When I first began "blogging" here (or more accurately, "threading") about two months ago, I had to defend my right to speak, because I was not an Iranian. It was hard, and sometimes painful, to hold my ground. But I knew I had finally arrived when I began to be accused of being a secret agent of various governments and organizations. I was “in”, I was accepted, I was one of the family. I met this victory with an odd mixture of satisfaction, frustration, and occasional despair.
Recently these accusations have been popping up left and right, and I mean literally left and right, because I am now apparently both a Hezbolaahi and a Zionist agent. I reply to these claims patiently, but still they multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm. So today I posted a lengthy reply to one of these posts—lengthy even by my standards--intending to convert it into a blog. And thinking, well, from now on I’ll just refer my accusers to that blog. But then I thought, why bother? After all, the reply I wrote today to accusations leveled at me under the December 20 Iranian of the Day entry entitled “Brilliant Physicist.,” is really good enough. I can just refer them to that. And anyway anyone can track all my posts on my blogspace. So I decided to translate a poem instead.
It is a Chilean poem I've long known as a song, and heard again yesterday in a cafe near my home in the East Village. It was written by progressive activist Violeta Parra in 1965. It is called “Gracias a la vida.” It is very well-known.
The nation of Chile has known major CIA interventions, dictatorships, tortures, gross exploitation of its natural resources, economic disaster, and depredations upon its indigenous peoples. But it has also known great strides in democracy and autonomy, and it has given us this song.
I confess. I am a secret agent. There are two secrets whose sanctity I always honor: the mystery of the unfolding of the human heart and that of the ultimate fate of the soul. And I divulge the name of my agency: My agency is myself, my autonomy, and truth as best I can understand it.
And I understand the sovereign agency of nations to be based on this same individual agency. An agency whose coming has long been announced in the timeless works of the two great Eniightenments, the secular and the spiritual ones. And yet whose fruition remains a dream, as long as these Enlightenments remain severed from each other.
But their union is whispered in every human breath, and also by the wind.
Forthwith, Violeta Parra.
Gracias a la vida
(Thank You, Life)
Thank you life for giving me so much.
It has given me two stars which, whenever I open them,
distinguish perfectly between black and white,
and in the high sky its starry depths
and among the crowds the man I love.
Thank you life for giving me so much.
It has given me my hearing, which, in all its breadth,
records day and night crickets and canaries;
hammers, turbines, dogs' barks, rainstorms,
and the gentle voice of my beloved.
Thank you life for giving me so much
It has given me sound and taught me my "abc's",
along with it the words which t I think and proclaim:
mother, friend, brother and light illuminating
the route of the soul of the one I now love.
Thank you life for giving me so much,
it has given me the progress of my tired feet;
with them I walked through cities and puddles,
beaches and deserts, mountains and plains,
and your house, your street and your patio too.
Thank you life for giving me so much.
It has given me my heart which shakes its very frame
when I look at the fruit of the human mind;
when I look at good so far removed from evil,
when I look into the depths of your clear eyes.
Thank you life for giving me so much,
It has given me laughter and it has given me weeping.
Thus I distinguish joy from affliction,
the two materials which shape my song,
and the song of all of you which is the same song,
and the song of everyone, which is my very own song.
Thank you life for giving me so much.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyOJ-A5iv5I [1]
****
Happy Holidays.
Salaam, Iraanrikaa
And don’t forget, paranoia will destroy ya! :D
Robin Jayne Goldsmith
New York City, December 20, 2007
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Links:
[1] //www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyOJ-A5iv5I