitúa en los Upanishads tardíos

«Instead of a levelling pantheism came innumerable souls, no two souls alike, a belief that nothing else exists or that nothing exists, a doctrine first taught not by priest but by king, a discipline that seemed always aristocratic, solitary and antithetical.» — y su carácter: una doctrina enseñada primero por un rey y no por un sacerdote

«I do not know what Frobenius has written in German, for I have not that language, but it seems possible that he found in ancient India also his Altar and Cavern where I have found the first distinction between primary and antithetical civilisations.» — Yeats declara no leer alemán y conjetura una coincidencia con Frobenius en la India antigua

«I, at any rate, would have said that all written upon the subject was a paragraph in my own Per Amica Silentia Lunae, so ignorant a man is a poet and artist.» — y su propio estado de lectura en la materia

«When I came to summarise on paper or in speech what the scripts contained no other theme made me so timid.» — el tema que Yeats declara haberle dado más reparo al resumir el guion

«After that I discovered for myself Spengler’s main source in Vico, and that half the revolutionary thoughts of Europe are a perversion of Vico’s philosophy. Marx and Sorel have taken from Vico’s cycle, writes Croce, his “idea of the struggle of classes and the regeneration of society by a return to a primitive state of mind and a new barbarism”.» — Yeats sitúa en Vico la fuente de Spengler y toma de Croce la deriva de Marx y Sorel

«Certainly my instructors have chosen a theme that has deeply stirred men’s minds though the newspapers are silent about it; the newspapers have the happy counter-myth of progress; a theme as important perhaps as Henry Adams thought when he told the Boston Historical Association that were it turned into a science powerful interests would prevent its publication.» — el peso que Yeats concede al tema, con el contra-mito del progreso en la prensa y el temor que atribuye a Henry Adams

«My instructors certainly expect neither a “primitive state” nor a return to barbarism as primitivism and barbarism are ordinarily understood; antithetical revelation is an intellectual influx neither from beyond mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history.» — Yeats acota qué no anuncia la revelación antithetical: ni estado primitivo ni barbarie ni nacimiento virginal

«At the birth of Christ took place, and at the coming antithetical influx will take place, a change equivalent to the interchange of the tinctures. The cone shaped like an ace of diamonds—in the historical diagram the cone is folded upon itself—is Solar, religious and vital; those shaped like an hour-glass Lunar, political and secular; but Body of Fate and Mask are in the Solar cones during a primary dispensation, and in the Lunar during an antithetical, while Will and Creative Mind occupy the opposing cones.» — el reparto de los conos en cada tipo de dispensación

«Mask and Body of Fate are symbolic woman, Will and Creative Mind symbolic man; the man and woman of Blake’s Mental Traveller.» — la lectura sexual de las cuatro Faculties dentro de la historia

«Before the birth of Christ religion and vitality were polytheistic, antithetical, and to this the philosophers opposed their primary, secular thought. Plato thinks all things into Unity and is the “First Christian”.» — el reparto de tinturas antes de Cristo, con Platón llamado el primer cristiano

«At the birth of Christ religious life becomes primary, secular life antithetical—man gives to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.» — y la inversión que Yeats fecha en el nacimiento de Cristo

«A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical.» — los dos retratos contrapuestos de dispensación, enunciados por listas

«Something of what I have said it must be, the myth declares, for it must reverse our era and resume past eras in itself; what else it must be no man can say, for always at the critical moment the Thirteenth Cone, the sphere, the unique intervenes.» — el límite que Yeats pone a su propia previsión: siempre interviene lo único

«The wheel of the Four Principles completes its movement in four thousand years. The life of Christ corresponds to the mid-period between birth and death; A.D. 1050 to death; the approaching influx to the mid-point between death and birth.» — el reparto de las cuatro fechas sobre la rueda de los Principles

«The rate is about one-third less, and the whole precession takes some 26,000 years.» — la corrección que Yeats hace en nota a la cifra de Ptolomeo

«This doctrine must have spread widely during the Middle Ages. Lady Gregory was told in County Clare that there was a “woman in the sky” and whatever she did at any particular moment a child born at that moment did throughout life. Mr. Robin Flower found a like story in the Blasket Islands; and has not Mr. Wyndham Lewis accused Mr. Bertrand Russell of turning Mr. Smith into Mr. Four-thirty-in-the-afternoon by his exposition of space-time?» — en nota, Yeats pone la creencia de una campesina de Clare, un relato de las Blasket y una pulla de Wyndham Lewis en la misma serie

«When I wrote this sentence I had not met Shree Purhoit Swami, who considers that the Sanskrit words do not mean that the doctrine is not known, but that it is not innate even in a Brahmin» — en nota, Yeats corrige su propia frase con la lectura que le dio el swami, sin borrar la anterior

«The numbers in brackets refer to phases, and the other numbers to dates A.D. The line cutting the cones a little below 250, 900, 1180 and 1927 shows four historical Faculties related to the present moment. May 1925.» — la leyenda del diagrama de los Conos Históricos, fechada por el propio Yeats

«A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs, And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.3 Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?» — el soneto de Leda con que se abre el Libro V

«One must bear in mind that the Christian Era, like the two thousand years, let us say, that went before it, is an entire wheel, and each half of it an entire wheel, that each half when it comes to its 28th Phase reaches the 15th Phase or the 1st Phase of the entire era. It follows therefore that the 15th Phase of each millennium, to keep the symbolic measure of time, is Phase 8 or Phase 22 of the entire era, that Aphrodite rises from a stormy sea, that Helen could not be Helen but for beleaguered Troy.» — la regla de lectura de las eras: cada mitad es a su vez una rueda entera

«The era itself is but half of a greater era and its Phase 15 comes also at a period of war or trouble. The greater number is always more primary than the lesser and precisely because it contains it.» — y su encaje en una era mayor

«A millennium is the symbolic measure of a being that attains its flexible maturity and then sinks into rigid age.» — la definición que Yeats da al milenio

«A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control, and in this it is like some great tragic person, some Niobe who must display an almost superhuman will or the cry will not touch our sympathy.5 The loss of control over thought comes towards the end; first a sinking in upon the moral being, then the last surrender, the irrational cry, revelation— the scream of Juno’s peacock.» — la definición de civilización que Yeats propone, con la revelación situada al final como grito irracional

«But all things are from antithesis, and when in my ignorance I try to imagine what older civilisation that annunciation rejected I can but see bird and woman blotting out some corner of the Babylonian mathematical starlight.» — y lo que alcanza a ver de la civilización que esa anunciación rechazó, declarando su propia ignorancia

«Was it because the older civilisation like the Jewish thought a long life a proof of Heavenly favour that the Greek races thought those whom the Gods love must die young, hurling upon some age of crowded comedy their tragic sense?» — la pregunta con que Yeats explica el morir joven de los amados por los dioses

«Certainly their tribes, after a first multitudinous revelation—dominated each by its Daimon and oracle-driven —broke up a great Empire and established in its stead an intellectual anarchy.» — lo que Yeats adjudica a las tribus griegas tras la primera revelación

«At, let me say, the sixth century B.C. (Phase 12) personality begins, but there is as yet no intellectual solitude. A man may rule his tribe or town but he cannot separate himself from the general mass.» — el punto en que empieza la personalidad, según su cronología

«With the first discovery of solitude (Phases 13 and 14) comes, as I think, the visible art that interests us most to-day, for Phidian art, like the art of Raphael, has for the moment exhausted our attention.» — el arte que Yeats prefiere en ese tramo, y su razón declaradamente presente

«Self-realisation attained will bring desire of power—systematisation for its instrument—but as yet clarity, meaning, elegance, all things separated from one another in luminous space, seem to exceed all other virtues.» — las virtudes que ese arte pone por encima de las demás

«One compares this art with the thought of Greek philosophers before Anaxagoras, where one discovers the same phases, always more concerned with the truth than with its moral or political effects.» — y la filosofía que Yeats le hace corresponder

«Side by side with Ionic elegance there comes after the Persian wars a Doric vigour, and the light-limbed dandy of the potters, the Parisian-looking young woman of the sculptors, her hair elaborately curled, give place to the athlete.» — el cambio de tipo humano en el arte tras las guerras médicas

«One suspects a deliberate turning away from all that is Eastern, or a moral propaganda like that which turned the poets out of Plato’s Republic, and yet it may be that the preparation for the final systematisation had for its apparent cause the destruction, let us say, of Ionic studios by the Persian invaders, and that all came from the resistance of the Body of Fate to the growing solitude of the soul.» — las dos explicaciones que Yeats deja abiertas para ese giro

«Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound, and it amuses one to remember that before Phidias, and his westward-moving art, Persia fell, and that when full moon came round again, amid eastward-moving thought, and brought Byzantine glory, Rome fell; and that at the outset of our westward-moving Renaissance Byzantium fell; all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.» — la serie de caídas que Yeats alinea, rematada con la fórmula de Heráclito

«After Phidias the life of Greece, which being antithetical had moved slowly and richly through the antithetical phases, comes rapidly to an end. Some Greek or Roman writer whose name I forget will soon speak of the declining comeliness of the people, and in the arts all is systematised more and more, and the antagonist recedes.» — el fin rápido que Yeats atribuye a Grecia después de Fidias

«Aristotle and Plato end creative system—to die into the truth is still to die—and formula begins.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Platón y Aristóteles dentro del sistema

«Yet even the truth into which Plato dies is a form of death» — y la razón por la que tampoco esa verdad se salva

«he prepares the Christian desert and the Stoic suicide.» — lo que la separación de las Ideas prepara, según Yeats

«I identify the conquest of Alexander and the break-up of his kingdom, when Greek civilisation, formalised and codified, loses itself in Asia, with the beginning and end of the 22nd Phase, and his intention recorded by some historian to turn his arms westward shows that he is but a part of the impulse that creates Hellenised Rome and Asia.» — el lugar que Yeats da a Alejandro en la rueda

«There are everywhere statues where every muscle has been measured, every position debated, and these statues represent man with nothing more to achieve, physical man finished and complacent» — el arte que corresponde a esa fase, con el hombre físico acabado y complacido

«Every discovery after the epoch of victory and defeat (Phase 22) which substitutes mechanics for power is an elimination of intellect by delight in technical skill (Phase 23), by a sense of the past (Phase 24), by some dominant belief» — el reparto de las tres fases siguientes según lo que elimina el intelecto

«After Plato and Aristotle, the mind is as exhausted as were the armies of Alexander at his death, but the Stoics can discover morals and turn philosophy into a rule of life.» — lo que los estoicos logran sobre esa mente agotada

«Among them doubtless—the first beneficiaries of Plato’s hatred of imitation—we may discover the first benefactors of our modern individuality, sincerity of the trivial face, the mask torn away.» — y lo que Yeats les adjudica como origen de la individualidad moderna

