#295 Material (from Quarry) (Karol Wojtyla, trad. Jerzy Peterkiewicz)

Tenemos un santuario dedicado a san Juan Pablo II al lado de la universidad al que sólo he ido una vez. Hoy tengo que pensado volver para celebrar su fiesta por lo alto. Tengo muchas cosas que pedirle.

A mí me gustan mucho sus poemas juveniles, de cuando trabajaba en la cantera. Es un poema largo dividido en partes: material, inspiración, participación, y un poema dedicado a la memoria de uno de los trabajadores. El valor del trabajo es uno de los grandes temas de su pontificado y ya en estos poemas se ve su visión del trabajo como la cantera misma en la que se pule el alma.

Traigo aquí la primera parte, acompañada de este comentario de Monika Jablonska:

“Wojtyla presents the harshness and murderous pace of a worker’s life, the dignity and drama, and shows the toll hard physical labor takes on a worker’s body. For the poet sees labor for what it really is: an exhausted human frame drenched in sweat; unending human effort underpinning the entire civilization. Exploding rocks become a metaphor for the eternal struggle between the inexorable force of nature and the willpower and labor of man. In Wojtyla’s poem, man matures through labor. Work acquires a redemptive, sacred quality which no one can take away from man. The unique dignity of human labor stems from the fact that it is a part of creation. Its greatness resides entirely inside man. Labor is born in his heart. Through the strain of work, man draws closer to God.”

(via)

I. MATERIAL

1

Listen: the even knocking of hammers,
so much their own,
I project on to the people
to test the strength of each blow.
Listen now: electric current
cuts through a river of rock.
And a thought grows in me day after day:
the greatness of work is inside man.
Hard and cracked
his hand is differently charged
by the hammer
and thought differently unravels in stone
as human energy splits from the strength of stone
cutting the bloodstream, an artery
in the right place.
Look, how love feeds
on this well-grounded anger
which flows in to people's breath
as a river bent by the wind,
and which is never spoken, but just breaks high vocal cords.
Passers-by scuttle off into doorways,
someone whispers: "Yet here is a great force."
Fear not. Man's daily deeds have a wide span,
a strait riverbed can't imprison them long.
Fear not. For centuries they all stand in Him,
and you look at Him now
through the even knocking of hammers.

2

Bound are the blocks of stone, the low-voltage wire
cuts deep in their flesh, an invisible whip--
stones know this violence.
When an elusive blast rips their ripe compactness
and tears them from their eternal simplicity,
the stones know this violence.
Yet can the current unbind their full strength?
It is he who carries that strength in his hands:
the worker.

3

Hands are the heart's landscape. They split sometimes
like ravines into which an undefined force rolls.
The very same hands which man only opens
when his palms have had their fill of toil.
Now he sees: because of him alone others can walk in peace.
Hands are a landscape. When they split, the pain of their sores
surges free as a stream.
But no thought of pain--
no grandeur in pain alone.
For his own grandeur he does not know how to name.

4

No, not just hands drooping with the hammer's weight,
not the taut torso, muscles shaping their own style,
but thought informing his work,
deep, knotted in wrinkles on his brow,
and over his head, joined in a sharp arc, shoulders and veins vaulted.
So for a moment he is a Gothic building
cut by a vertical thought born in the eyes.
No, not a profile alone,
not a mere figure between God and the stone,
sentenced to grandeur and error.