{"id":9813,"date":"2025-01-11T13:58:34","date_gmt":"2025-01-11T17:58:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/do-not-spare-yourself-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-01-11T13:58:34","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T17:58:34","slug":"do-not-spare-yourself-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/do-not-spare-yourself-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Not Spare Yourself \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person \u2014 a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love \u2014 is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.<\/p>\n

We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation \u2014 religion to save us from our sins, therapy to save us from our traumas, marriage to save us from our loneliness \u2014 in order to salve our suffering, which is the price we pay for the fulness of living. And salve it we must, yet there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience. To try to save ourselves from the despair by which we contour hope<\/a>, to spare ourselves the fertile doubt<\/a> and the gasps of self-surprise by which we discover who we really are, is to live a safe distance from alive. <\/p>\n

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Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That is what the Uruguayan novelist, journalist, and poet Mario Benedetti<\/strong> (September 14, 1920\u2013May 17, 2009) explores in his astonishing poem \u201cNo Te Salves\u201d \u2014 part indictment, part invitation, reminding us that we most often break our hearts on the hard edges of our own fear of living, on the parts of us so petrified that they have become brittle to the touch of life, the touch of love.<\/p>\n

Since I didn\u2019t feel that the standard English translation quite captures the urgency and intimacy of the original language, I have translated it anew. It is read here in the original Spanish by my friend Karen Maldonado (who introduced me to the poem), in English and Bulgarian by me, and in Russian by my mother (who translated it into Russian and our native Bulgarian), to the sound of Bach\u2019s Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major<\/em>.<\/p>\n