«This adoration which begins in the second century before Christ creates a world-wide religious movement as the world was then known, which, being swallowed up in what came after, has left no adequate record.» — el movimiento religioso que Yeats sitúa en el siglo II antes de Cristo y declara sin registro adecuado

«The adored image took everywhere the only form possible as the antithetical age died into its last violence—a human or animal form.» — la forma que toma la imagen adorada al morir la edad antithetical

«Even before Plato that collective image of man dear to Stoic and Epicurean alike, the moral double of bronze or marble athlete, had been invoked by Anaxagoras when he declared that thought and not the warring opposites created the world.» — la sentencia de Anaxágoras que Yeats sitúa en el origen de ese cambio

«At that sentence the heroic life, passionate fragmentary man, all that had been imagined by great poets and sculptors began to pass away, and instead of seeking noble antagonists, imagination moved towards divine man and the ridiculous devil.» — y lo que con ella empieza a pasar

«When revelation comes athlete and sage are merged; the earliest sculptured image of Christ is copied from that of the Apotheosis of Alexander the Great;32 the tradition is founded which declares even to our own day that Christ alone was exactly six feet high, perfect physical man.» — la fusión de atleta y sabio en la primera imagen de Cristo

«Yet as perfect physical man He must die, for only so can primary power reach antithetical mankind shut within the circle of its senses, touching outward things alone in that which seems most personal and physical.» — la razón que el sistema da a esa muerte

«When I think of the moment before revelation I think of Salome—she, too, delicately tinted or maybe mahogany dark—dancing before Herod and receiving the Prophet’s head in her indifferent hands, and wonder if what seems to us decadence was not in reality the exaltation of the muscular flesh and of civilisation perfectly achieved.» — la figura con que Yeats piensa el momento anterior a la revelación, y la pregunta sobre la decadencia que deja abierta

«Seeking images, I see her anoint her bare limbs according to a medical prescription of that time, with lion’s fat, for lack of the sun’s ray, that she may gain the favour of a king, and remember that the same impulse will create the Galilean revelation and deify Roman Emperors whose sculptured heads will be surrounded by the solar disk.» — y el impulso único que Yeats hace común a la revelación galilea y a la deificación de los emperadores

«Upon the throne and upon the cross alike the myth becomes a biography.» — la fórmula con que cierra ese tramo

«God is now conceived of as something outside man and man’s handiwork, and it follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made, and seeing that He is a Father in Heaven, that Heaven will be found presently in the Thebaid, where the world is changed into a featureless dust and can be run through the fingers;38 and these things are testified to from books that are outside human genius, being miraculous, and by a miraculous Church, and this Church, as the gyre sweeps wider, will make man also featureless as clay or dust.» — lo que sigue, según Yeats, de concebir a Dios fuera del hombre y de su obra

«Night will fall upon man’s wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing.39 He had discovered, or half-discovered, that the world is round and one of many like it,40 but now he must believe that the sky is but a tent spread above a level floor, and that he may be stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation, blot out the knowledge or half-knowledge that he has lived many times, and think that all eternity depends upon a moment’s decision.» — el precio que la nueva era cobra al saber, incluida la pérdida de la redondez del mundo y de las vidas anteriores

«It is even essential to this faith to declare that God’s messengers, those beings who show His will in dreams or announce it in visionary speech, were never men. The Greeks thought them great men of the past, but now that concession to mankind is forbidden.» — lo que la nueva fe prohíbe, según Yeats: que los mensajeros de Dios hayan sido hombres

«The mind that brought the change, if considered as man only, is a climax of whatever Greek and Roman thought was most a contradiction to its age; but considered as more than man He controlled what Neo-Pythagorean and Stoic could not—irrational force. He could announce the new age, all that had not been thought of, or touched, or seen, because He could substitute for reason, miracle.» — el modo en que Yeats sitúa a la figura que trae el cambio, y lo que le permite dominar la fuerza irracional

«We say of Him because His sacrifice was voluntary that He was love itself, and yet that part of Him which made Christendom was not love but pity, and not pity for intellectual despair, though the man in Him, being antithetical like His age, knew it in the Garden, but primary pity, that for the common lot, man’s death, seeing that He raised Lazarus, sickness, seeing that He healed many, sin, seeing that He died.» — la distinción que Yeats hace entre amor y piedad al describir lo que hizo la cristiandad

«Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action» — la definición de amor que Yeats propone, apoyada en la unicidad y en la contemplación

«Fragment delights in fragment and seeks possession, not service; whereas the Good Samaritan discovers himself in the likeness of another, covered with sores and abandoned by thieves upon the roadside, and in that other serves himself.» — la oposición con que la ilustra, con el buen samaritano por caso

«The opposites are gone; he does not need his Lazarus; they do not each die the other’s life, live the other’s death.» — y lo que se pierde en ese trato: la fórmula heraclítea deja de aplicarse

«It is impossible to do more than select an arbitrary general date for the beginning of Roman decay (Phases 2 to 7, A.D. 1 to A.D. 250).45 Roman sculpture—sculpture made under Roman influence whatever the sculptor’s blood—did not, for instance, reach its full vigour, if we consider what it had of Roman as distinct from Greek, until the Christian Era.» — Yeats declara arbitraria la fecha con que abre la decadencia romana

«The Greeks painted the eyes of marble statues and made out of enamel or glass or precious stones those of their bronze statues, but the Roman was the first to drill a round hole to represent the pupil, and because, as I think, of a preoccupation with the glance characteristic of a civilisation in its final phase.» — el hallazgo técnico que Yeats atribuye a Roma —taladrar la pupila— y la razón que le da

«The administrative mind, alert attention had driven out rhythm, exaltation of the body, uncommitted energy. May it not have been precisely a talent for this alert attention that had enabled Rome and not Greece to express those final primary phases?» — la pregunta con que Yeats explica que fuera Roma y no Grecia quien expresara esas fases

«One sees on the pediments troops of marble Senators, officials serene and watchful as befits men who know that all the power of the world moves before their eyes, and needs, that it may not dash itself to pieces, their unhurried, unanxious, never-ceasing care.» — los senadores de mármol con que Yeats la ilustra

«But in Rome of the first and second centuries, where the dancing-master himself has died, the delineation of character as shown in face and head, as with us of recent years, is all in all, and sculptors, seeking the custom of occupied officials, stock in their workshops toga’d marble bodies upon which can be screwed with the least possible delay heads modelled from the sitters with the most scrupulous realism.» — el procedimiento de taller que Yeats atribuye a la escultura romana: cuerpos con toga en existencia y cabezas atornilladas

«When I think of Rome I see always those heads with their world-considering eyes, and those bodies as conventional as the metaphors in a leading article, and compare in my imagination vague Grecian eyes gazing at nothing, Byzantine eyes of drilled ivory staring upon a vision, and those eyelids of China and of India, those veiled or half-veiled eyes weary of world and vision alike.» — la serie de miradas con que Yeats reparte las civilizaciones

«Meanwhile the irrational force that would create confusion and uproar as with the cry “The Babe, the Babe is born”51—the women speaking unknown tongues, the barbers and weavers expounding Divine revelation with all the vulgarity of their servitude, the tables that move or resound with raps—but creates a negligible sect.» — el estado en que la fuerza irracional se halla todavía, con los fenómenos que Yeats alinea

«All about it is an antithetical aristocratic civilisation in its completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself who is a God dependent upon a greater God, and everywhere in court, in the family, an inequality made law, and floating over all the Romanised Gods of Greece in their physical superiority.» — el retrato de la civilización aristocrática que la rodea

«All is rigid and stationary, men fight for centuries with the same sword and spear, and though in naval warfare there is some change of tactics to avoid those single combats of ship with ship that needed the seamanship of a more skilful age, the speed of a sailing ship remains unchanged from the time of Pericles to that of Constantine.» — la inmovilidad técnica que Yeats mide en armas y en velocidad de los barcos

«Though sculpture grows more and more realistic and so renews its vigour, this realism is without curiosity. The athlete becomes the boxer that he may show lips and nose beaten out of shape, the individual hairs show at the navel of the bronze centaur, but the theme has not changed.» — el realismo sin curiosidad que Yeats atribuye a esa escultura

«Yet Plotinus is as primary, as much a contradiction of all that created Roman civilisation, as St. Peter, and his thought has its roots almost as deep among the primary masses. The founder of his school was Ammonius Sacca, an Alexandrine porter.» — Yeats iguala a Plotino y a san Pedro por lo primary, y consigna el origen del fundador de aquella escuela

«Origen, because the Judean miracle has a stronger hold upon the masses than Alexandrian thaumaturgy, triumphs when Constantine (Phase 8) puts the Cross upon the shields of his soldiers and makes the bit of his war-horse from a nail of the True Cross, an act equivalent to man’s cry for strength amid the animal chaos at the close of the first lunar quarter.» — el triunfo de Orígenes leído dentro del sistema, con Constantino en la fase 8

«Seeing that Constantine was not converted till upon his deathbed, I see him as half statesman, half thaumaturgist, accepting in blind obedience to a dream the new fashionable talisman, two sticks nailed together.» — la lectura que Yeats hace de Constantino, mitad estadista y mitad taumaturgo

«The world became Christian, “that fabulous formless darkness” as it seemed to a philosopher of the fourth century, blotted out “every beautiful thing”, not through the conversion of crowds or general change of opinion, or through any pressure from below, for civilization was antithetical still, but by an act of power.» — la fórmula de un filósofo del siglo IV que Yeats cita, y su propia adjudicación del cambio a un acto de poder

«I have not the knowledge (it may be that no man has the knowledge) to trace the rise of the Byzantine State through Phases 9, 10 and 11.61 My diagram tells me that a hundred and sixty years brought that State to its 15th Phase, but I that know nothing but the arts and of these little, cannot revise the series of dates “approximately correct” but given, it may be, for suggestion only.» — Yeats declara no tener saber para revisar las fechas que le fueron dadas

«With a desire for simplicity of statement I would have preferred to find in the middle, not at the end, of the fifth century Phase 12, for that was, so far as the known evidence carries us, the moment when Byzantium became Byzantine and substituted for formal Roman magnificence, with its glorification of physical power, an architecture that suggests the Sacred City in the Apocalypse of St. John.» — y consigna dónde su propio gusto habría puesto una fase, contra la fecha recibida

«I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato.» — el mes de antigüedad que Yeats elegiría, situado con dos hechos

«I think I could find in some little wine-shop some philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to princes and clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like that of a perfect human body.» — el interlocutor que imagina hallar allí

«The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books, were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter and that the vision of a whole people.» — y el carácter impersonal que atribuye a sus artífices

«They could copy out of old Gospel books those pictures that seemed as sacred as the text, and yet weave all into a vast design, the work of many that seemed the work of one, that made building, picture, pattern, metal-work of rail and lamp, seem but a single image; and this vision, this proclamation of their invisible master, had the Greek nobility, Satan always the still half-divine Serpent, never the horned scarecrow of the didactic Middle Ages.» — el modo en que ese arte teje lo copiado en un diseño único, y el Satán que conserva

«The ascetic, called in Alexandria “God’s Athlete”, has taken the place of those Greek athletes whose statues have been melted or broken up or stand deserted in the midst of cornfields, but all about him is an incredible splendour like that which we see pass under our closed eyelids as we lie between sleep and waking, no representation of a living world but the dream of a somnambulist.» — el relevo del atleta griego por el asceta, con el esplendor que Yeats compara al del duermevela

«Even the drilled pupil of the eye, when the drill is in the hand of some Byzantine worker in ivory, undergoes a somnambulistic change, for its deep shadow among the faint lines of the tablet, its mechanical circle, where all else is rhythmical and flowing, give to Saint or Angel a look of some great bird staring at miracle.» — y lo que la pupila taladrada llega a ser en manos bizantinas

«To me it seems that He, who among the first Christian communities was little but a ghostly exorcist, had in His assent to a full Divinity made possible this sinking-in upon a supernatural splendour, these walls with their little glimmering cubes of blue and green and gold.» — Yeats adjudica a la asunción de la divinidad plena el esplendor sobrenatural de los mosaicos

«Recent criticism distinguishes between Greco-Roman figures, their stern faces suggesting Greek wall-painting at Palmyra, Greco-Egyptian painting upon the cases of mummies, where character delineations are exaggerated as in much work of our time, and that decoration which seems to undermine our self-control, and is, it seems, of Persian origin, and has for its appropriate symbol a vine whose tendrils climb everywhere and display among their leaves all those strange images of bird and beast, those forms that represent no creature eye has ever seen, yet are begotten one upon the other as if they were themselves living creatures.» — las dos corrientes del arte bizantino que Yeats distingue, con la vid persa y sus criaturas imposibles

«May I consider the domination of the first antithetical and that of the second primary, and see in their alternation the work of the horizontal gyre?» — y la pregunta con que las encaja en su propio sistema

«Strzygowski thinks that the church decorations where there are visible representations of holy persons were especially dear to those who believed in Christ’s double nature, and that wherever Christ is represented by a bare Cross and all the rest is bird and beast and tree, we may discover an Asiatic art dear to those who thought Christ contained nothing human.» — la correlación que Yeats toma de Strzygowski entre modo decorativo y cristología

«If I were left to myself I would make Phase 15 coincide with Justinian’s reign, that great age of building in which one may conclude Byzantine art was perfected; but the meaning of the diagram may be that a building like St. Sophia, where all, to judge by the contemporary description, pictured ecstasy, must unlike the declamatory St. Peter’s precede the moment of climax.» — Yeats consigna su propia preferencia y la corrige con lo que el diagrama parece decir

«Of the moment of climax itself I can say nothing, and of what followed from Phase 17 to Phase 21 almost nothing, for I have no knowledge of the time; and no analogy from the age after Phidias» — y declara no poder decir nada del momento culminante por falta de conocimiento

«We and the Greeks moved towards intellect, but Byzantium and the Western Europe of that day moved from it.» — la asimetría con que Yeats separa su propia era de la bizantina

«If Strzygowski is right we may see in the destruction of images but a destruction of what was Greek in decoration accompanied perhaps by a renewed splendour in all that came down from the ancient Persian Paradise, an episode in some attempt to make theology more ascetic, spiritual and abstract.» — la lectura de la iconoclastia que Yeats deriva de Strzygowski

«Destruction was apparently suggested to the first iconoclastic Emperor by followers of a Monophysite Bishop, Xenaias, who had his see in that part of the Empire where Persian influence had been strongest.» — el origen que atribuye a esa destrucción, con el obispo monofisita nombrado

«The return of the images may, as I see things, have been the failure of synthesis (Phase 22) and the first sinking-in and dying-down of Christendom into the heterogeneous loam.» — y lo que Yeats ve en la vuelta de las imágenes

«Did Europe grow animal and literal? Did the strength of the victorious party come from zealots as ready as their opponents to destroy an image if permitted to grind it into powder, mix it with some liquid and swallow it as a medicine?77 Did mankind for a season do, not what it would, or should, but what it could, accept the past and the current belief because they prevented thought?» — las tres preguntas que Yeats deja abiertas sobre ese tramo, sin contestarlas

«I notice too that my diagram makes Phase 22 coincide with the break-up of Charlemagne’s Empire and so clearly likens him to Alexander, but I do not want to concern myself, except where I must, with political events.» — Yeats consigna la coincidencia con el desmembramiento del imperio carolingio y declara no querer ocuparse de política

«Then follows, as always must in the last quarter,80 heterogeneous art; hesitation amid architectural forms, some book tells me; an interest in Greek and Roman literature; much copying out and gathering together; yet outside a few courts and monasteries another book tells me an Asiatic and anarchic Europe.» — el arte heterogéneo del último cuarto, descrito con sus fuentes puestas a la vista

«The intellectual cone has so narrowed that secular intellect has gone, and the strong man rules with the aid of local custom; everywhere the supernatural is sudden, violent, and as dark to the intellect as a stroke or St. Vitus’ dance.» — el estado del intelecto secular en ese tramo y la forma que toma lo sobrenatural

«Men under the Caesars, my own documents tell me, were physically one but intellectually many, but that is now reversed, for there is one common thought or doctrine, town is shut off from town, village from village, clan from clan.» — la inversión que Yeats consigna entre unidad física y unidad intelectual

«The spiritual life is alone overflowing, its cone expanded, and yet this life—secular intellect extinguished—has little effect upon men’s conduct, is perhaps a dream which passes beyond the reach of conscious mind but for some rare miracle or vision. I think of it as like that profound reverie of the somnambulist which may be accompanied by a sensuous dream—a Romanesque stream perhaps of bird and beast images—and yet neither affect the dream nor be affected by it.» — y el poco efecto que esa vida espiritual tiene sobre la conducta, con la imagen del sonámbulo

«It is indeed precisely because this double mind is created at full moon that the antithetical phases are but, at the best, phases of a momentary illumination like that of a lightning flash.» — por qué las fases antithetical no dan más que iluminación momentánea

«I knew a man once who, seeking for an image of the Absolute, saw one persistent image, a slug, as though it were suggested to him that Being which is beyond human comprehension is mirrored in the least organised forms of life.» — la babosa que Yeats consigna como imagen del Absoluto, referida por un conocido

«Intellectual creation has ceased, but men have come to terms with the supernatural and are agreed that, if you make the usual offerings, it will remember to live and let live; even Saint or Angel does not seem very different from themselves: a man thinks his guardian Angel jealous of his mistress;84 a King, dragging a Saint’s body to a new church, meets some difficulty upon the road, assumes a miracle, and denounces the Saint as a churl.» — el trato con lo sobrenatural en ese tramo, con dos escenas por muestra

«Three Roman courtesans who have one after another got their favourite lovers chosen Pope have, it pleases one’s mockery to think, confessed their sins, with full belief in the supernatural efficacy of the act, to ears that have heard their cries of love, or received the Body of God from hands that have played with their own bodies.» — y la tercera, que Yeats declara traer por gusto de la burla

«In monasteries and in hermit cells men freed from the intellect at last can seek their God upon all fours like beasts or children.» — el resultado que Yeats atribuye a esa liberación del intelecto

«Ecclesiastical Law, in so far as that law is concerned not with government, Church or State, but with the individual soul, is complete; all that is necessary to salvation is known, yet there is apathy everywhere.» — el estado de la ley eclesiástica y la apatía que le acompaña

«Hidden, except at rare moments of excitement or revelation, even then shown but in symbol, the stream set in motion by the Galilean Symbol has filled its basin, and seems motionless for an instant before it falls over the rim.» — la imagen del agua a punto de desbordar con que Yeats fecha el fin de esa era

«In the midst of the basin stands, in motionless contemplation, blood that is not His blood upon His Hands and Feet, One that feels but for the common lot, and mourns over the length of years and the inadequacy of man’s fate to man. Two thousand years before, His predecessor, careful of heroic men alone, had so stood and mourned over the shortness of time, and man’s inadequacy to his fate.» — las dos figuras contrapuestas que Yeats coloca en el centro, cada una lamentando lo contrario

«When the tide changed and faith no longer sufficed, something must have happened in the courts and castles of which history has perhaps no record, for with the first vague dawn of the ultimate antithetical revelation man, under the eyes of the Virgin, or upon the breast of his mistress, became but a fragment.» — el cambio que Yeats fecha hacia 1050 y del que declara que la historia acaso no guarde registro

«A certain Byzantine Bishop had said upon seeing a singer of Antioch, “I looked long upon her beauty, knowing that I would behold it upon the day of judgment, and I wept to remember that I had taken less care of my soul than she of her body”» — la primera de las dos escenas con que Yeats mide ese cambio

«but when in the Arabian Nights Harun Al-Rashid looked at the singer Heart’s Miracle, and on the instant loved her, he covered her head with a little silk veil to show that her beauty “had already retreated into the mystery of our faith”.» — y la segunda, con el velo que declara la belleza santa por sí misma

«The Bishop saw a beauty that would be sanctified, but the Caliph that which was its own sanctity, and it was this latter sanctity, come back from the first Crusade or up from Arabian Spain or half Asiatic Provence and Sicily, that created romance.» — la distinción que Yeats saca de esas dos escenas, y de dónde hace venir el romance

«What forgotten reverie, what initiation, it may be, separated wisdom from the monastery and, creating Merlin, joined it to passion?» — la pregunta que Yeats deja abierta sobre el origen de Merlín

«Parsifal in such a trance, seeing nothing before his eyes but the image of his absent love, overcame knight after knight, and awakening at last looked amazed upon his dinted sword and shield; and it is to his lady and not to God or the Virgin that Parsifal prayed upon the day of battle, and it was his lady’s soul, separated from her entranced or sleeping body, that went beside him and gave him victory.» — y a quién reza Parsifal el día de la batalla, según ese relato

«The period from 1050 to 1180 is attributed in the diagram to the first two gyres of our millennium, and what interests me in this period, which corresponds to the Homeric period some two thousand years before, is the creation of the Arthurian Tales and Romanesque architecture.» — el tramo con que Yeats abre el milenio y lo que le interesa de él

«I see in Romanesque the first movement to a secular Europe, but a movement so instinctive that as yet there is no antagonism to the old condition. Every architect, every man who lifts a chisel, may be a cleric of some kind, yet in the overflowing ornament where the human form has all but disappeared and where no bird or beast is copied from nature, where all is more Asiatic than Byzantium itself, one discovers the same impulse that created Merlin and his jugglery.» — la lectura que da al románico: primer movimiento hacia una Europa secular, aún sin antagonismo

«I do not see in Gothic architecture, which is a character of the next gyre, that of Phases 5, 6 and 7, as did the nineteenth-century historians, ever looking for the image of their own age, the creation of a new communal freedom, but a creation of authority, a suppression of that freedom though with its consent, and certainly St. Bernard when he denounced the extravagance of Romanesque saw it in that light.» — Yeats objeta la lectura del gótico como libertad comunal y le opone la autoridad, con san Bernardo por testigo

«I think of that curious sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt with its insistence upon mathematical form, and I see that form in Mont St. Michel—Church, Abbey, Fort and town, all that dark geometry that makes Byzantium seem a sunlit cloud—and it seems to me that the Church grows secular that it may fight a new-born secular world.» — y la fórmula con que la resume: la Iglesia se seculariza para pelear con un mundo secular

«Its avowed appeal is to religion alone: nobles and great ladies join the crowds that drag the Cathedral stones, not out of love for beauty but because the stones as they are trundled down the road cure the halt and the blind; yet the stones once set up traffic with the enemy.» — el motivo declarado y el efecto no querido de esas obras

«The mosaic pictures grown transparent93 fill the windows, quarrel one with the other like pretty women, and draw all eyes, and upon the faces of the statues flits once more the smile that disappeared with archaic Greece.» — el paso del mosaico al vitral y la vuelta de la sonrisa arcaica

«That smile is physical, primary joy, the escape from supernatural terror, a moment of irresponsible common life before antithetical sadness begins.» — el sentido que Yeats le da a esa sonrisa

«Are not the cathedrals and the philosophy of St. Thomas the product of the abstraction that comes before Phase 8 as before Phase 22, and of the moral synthesis that at the end of the first quarter seeks to control the general anarchy?» — la pregunta con que Yeats sitúa catedrales y tomismo en la rueda

«That anarchy must have been exceedingly great, or man must have found a hitherto unknown sensitiveness, for it was the shock that created modern civilisation.» — y la alternativa que deja abierta sobre la causa de aquel choque

«The diagram makes the period from 1250 to 1300 correspond to Phase 8, certainly because in or near that period, chivalry and Christendom having proved insufficient, the King mastered the one, the Church the other, reversing the achievement of Constantine, for it was now the mitre and the crown that protected the Cross.» — la inversión respecto de Constantino que Yeats fecha entre 1250 y 1300

«The period from 1300 to 1380 is attributed to the fourth gyre, that of Phases 9, 10 and 11, which finds its character in painting from Giotto to Fra Angelico, in the Chronicles of Froissart and in the elaborate canopy upon the stained glass of the windows.» — el tramo siguiente y las obras en que lo reconoce

«Every old tale is alive, Christendom still unbroken; painter and poet alike find new ornament for the tale, they feel the charm of everything but the more poignantly because that charm is archaistic; they smell a pot of dried roses.» — el encanto arcaizante que Yeats atribuye a ese tramo

«The practical men, face to face with rebellion and heresy, are violent as they have not been for generations, but the artists separated from life by the tradition of Byzantium can even exaggerate their gentleness, and gentleness and violence alike express the gyre’s hesitation.» — y el contraste entre la violencia de los prácticos y la dulzura exagerada de los artistas

«The public certainty that sufficed for Dante and St. Thomas has disappeared, and there is yet no private certainty. Is it that the human mind now longs for solitude, for escape from all that hereditary splendour, and does not know what ails it; or is it that the Image itself encouraged by the new technical method, the flexible brush-stroke instead of the unchanging cube of glass, and wearied of its part in a crowded ghostly dance, longs for a solitary human body?» — la pregunta doble con que Yeats explica ese estado, sin decidirse entre las dos ramas

«That body comes in the period from 1380 to 1450 and is discovered by Masaccio, and by Chaucer who is partly of the old gyre, and by Villon who is wholly of the new.» — quiénes descubren ese cuerpo solitario, según Yeats

«cannot move us, as he did his immediate successors, for he discovered a naturalism that begins to weary us a little;100 making the naked young man awaiting baptism shiver with the cold, St. Peter grow red with the exertion of dragging the money out of the miraculous fish’s mouth, while Adam and Eve, flying before the sword of the Angel, show faces disfigured by their suffering.» — el naturalismo de Masaccio, que Yeats declara empezar a cansarle; la frase anterior, sobre su muerte a los veintiséis años, se corta antes de un compuesto partido por el salto de renglón

«It is very likely because I am a poet and not a painter that I feel so much more keenly that suffering of Villon—of the 13th Phase as man, and of it or near it in epoch—in whom the human soul for the first time stands alone before a death ever present to imagination, without help from a Church that is fading away; or is it that I remember Aubrey Beardsley, a man of like phase though so different epoch, and so read into Villon’s suffering our modern conscience which gathers intensity as we approach the close of an era?» — Yeats declara la sospecha de estar proyectando su propia conciencia moderna sobre el sufrimiento de Villon

«Intensity that has seemed to me pitiless self-judgment may have been but heroic gaiety.» — y deja la lectura alternativa en pie

«With the approach of solitude bringing with it an ever-increasing struggle with that which opposes solitude—sensuality, greed, ambition, physical curiosity in all its species—philosophy has returned driving dogma out.» — el cambio que Yeats fecha ahí: la filosofía desplaza al dogma

«Even amongst the most pious the worshipper is preoccupied with himself, and when I look for the drilled eyeball, which reveals so much, I notice that its edge is no longer so mechanically perfect, nor, if I can judge by casts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, is the hollow so deep.» — y la prueba material que aduce: la pupila taladrada ya no es tan perfecta

«There are no miracles to stare at, for man descends the hill he once climbed with so great toil, and all grows but natural again.» — la fórmula con que Yeats describe ese descenso

«Donatello, as later Michelangelo, reflects the hardness and astringency of Myron, and foretells what must follow the Renaissance; while Jacopo della Quercia and most of the painters seem by contrast, as Raphael later on, Ionic and Asiatic.» — la oscilación entre dureza y suavidad que Yeats reparte entre los artistas del Renacimiento

«I do not myself find it possible to make more than the first half coincide with the central moment, Phase 15 of the Italian Renaissance—Phase 22 of the cone of the entire era— the breaking of the Christian synthesis as the corresponding period before Christ, the age of Phidias, was the breaking of Greek traditional faith.» — el paralelo con que Yeats sitúa el Renacimiento: la ruptura de la síntesis cristiana como la de la fe griega en tiempos de Fidias

«The first half covers the principal activity of the Academy of Florence which formulated the reconciliation of Paganism and Christianity.» — la obra que Yeats atribuye a la Academia florentina

«This reconciliation, which to Pope Julius meant that Greek and Roman Antiquity were as sacred as that of Judea, and like it “a vestibule of Christianity”, meant to the mind of Dürer—a visitor to Venice during the movement of the gyre—that the human norm, discovered from the measurement of ancient statues, was God’s first handiwork, that “perfectly proportioned human body” which had seemed to Dante Unity of Being symbolised.» — los dos sentidos que Yeats da a esa reconciliación, el del papa y el de Durero

«The ascetic, who had a thousand years before attained his transfiguration upon the golden ground of Byzantine mosaic, had turned not into an athlete but into that unlabouring form the athlete dreamed of: the second Adam had become the first.» — la fórmula con que Yeats cierra ese tránsito

«Because the 15th Phase can never find direct human expression, being a supernatural incarnation, it impressed upon work and thought an element of strain and artifice, a desire to combine elements which may be incompatible, or which suggest by their combination something supernatural.» — el efecto que Yeats atribuye a la fase 15 sobre la obra: tensión y artificio

«Had some Florentine Platonist read to Botticelli Porphyry upon the Cave of the Nymphs? for I seem to recognise it in that curious cave, with a thatched roof over the nearer entrance to make it resemble the conventional manger, in his “Nativity”II in the National Gallery.108 Certainly the glimpse of forest trees, dim in the evening light, through the far entrance, and the deliberate strangeness everywhere, gives one an emotion of mystery which is new to painting.» — la conjetura con que Yeats lee la Natividad de Botticelli

«Botticelli, Crivelli, Mantegna, Da Vinci,109 who fall within the period, make Masaccio and his school seem heavy and common by something we may call intellectual beauty or compare perhaps to that kind of bodily beauty which Castiglione called “the spoil or monument of the victory of the soul”.» — lo que Yeats les concede frente a Masaccio, con una fórmula de Castiglione

«Intellect and emotion, primary curiosity and the antithetical dream, are for the moment one.» — la unidad momentánea que Yeats sitúa ahí

«Since the rebirth of the secular intellect in the eleventh century, faculty has been separating from faculty, poetry from music, the worshipper from the worshipped, but all have remained within a common fading circle— Christendom—and so within the human soul.» — la separación progresiva de facultades desde el siglo XI, contenida aún en un círculo común

«The subject-matter may arise out of some propaganda as when Raphael in the Camera della Segnatura, and Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, put, by direction of the Pope, Greek Sages and Doctors of the Church, Roman Sibyls and Hebrew Prophets, opposite one another in apparent equality.» — el ejemplo de propaganda con que ilustra ese giro: sabios griegos y profetas hebreos enfrentados por mandato del papa

«From this on, all is changed, and where the Mother of God sat enthroned, now that the Soul’s unity has been found and lost, Nature seats herself, and the painter can paint only what he desires in the flesh, and soon, asking less and less for himself, will make it a matter of pride to paint what he does not at all desire.» — el cambio de asunto que Yeats fecha ahí: la Naturaleza en el trono de la Madre de Dios

«I see in Shakespeare a man in whom human personality, hitherto restrained by its dependence upon Christendom or by its own need for self-control, burst like a shell.» — el lugar que Yeats da a Shakespeare en ese giro

«Perhaps secular intellect, setting itself free after five hundred years of struggle, has made him the greatest of dramatists, and yet because an antithetical age alone could confer upon an art like his the unity of a painting or of a temple pediment, we might, had the total works of Sophocles survived—they too born of a like struggle though with a different enemy—not think him greatest.» — y la reserva con que acota esa grandeza, apoyada en las obras perdidas de Sófocles

«Were he not himself of a later phase, were he of the 16th Phase like his age and so drunk with his own wine, he had not written plays at all, but as it is he finds his opportunity among a crowd of men and women who are still shaken by thought that passes from man to man in psychological contagion.» — por qué, según el sistema, Shakespeare pudo escribir teatro y su época no

«I see in Milton, who is characteristic of the moment when the first violence of the gyre has begun to sink, an attempted return to the synthesis of the Camera della Segnatura and the Sistine Chapel. It is this attempt made too late that, amid all the music and magnificence of the still violent gyre, gives him his unreality and his cold rhetoric.» — el juicio de Yeats sobre Milton dentro del sistema

«The two elements have fallen apart in the hymn “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, the one is sacred, the other profane; his classical mythology is an artificial ornament;114 whereas no great Italian artist from 1450 to the sack of Rome saw any difference between them, and when difference came, as it did with Titian, it was God and the Angels that seemed artificial.» — y la inversión que señala: primero el mito clásico parece artificial, luego lo parecen Dios y los ángeles

«The gyre ebbs out in order and reason, the Jacobean poets succeed the Elizabethan, Cowley and Dryden the Jacobean as belief dies out.» — el modo en que ese giro se agota

«The world begins to long for the arbitrary and accidental, for the grotesque, the repulsive and the terrible, that it may be cured of desire.» — lo que el mundo empieza a buscar al agotarse el deseo

«The beginning of the gyre like that of its forerunner is violent, a breaking of the soul and world into fragments, and has for a chief character the materialistic movement at the end of the seventeenth century, all that comes out of Bacon perhaps, the foundation of our modern inductive reasoning, the declamatory religious sects and controversies that first in England and then in France destroy the sense of form, all that has its very image and idol in Bernini’s big Altar in St. Peter’s with its figures contorted and convulsed by religion as though by the devil.» — el comienzo del noveno giro, con Bacon y las sectas declamatorias, y el altar de Bernini por imagen

«Men change rapidly from deduction to deduction, opinion to opinion, have but one impression at a time and utter it always, no matter how often they change, with the same emphasis.» — el modo de cambiar de opinión propio de ese giro

«Then the gyre develops a new coherence in the external scene; and violent men, each master of some generalisation, arise one after another: Napoleon, a man of the 20th Phase in the historical 21st—personality in its hard final generalisation—typical of all.» — y el tipo de hombre que produce, con Napoleón por caso

«The artistic life, where most characteristic of the general movement, shows the effect of the closing of the tinctures. It is external, sentimental and logical—the poetry of Pope and Gray, the philosophy of Johnson and of Rousseau—equally simple in emotion or in thought, the old oscillation in a new form.» — la vida artística de ese giro, repartida entre Pope y Gray, Johnson y Rousseau

«Personality is everywhere spreading out its fingers in vain, or grasping with an always more convulsive grasp a world where the predominance of physical science, of finance and economics in all their forms, of democratic politics, of vast populations, of architecture where styles jostle one another, of newspapers where all is heterogeneous, show that mechanical force will in a moment become supreme.» — el diagnóstico que Yeats da del momento presente

«That art discovered by Dante of marshalling into a vast antithetical structure antithetical material became through Milton Latinised and artificial—the Shades, as Sir Thomas Browne said, “steal or contrive a body”119—and now it changes that it may marshal into a still antithetical structure primary material, and the modern novel is created» — el nacimiento de la novela moderna leído como cambio de material dentro de la misma estructura

«but even before the gyre is drawn to its end the happy ending, the admired hero, the preoccupation with desirable things, all that is undisguisedly antithetical disappears.» — y lo que desaparece de ella antes de acabar el giro

«A mysterious contact is perceptible first in painting and then in poetry and last in prose.» — el orden en que Yeats sitúa la aparición de ese contacto

«Reynolds had nothing of it, an ostentatious fashionable man fresh from Rome, he stayed content with fading Renaissance emotion and modern curiosity.» — y a quién se lo niega

«In frail women’s faces the soul awakes— all its prepossessions, the accumulated learning of centuries swept away—and looks out upon us wise and foolish like the dawn.» — la fórmula con que lo describe

«Then it is everywhere, it finds the village Providence of the eighteenth century and turns him into Goethe, who for all that comes to no conclusion, his Faust after his hundred years but reclaiming land like some Sir Charles Grandison or Voltaire in his old age.» — el efecto que le atribuye sobre Goethe, con su Fausto acabando por desecar tierras

«It makes the heroines of Jane Austen seek, not as their grandfathers and grandmothers would have done, theological or political truth, but simply good breeding, as though to increase it were more than any practical accomplishment.» — y sobre las heroínas de Jane Austen

«In poetry alone it finds its full expression, for it is a quality of the emotional nature (Celestial Body acting through Mask); and creates all that is most beautiful in modern English poetry from Blake to Arnold, all that is not a fading echo.» — dónde halla su expresión plena, y de qué facultad lo hace depender

«In painting it shows most often where the aim has been archaistic, as though it were an accompaniment of what the popular writers call decadence, as though old emotions had first to be exhausted.» — la condición en que ese contacto aparece en pintura

«I think of the French portrait-painter Ricard, to whom it was more a vision of the mind than a research, for he would say to his sitter, “You are so fortunate as to resemble your picture”, and of Charles Ricketts, my education in so many things.126 How often his imagination moves stiffly as though in fancy dress, and then there is something—Sphinx, Danaides—that makes me remember Callimachus’ return to Ionic elaboration and shudder as though I stared into an abyss full of eagles.» — los dos pintores que Yeats trae como ejemplo, uno de ellos su propio maestro en tantas cosas

«Everywhere this vision, or rather this contact, is faint or intermittent and it is always fragile; Dickens was able with a single book, Pickwick, to substitute for Jane Austen’s privileged and perilous research the camaraderie of the inn parlour, qualities that every man might hope to possess, and it did not return till Henry James began to write.» — la fragilidad de ese contacto, medida en el efecto de un solo libro de Dickens

«Certain men have sought to express the new emotion through the Creative Mind, though fit instruments of expression do not yet exist, and so to establish, in the midst of our ever more abundant primary information, antithetical wisdom; but such men, Blake, Coventry Patmore at moments, Nietzsche, are full of morbid excitement and few in number, unlike those who, from Richardson to Tolstoy, from Hobbes down to Spencer, have grown in number and serenity.» — quiénes intentaron esa expresión y en qué estado los halla Yeats, frente a los que crecieron en número y serenidad

«They were begotten in the Sistine Chapel and still dream that all can be transformed if they be but emphatic; yet Nietzsche, when the doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence drifts before his eyes, knows for an instant that nothing can be so transformed and is almost of the next gyre.» — y el instante en que Yeats sitúa a Nietzsche fuera de ese grupo

«The period from 1875 to 1927 (Phase 22—in some countries and in some forms of thought the phase runs from 1815 to 1927) is like that from 1250 to 1300 (Phase 8) a period of abstraction, and like it also in that it is preceded and followed by abstraction.» — el tramo presente y su paralelo con el de 1250 a 1300

«Abstraction which began at Phase 19 will end at Phase 25, for these movements and this science will have for their object or result the elimination of intellect.» — el término que Yeats fija a esa abstracción y su resultado

«I too think of famous works where synthesis has been carried to the utmost limit possible, where there are elements of inconsequence or discovery of hitherto ignored ugliness, and I notice that when the limit is approached or past, when the moment of surrender is reached, when the new gyre begins to stir, I am filled with excitement.» — y su propia reacción ante esas obras

«I think of recent mathematical research; even the ignorant can compare it with that of Newton—so plainly of the 19th Phase—with its objective world intelligible to intellect; I can recognise that the limit itself has become a new dimension, that this ever-hidden thing which makes us fold our hands has begun to press down upon multitudes.» — lo que Yeats lee en la matemática reciente: el límite mismo vuelto dimensión nueva

«Having bruised their hands upon that limit, men, for the first time since the seventeenth century, see the world as an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade, and some few, meeting the limit in their special study, even doubt if there is any common experience, doubt the possibility of science.» — y su consecuencia: el mundo vuelto objeto de contemplación y no cosa por rehacer

«But nothing comes—though this moment was to reward me for all my toil. Perhaps I am too old. Surely something would have come when I meditated under the direction of the Cabbalists.» — y el resultado que declara: nada viene, y él mismo se pregunta si es la edad

«What discords will drive Europe to that artificial unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilisation?» — la pregunta sobre la unidad artificial de Europa, con la imagen de los palos secos atados en haz

«Should Jupiter and Saturn meet, O what a crop of mummy wheat!» — los dos versos propios con que Yeats deja planteado el influjo por venir

«Then I understand. I have already said all that can be said. The particulars are the work of the Thirteenth Cone or cycle which is in every man and called by every man his freedom.» — la frase que las editoras llaman a menudo citada, en el lugar donde 1937 la imprime, con la esfera decimotercera

«Doubtless, for it can do all things and knows all things, it knows what it will do with its own freedom but it has kept the secret.» — y la sentencia con que Yeats cierra el asunto

«Shall we follow the image of Heracles that walks through the darkness bow in hand, or mount to that other Heracles, man, not image, he that has for his bride Hebe, “The daughter of Zeus, the mighty, and Hera, shod with gold”?» — la pregunta con que se cierra el cuerpo del libro, entre las dos figuras de Heracles

«Toynbee considers Greece the heir of Crete, and that Greek religion inherits from the Minoan monotheistic mother goddess its more mythical conceptions (A Study of History, vol. i, p. 92). “Mathematic Starlight” Babylonian astrology is, however, present in the friendships and antipathies of the Olympic gods.» — en nota, Yeats recoge de Toynbee la herencia cretense de Grecia y sostiene a la vez la presencia de la astrología babilonia entre los olímpicos

«There is a Greek inscription at the top of the picture which says that Botticelli’s world is in the “second woe” of the Apocalypse, and that after certain other Apocalyptic events the Christ of the picture will appear. He had probably found in some utterance of Savonarola’s promise of an ultimate Marriage of Heaven and Earth, sacred and profane, and pictures it by the Angels and shepherds embracing, and as I suggest by Cave and Manger. When I saw the Cave of Mithra at Capri I wondered if that were Porphyry’s Cave. The two entrances are there, one reached by a stair of a hundred feet or so from the sea and once trodden by devout sailors, and one reached from above by some hundred and fifty steps and used, my guide-book tells me, by Priests. If he knew that cave, which may have had its recognised symbolism, he would have been the more ready to discover symbols in the cave where Odysseus landed in Ithaca.» — la nota en que Yeats documenta la inscripción de la Natividad de Botticelli y enlaza su cueva con la de Mitra en Capri, que él mismo visitó

«Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Souls’ Night. And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come; For it is a ghost’s right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.» — arranca el poema epílogo, con la copa servida para el fantasma

«I need some mind that, if the cannon sound From every quarter of the world, can stay Wound in mind’s pondering, As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound; Because I have a marvellous thing to say, A certain marvellous thing None but the living mock, Though not for sober ear; It may be all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.» — el interlocutor que el poema pide y la cosa maravillosa que dice tener que decir

«Horton’s the first I call.2 He loved strange thought And knew that sweet extremity of pride That’s called platonic love, And that to such a pitch of passion wrought Nothing could bring him, when his lady died, Anodyne for his love.» — el primero de los tres muertos que el poema convoca

«On Florence Emery I call the next, Who finding the first wrinkles on a face Admired and beautiful, And by foreknowledge of the future vexed; Diminished beauty, multiplied commonplace; Preferred to teach a school Away from neighbour or friend, Among dark skins, and there Permit foul years to wear Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.» — la segunda convocada, con su marcha a enseñar lejos al descubrirse las primeras arrugas

«Before that end much had she ravelled out From a discourse in figurative speech By some learned Indian On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach, Until it plunge into the sun; And there, free and yet fast, Being both Chance and Choice, Forget its broken toys And sink into its own delight at last.» — y la doctrina del viaje del alma que el poema le atribuye, con el Azar y la Elección vueltos uno

«I call MacGregor Mathers from his grave, For in my first hard spring-time we were friends, Although of late estranged. I thought him half a lunatic, half knave, And told him so, but friendship never ends; And what if mind seem changed, And it seem changed with the mind, When thoughts rise up unbid On generous things that he did And I grow half contented to be blind!» — el tercero, llamado con el juicio que el poema no le retira

«But names are nothing. What matter who it be, So that his elements have grown so fine The fume of muscatel Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy No living man can drink from the whole wine. I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.» — el poema declara indiferentes los nombres y se queda con la condición del fantasma

«Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight Till meditation master all its parts, Nothing can stay my glance Until that glance run in the world’s despite To where the damned have howled away their hearts, And where the blessed dance; Such thought, that in it bound I need no other thing, Wound in mind’s wandering As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.» — la estrofa final del poema, con el pensamiento que basta y no necesita otra cosa

«Four weeks ago I read poetry again after four years philosophical study; at first it was faint like an old faded letter, and then an excitement that I had not felt for years.» — en la sección VI de Rapallo que 1937 suprime, Yeats fecha su vuelta a la poesía tras cuatro años de estudio filosófico

«One is a harder judge of a friend’s work than of a stranger’s because one knows his powers so well that his faults seem perversity, or we do not know his powers and think he should go our way and not his, and then all in a moment we see his work as a whole and judge as with the eyes of a stranger.» — y explica en esa versión anterior por qué se juzga peor la obra de un amigo

«though I had read it all in the little books I had never understood until now that the translations from Chinese, from Latin, from Provencal, are as much a part of his original work, as much chosen as to theme, as much characterised as to style, as the vituperation, the railing, which I had hated but which now seem a necessary balance.» — en el mismo texto exciso, Yeats declara haber entendido solo entonces que las traducciones de Pound son tan obra suya como el resto

«He is not trying to create forms because he believes, like so many of his contemporaries, that old forms are dead, so much as a new style, a new man.» — y el propósito que le atribuye: no formas nuevas sino un estilo y un hombre nuevos

«Again and again he breaks the metrical form which the work seemed to require, or which, where he is translating, it once had, or interjects some anachronism, as when he makes Propertius talk of an old Wordsworthian, that he may pull it back not into himself but into this hard, shining, fastidious modern man, who has no existence, who can never have existence, except to the readers of his poetry.» — el procedimiento que Yeats describe en esa versión: el anacronismo que devuelve el texto a un hombre moderno que solo existe para sus lectores

«Synge once said to me ‘All our modern poetry is the poetry of the lyrical boy’,2 but here, in spite of all faults and flaws,—sometimes that exasperation is but nerves —is the grown man, in ‘Cathay’ his passion and self-possession, in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ his self-abandonment that recovers itself in mockery, everywhere his masterful curiosity.» — la frase de Synge que Yeats trae en ese texto suprimido, y lo que le opone en Pound

«Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant, Move among the lovers of perfection alone. Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light’» — los versos de Pound con que se cerraba la sección excisa

«As rendered in the carbon of the setting TS, the ending of Section I of Book II (138–39) differs substantially from the printed text, even in being separated into two sections.» — la nota de las editoras sobre la primera pieza de typescript del Libro II

«At death consciousness passes from Husk to Spirit Husk and Passionate Body are said to “disappear”, which corresponds to Creative Mind and Body of Fate ceasing to be “enforced” at their phase 22, and from that on to birth Spirit turns from Passionate Body and clings to Celestial Body, as Creative Mind in the primary phases turns from Mask and clings to Body of Fate.» — en el typescript del Libro II, la muerte se describe con un paralelo que el impreso de 1937 recorta; el texto se cita tal como lo trae el apéndice, sin puntuación entre Spirit y Husk

«The Husk is more than kind or race, and Passionate Body is more than what is sensible or perceivable. Through the Husk is expressed the needs of a particular daimon: it draws to itself and turns into pleasure and pain those objects of sense that symbolise those daimons that are its natural associates.» — en esa versión anterior Yeats define el Husk y el Passionate Body con una amplitud que el texto de 1937 no conserva

«Through the Body of Fate we touch the Creative Minds of all other beings; through the Passionate Body their Husks, for every daimon is a centre that has all other daimons for circumference.» — y la fórmula del daimon como centro que tiene por circunferencia a todos los demás, que tampoco está en el impreso

«The Spirit knows by an act of pure consciousness; what the Spirit knows becomes a part of itself and is accepted as intellectual necessity, and for this reason my instructors have called the Celestial Body “fate” although I have preferred to keep the word for the Faculties where it describes the sum of fact.» — en el typescript Yeats consigna que sus instructores llamaron fate al Celestial Body y que él prefirió reservar la palabra para las Faculties

«The Husk is not only the natural senses but what Blake called the enlarged and numerous senses, it knows the ultimate reality through its Passionate Body as multitude, but the Spirit knows it in the Celestial Body as one, and I must not attempt to solve the impossible. “In aeternitatis opposita coincidunt”.» — y remata con una sentencia latina sobre la coincidencia de los opuestos, ausente del texto publicado

«It must not be thought that spirit is reality and sense illusionary, both are illusionary because abstracted from that reality symbolised as the sphere.» — la advertencia con que cierra ese tramo del typescript

«The Spirit begets the next life, the stream of images and events, and then from birth “disappears” but continues to act through the Huskk spearating [sic] from one another those forms which now constitute the Passionate Body but were once through past unions with the Celestial Body a part of itself; but the Celestial Body, now evil because separate, pursues the forms and encloses them in time and space.» — el papel del Spirit y del Celestial Body en el nacimiento según el typescript, con las erratas del original conservadas

«Some srtists [sic] seek to undo the work of the Faculties and to reach through associations of excitement pure Passionate Body—perhaps some philosophers have attempted an equal impossibility—the discovery of pure Celestial Body.» — y la conjetura sobre artistas y filósofos con que se cierra, con el sic que las editoras marcan

«From the paragraph that in the printed text begins “If we consider East . . .” on 145, and continuing to “The foregoing figure shows the position . . .” on 147, the TS carbon differs significantly from the printed text, and so is reproduced here.» — la nota que sitúa la segunda pieza de typescript del Libro II

«The pole of the Principles, if we place it in that of the year, is at right angles to that of the Faculties. My instructors fixed this upon my mind by saying that the man of the Principles stood upright whereas the man of the Faculties lay horizontal like a sleeping man.» — en el typescript, la imagen del hombre de pie y el hombre acostado se reparte entre Principles y Faculties, al revés que en el impreso, donde se reparte entre rueda solar y rueda lunar

«The first figure I shall for convenience think of as divided according to the signs of the Zodiac, though it can be divided as readily according to the points of the compass, the East or sunrise taking the place of the Vernal Equinox, and the second figure I shall divide into the 28 lunar phases.» — el mismo pasaje en primera persona y en futuro, donde el impreso lo da ya hecho

«Owing to the fact that the diamond touches the circumference of the Wheel with its narrow ends this is the least satisfactory of the diagrams pictorially.» — en el typescript del Libro II, Yeats declara insatisfactorio uno de sus propios diagramas; el impreso de 1937 no conserva ese juicio

«The flash starts at Will and moves with seeming irregularity from phase to phase until it ends at the phase that gives its character to the next incarnation.» — y el recorrido que le atribuye

«The phases it has touched are more important than the others and are called “Initiatory Moments” and differentiate certain points among others touched by the gyres at one or other side of its cone, whereas the ends of the cones are called “Critical Moments”.» — los dos nombres que ese texto suprimido da a los puntos de la rueda

«The “Lightning Flash” is what makes two men at the same phase and as near to the same moment and the same place as may be, two men who are twins let us say, differ from one another.» — el oficio que ese texto le adjudica: distinguir a dos hombres de la misma fase

«It is a conscious act as distinguished from the circular course of nature; its origin never explained, unexplainable, lies in the past and the future and yet lies fully in the present, and though the “flash” may seem to occupy many years it is but an instant of the last initiation.» — y su estatuto, declarado inexplicable en el propio texto

«When its Initiatory and Critical Moments are moments of activity or change in sexual life my instructors can without difficulty—I have tested this—date them in the “Ephemeris” by their association with certain planets.» — en ese texto suprimido Yeats declara haber comprobado él mismo que sus instructores fechaban esos momentos en las efemérides

«Sometimes my instructors have constructed a s igil [sic] like those in old books of magic, and only when re-drawn ypon [sic] the Wheel, only when one has noticed where its first point, its last point, and its angles fall, does one discover in this zig-zag sigil or “Flash” a series of initiatory moments, the essential character of an action or a man.» — el sigilo que ese texto describe, y el modo de leerlo sobre la rueda, con los sic que las editoras marcan

«Certain mystics have indeed drawn similar lines between the petals of a symbolic Rose, where every petal has its separate meaning, marking the beginning and end with a minute circle.» — y el paralelo con la Rosa simbólica con que cierra

«The TS carbon contains a lengthy section of text that in the printed version is replaced by the first five sentences of section V (162). This text is heavily corrected in ink in WBY’s hand, and text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.» — la nota de las editoras sobre la primera pieza de typescript del Libro III, con las correcciones de mano de Yeats declaradas

«Should one say, Like Swedenborg, that the spirits enter into our dreams and thoughts, into our unconscious life whether we wake or sleep, or that their daimons (Principles) are present to our daimons (our Principles) and that it is our daimon that compels us to dream and think. The second seems most compatible with the system I am expounding.» — en el typescript del Libro III Yeats plantea la alternativa entre la explicación de Swedenborg y la suya, y declara cuál le encaja

«All ghosts controls, communicators, materialisations, poltergeists, apparitions, instructors, are personnifications [sic], dramatisations of what would otherwise remain unknown, but these dramatisations conveyed from one man to another as daimon becomes aware of daimon, or if you prefer by “suggestion”, “thought transference” take their forms from general experience, forms that can be studied as we study dreams in the old dream books or in those of the psycho-analysts.» — y describe fantasmas, controles y apariciones como dramatizaciones estudiables como sueños, en un pasaje que 1937 no conserva

«The true spirits, the discarnate daimons, the objective principles, are served by these subjective fabrications, relieved of certain burdens, but are of another nature, for all that speaks, reasons, dramatises, wills, belongs to the Faculties and the Faculties are cast off at death.» — la distinción que ese texto mantiene entre esas dramatizaciones y los espíritus verdaderos

«Discarnate life corresponds to the months from mid-March to mid-September, and the sisx states described in the book are the “Vision of the Blood Kindred” (March), the “Return” or “Dreaming Back” (April), the “Shiftings” “First Purification” (May), tThe “Beatitude” “Marriage” (June), the “Second Purification” (July), the “Preparation” “Foreknowledge” (August). The six states are states of learning that climax in tThe “Beatitude” “Marriage” whereas the primary phases in the Wheel of the Faculties are states of obedience that climax in phase 1.» — el typescript nombra dos de los seis estados de otro modo que el impreso —First Purification, Second Purification, Preparation— y las editoras conservan las tachaduras

«The In “the Vision of the Blood Kindred” I do not fully understand, but it is too picturesque to ignore.» — en el typescript Yeats declara no entender del todo el primer estado y quedarse con él por pintoresco, cosa que el impreso no dice

«the blood kindred appear to the dying man, the more recent the more vividly, from amongst them come those visions of husband or wife seen by the dying.» — y describe el primer estado como la aparición de los parientes de sangre al moribundo

«Beginning on 167 (“Teaching Spirits are Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone . . .”), and continuing to the end of Book III, the text of the TS carbon differs radically from that of the printed text. Text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.» — la nota que declara radicalmente distinto el resto del Libro III en el typescript

«The spirit has itself no creative power, but the spirits of the thirteenth cone may create an illusionary life which exhausts emotion. Houses appear to satisfy hope or habit, the child seems to grow to maturity, or with the help of some medium a christmas tree is created.» — en el typescript la Phantasmagoria se atribuye a los espíritus del cono decimotercero y no al Spirit, que se declara sin poder creador

«The celestial body is made apparent by the spirits of the 13th cone during what my instructors have called the teaching.» — y el typescript llama teaching a lo que el impreso reparte de otro modo

«The act of teaching is by its very nature a recession through time, a disappearance of the» — la definición que ese texto da del acto de enseñanza

«The passage from event to event with the periodical falling back into Passionate Body when some event seems to complete itself shows to the Spirit the course and effect of all the passionate events of life.» — el typescript del Libro III describe el paso de suceso a suceso y lo que muestra al Spirit

«This showing is not the work of Spirit itself because Spirit separated from the Faculties cannot choose, can but attend or withold attention, nor that even without the collaboration of some living man.» — y le niega al Spirit toda elección: solo puede atender o retirar la atención, y ni eso sin un vivo

«It has been purified of pleasure and pain and must now be purified of good and evil, and in this the Celestial Body is present as it were in person and not through its messengers.» — el orden de purificaciones en esa versión

«Events are no longer seen and explained but are lived, and the Spirit is now saidto [sic] live a true life. The past life seen as cause and effect is almost identical with the timeless Celestial Body, almost apprehended as a single simultaneous act.» — y el estado que de ahí resulta, casi idéntico al Celestial Body

«But nowthe [sic] Code itself must be judged and transcended; as Spirit and Celestial Body approach each other events losetheir [sic] separate identity, reveal themselves as an abstraction from Divine Wisdom or Reality. The change from the Return to the First Purification is analogous to that after phase II. The unity that had hitherto been sought in external events and some accepted code is revealed through the One, but the One is not now within the human personality but in Celestial Body, present to the Spirit as its Other.» — el typescript exige que el propio código sea juzgado, con la errata que las editoras conservan

«Here too, it seems plain, the Spirit may eke out its knowledge with that of the living, or be helped as that Priest might have helped, be released from Purgatory as we say; that it has still its part among those whose beliefs it shared, or shared in some measure while living.» — y añade lo que el impreso omite: que el Spirit puede ser ayudado por los vivos que compartieron su creencia

«The Third State called the Marriage, Celestial Body is completely absorbed in Spirit (as Mask is in Will at phase 15) or in a timeless moment of pure consciousness or unconsciousness that must not be called the present because the present divides past and future and implies their existence. This moment has been compared to two mirrors which are empty because face to face.» — el tercer estado en la versión del typescript, con la imagen de los dos espejos vacíos por estar frente a frente

«This state must not be confused with the Beatitude a state analagous [sic] to Unity of Being which may occur either in the first or second Purification according to the nature of the soul. Antithetical man has a Primary daimon, or Primary Principles, and will enter the Beatitude if at all during the Second Purification. Primary man has an antithetical daimon and will enter the Beatitude in the First Purification. It is a state symbolical of ultimate reality, or of the final solution of the antinomies. All is not lost in Spirit but the Spirit finds itself in all.» — en el typescript del Libro III, la Beatitude se distingue del estado anterior y se reparte según el tipo de daimon; el impreso de 1937 no trae esa distinción

«Before and after the Marriage occurs an experience called the Shiftingswhich [sic] corresponds to the Interchange of the Tinctures in the Wheel of the Faculties. The Solar and Lunar Principles exchange their contents. What was motive may become environment and vice-versa. This may last until the mid-point between birth and death when the Shiftings recur once more. A life may however have to be re-lived before the exchange is either complete or unnecessary.» — el typescript coloca las Shiftings antes y después del Marriage, y admite que una vida se reviva

«My instructors speak of those in the states before the Beatitude as the dead and confine the word spirit (as distinct from Spirit) to those in the Beatitude or later states. The dead, if they approach the living during the Meditation, appear as they were a little before death, if during the Return as they appeared during the moment of life just lived through in the Dreaming Back, if during the First Purification in whatever form they most impressed themselves upon the living. If a spirit appear during the Beatitude it wears a form symbolical of the Divine Intellect. In the state I am about to describe the spirit appears as the shape-changer of tradition.» — el reparto de formas de aparición en la versión del typescript, con el Divine Intellect donde el impreso no lo trae

«The dead meet one another under the constraint of necessity. In the Dreaming Back each is alone in his dream though many may compose a single event; during the Return they are not alone but meet only as some past event permits. During the Phantasmagoria they may meet at the permission of the 13th Cone; during the First Purification as that of the Celestial Body. During the Second Purification spirits are drawn like to like.» — las condiciones de encuentro entre los muertos en esa versión anterior

«We have no freedom” said an inhabitant of this state “but to purify our intention”, meaning, as I found afterward, to purify it of “complication” or of all that is not compatible with its ideal aim or ruling love of its group.» — el mismo intercambio con un habitante del estado, que el typescript trae con freedom donde el impreso imprime power

«It is a state not of thought but of contemplation. These aims unseal the soul’s ultimate rest whereas the First Purification unsealed its source by turning necessity into thought.» — y la definición de ese estado en la versión anterior

«But Spirits must draw upon the Faculties of the living whose daimonic or unconscious words or actions they control that they may turn their vision into knowledge. Those who taught me this system claim to have done so not for my sake but for the sake of their own “purification”.» — el typescript declara el motivo de los instructores con la palabra purificación, donde el impreso dice solo que lo hicieron por sí mismos

«For that reason my instructors have said “we never give thoughts, we create such a situation as compels you to listen to your daimon . . . . . . we are objectivity”.» — la frase de los instructores que el typescript conserva entera y el impreso no trae

«The “Foreknowledge” is a vision of the next incarnation in its concrete detailin [sic] its alliances and groups, if the spirit is not in phase it may seek to act upon the living so as to influence its own future life but it cannot affect that life unless at the bidding of the 13th cone. It may be full of a partizan [sic] intensity unknown to living men because it foresees the remote consequence of some perhaps trivial act and this emotion and the action it inspires constitutes the frustration dreaded by mediums. This frustration this partizan [sic] intensity have however no consequencef or [sic] the spirit, for the discarnate spirit cannot create, except that it may delay its birth which cannot take place until all it has foreseen is admitted to be just.» — la descripción del último estado en el typescript, con las erratas del original conservadas

«Doubtless we all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother or sister of the next.» — el mismo pasaje sobre la familia que vuelve vida tras vida, aquí encabezado por un doubtless que el impreso suprime

«All such passions they say, with an unexpected austerity, contain “cruelty and deceit”, and this antithetical cruelty and deceit must be expiated in primary suffering and submission, or the old tragedy will be repeated.» — en el typescript Yeats califica de austeridad inesperada la sentencia de sus instructores sobre la crueldad y el engaño; el impreso quita el comentario y le añade una comparación con D. H. Lawrence

«There are other bonds besides those between tyrant and victim but of these I know nothing.» — el typescript declara ignorancia sobre los demás vínculos, donde el impreso los enumera

«This symbolism becomes intelligible when we so superimpose the cones of the Principles upon those of the Faculties that they lie at right angles to one another.» — el typescript explica el intercambio entre Sabio y Víctima por la superposición de los conos, cosa que el impreso deja fuera

«It seems strange that Sage and Victim should suggest Tyrant and Victim, but the Sage and Tyrant echo the Antithetical Tincture. The Sage is described as dependent for his strength upon a tradition or logical process independent of himself, a wing of the antinomy asserted against the whole; and both victims expiate ignorance.» — y consigna lo que en esa correspondencia le parece extraño

«The Victim that is the opposite of the Sage is the One present in all things and he suffers because he shares the sufferings of all. I think of Ramakrishna and certain followers of his who if they saw a man or beast beaten in the street displayed the stripes upon their own bodies, and of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam who took the diseases of others upon herself.» — los dos ejemplos de esa Víctima que el typescript trae y el impreso no: los seguidores de Ramakrishna y santa Lidwina de Schiedam

«It is that whereby a supernatural guide is brought into existence. The 13th cone contains the Ghostly Self, the self that does not incarnate, and there is a Victimage for the Ghostly Self corresponding to that which though it be for the incarnate daimon is called Victimage for the dead.» — el typescript nombra el intercambio que engendra un guía sobrenatural y declara que no tiene nombre técnico

«The soul in Victimage for the Dead takes upon itself suffering because it has through some excess or particularity of living wounded that body which represents the body of the whole. Victimage for the Ghostly Self follows a refusal to live, whether from fear of injuring oneself or others or necessitated by conviction.» — y separa las dos clases de victimaje por su causa

«The latest surviving typescript of the latter parts of Book IV contains two short but interesting sections that were cut before the printed text. In that typescript, they appear between the material that would become sections XI and XIII in the printed text, possibly in lieu of the current section XII (188–89). Text rendered in italics was added in manuscript.» — la nota con que las editoras sitúan las dos secciones del Libro IV cortadas antes de imprimir

«Some years ago I repeated in Westminster Abbey a trick of the mind I had first practised in a baroque Italian church. All I compared those preposterous crowded marble figures to Asiatic figures with half a dozen seemed at my bidding to thrust out three or four arms apiece. I said to myself “I am somewhere in Thibet and in the Temple of some old decadent Asiatic faith”» — en una sección suprimida del Libro IV, Yeats cuenta el truco mental con que miró las figuras de mármol de Westminster como asiáticas

«and now all that marble seemed so full of exciting history that I would not for the world have an inch of it away. I understood for the first time, though it sounds simple enough, that Christianity in its present form was an eastern religion that had spread through Europe as the Mahomettan conquest spread into Sicily and Spain» — y lo que dice haber entendido con él: el cristianismo como religión oriental extendida por Europa

«that when the neo-Thomist bids us cling to what is western he is turning away from all that has made his Christianity a religion, turning to its inmost character indeed, but to something that is not religion, to something that declares itself at the moment when faith sees its the tomb shows at the turn of the road.» — y la objeción al neotomismo que de ahí saca, ausente del texto publicado

«The next era should have a harsh secular western body but gradually as that body dies reveal its Asiatic soul. It may even be as my Instructors have said that we shall seek through hate and science what we once sought through faith and love» — el pronóstico con que cierra esa sección suprimida, atribuido a sus instructores

«A folder of rejected odd pages of what would become Book IV contains two very brief sections that might initially have been intended to follow what is in the printed Macmillan text the final section (192). We here transcribe the text from the typescript.» — la nota con que las editoras sitúan las dos secciones brevísimas de un legajo de páginas rechazadas

«I have left unexpounded certain automatic scripts about the relations of man and woman as this book is sufficiently complicated, though I have touched upon their symbols. The more historically important of the phases marked upon the upper and lower sides of the figure correspond to loves or episodes in love that fix some new symbol or lure and constitute initiatory moments and the final influx to that liberation from all lures and symbols, that presence of a love which does not pass away being fated and accepted that my instructors have named a critical moment.» — en una sección rechazada del Libro IV, Yeats declara haber dejado sin exponer los guiones sobre la relación de hombre y mujer por complejidad del libro

«Preserved with the TS carbon are two draft stages, dated September 1932, of what would become “The End of the Cycle” (see 219–20). The first text, typed on different paper from the rest of the setting-copy carbon, comprises 9 leaves, and it is heavily marked with corrections. The second text, also 9 leaves and on the same paper as the rest of the carbon of the setting-copy typescript, is unmarked and incorporates the changes from the first version. We reproduce here the second text, with annotations representing the most substantial changes from the first text.» — la nota con que las editoras sitúan los dos estados de borrador del final del Libro V y declaran cuál reproducen

«The most honoured historians describe great public events as the result of inevitable social or economic forces but never announce those events beforehand; no government sends for them as did that of the commonwealth for Lilly the astrologer;9 yet science is prophecy, the laboratory corroborates the text book, the stars the calendar.» — en el borrador de 1932, Yeats objeta a los historiadores que expliquen los sucesos por fuerzas inevitables y no los anuncien, y opone la ciencia como profecía

«Karl Marx said that the opponents of Hegel, “that great mind” as he calls him, would see the dialectic at work and has foretold its work, but Karl Marx thought his words could shape that work.» — y la objeción que en ese texto le hace a Marx, ausente del impreso

«No, that is impossible, I must think of some other age like and yet unlike what the symbol seems to foretell. Perhaps certain pages of Schneider’s analysis of Roman civilisationV give me what I need though my instructors spoke of Greek civilisation alone in their examination of the pre-Christian age.» — el borrador contesta de inmediato a su propio intento, cosa que el impreso no hace, y acude al análisis de Roma que sus instructores no le dieron

«“Dove or Swan” has a more important omission for which I am responsible. I knew nothing of the Principles when I wrote it. Perhaps my imagination in my own despite will some day force meto [sic] discover their effect upon the 12th and 14th centuries and upon the epoch that has just closed.» — en el borrador Yeats declara una omisión propia en Dove or Swan y la espera de repararla algún día

«For the present all I need say is that for a generation or so to come a state analagous to The Beatitude is possible in the daemonic life, but such a state can not act directly on more than a few trained or gifted minds.» — y el pronóstico acotado con que la sustituye

«Schneider does not help me to separate the Roman 23rd phase from the general turbulence of the civil wars (phase 22), he sees however in Augustus Caesar and his poet Virgil the characters I attribute to an antithetical twentyfourth [sic] phase: tradition remained, Augustus ruled in its name, but the public welfare seemed the sole test of tradition and action alike, and every god a public god; personality returned within narrow limits in Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, only private [joys] and sorrows mattered and at last artificial and therefore violent personality (phase 26) created the counter Augustus in Nero. When order accompanied the philosophical identification of the individual and the One: Epicetus [sic] became emperor in Marcus Aurelius» — el borrador aplica la rueda a la Roma imperial y reparte fases entre Augusto, Ovidio, Nerón y Marco Aurelio, con la errata que las editoras conservan

«Instead of the turbulence of some great person our phase 23 is a movement of unconscious forces and revolutionary ideas which affect the general mass.» — el borrador describe la fase presente como movimiento de fuerzas inconscientes y no de una gran persona

«I know young men, not all under the influence of Marxian Russia, who in criticising literature repudiate individual chracterisation and commend, let us say, the second act of Casey’s “Silver Tassie” because man there is described in the mass.» — y trae por prueba a los jóvenes críticos que repudian la caracterización individual

«Others with finer susceptibilities create sacred books, “Ulysses” or “The Waste Land”, where character and detail however clearly seen summon thought to an undefined immensity.» — los dos libros que el borrador llama sagrados dentro de ese movimiento

«I remember Pirandello whose dramatis personae find their own characters so plastic that they flow into any mould.» — y las figuras que le siguen: Pirandello y la mujer que ya nada puede sufrir

«I remember Wyndham Lewis, who seems to have found a stone where he can stand and watch stream by, those artists, idlers, rich men, low and high-born parasites, who create out of some carefully selected vice, crime or eccentricity, an artificial character.» — el personaje artificial que el borrador atribuye a Wyndham Lewis y a los suyos

«But these artificial characters protect themselves not against suggestibility which implies a suggesting mind but against imitativeness. They resist absorption in the mass of men, in public ideals, in a material external unity as the Hunchback will resist absorption in a spiritual unity; yet it is from their half accomplished absorption that they get their plasticity.» — y la distinción que hace entre sugestionabilidad e imitación

«The moment (phase 24) has all but come for the Comedia [sic] del arte, for a drama where all characters express the public conscience as it is shaped by history or necessity, or by some resistance to that conscience that soon must seem stupid or in bad taste. Personality, still possible in private, or as it were in a monk’s cell, will lose all public significance.» — el pronóstico teatral del borrador y el fin que le da a la personalidad pública

«As we are not in Rome or Greece where politics, always an expression of power, delayed and shaped the decadence, but in primary Europe, economics may create our values.» — el borrador atribuye a la economía el papel que en Roma tuvo la política

«Men see the future in Russia as a hundred and odd years ago they saw it in France, but the Russian revolution will be absorbed like the French revolution in the growing complexity of Europe. The historical conflict does not work itself out, as Marx believed, through a single preoccupation of the conscious mind, but is conterminous with the mind, conscious and unconscious.» — y niega a Marx que el conflicto histórico se resuelva por una sola preocupación de la mente consciente

«The Europe of Personality (phases 17, 18, 19) found its expression in Shakespeare, the Europe of Will (phases 19, 20, 21), as I think in Balzac; the moral Europe (phases 23, 24, 25) yet to come may form some man of genius as inferior to Balzac as Balzac is to Shakespeare.» — la escala de genios que el borrador propone para las tres Europas

«There will be no Ovid, no Catullus, no Marcus Aurelius, but I can imagine a public licence beyond anything we have known, followed by some sudden outbreak of psychic phenomena which, whether it sustain or undermine traditional religion, will cause as much excitement as did witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.» — y el brote de fenómenos psíquicos que anuncia, comparado con la brujería de los siglos XVI y XVII

«Every ancient civilisation in its last phase (harvest and decadence) has ceased to be intelligible to the mass of men and the mass of men have accepted in its place the horseman and the shepherd.» — el cambio que el borrador atribuye a toda civilización en su última fase

«Our civilisation, from its birth in the 10th to the Exchange of the Tinctures in the 15th century faced a vivid, concrete, exciting life (Will and Body of Fate in the natural phases) with a desire growing clearer in the depth of the mind for an abstract external order (Creatice [sic] Mind and Mask in the intellectual and moral phases), but since the Exchange they have faced an abstract and external order with a desire in the depth of the mind (a secret committed to painters, poets and musicians alone), for all that is vivid, concrete and exciting.» — y la inversión de deseo que fecha en el intercambio de las tinturas, con el secreto confiado a pintores, poetas y músicos

«But this desire can no more bring the shepherd and the horseman than could the pastoral poetry of Rome and Alexandrian Greece bring the migrating hordes; the final change is not from desire but from fate acting through submission and exhaustion.» — y el límite que le pone: el cambio final no viene del deseo sino del destino

«The unity we move towards will not be that deduced by Graeco-Roman civilisation from Christ’s “I and My Father are One”, Historical Christianity turning in its greater wheel has awakened like the Civilisation, an opposition in the depth of the mind. After the predominance of a single ideal figure, or of a single interpretation, must come multiform influx, the One present in every form, but conscious alone in all that is perfect after its kind; and that is why I foretell the horseman, the ruler, not the shepherd who breaks up and settles.» — el cierre del borrador, con el jinete anunciado en lugar del pastor

«Once when a child was born in the house I smelt roses everywhere, though none were visible, nor were they in my head alone for the doctor and the child’s mother smelt them.» — la misma nota de las rosas en la versión del typescript, donde los testigos son dos y no tres como en el impreso

«We make an image of him who sleeps that is not him who sleeps and we call it Emmanuel”.» — la voz oída en la juventud, en la forma del typescript, que difiere de la impresa