Thus, we shall begin now to quote some passages from Leaves of Grass, reminding ourselves and the reader of Whitman’s “abrupt departure” from traditional poetic forms. Even though we have brought here examples of creative literary works by Fitzgerald, Joyce and Dickinson, in terms of specific poetic invention we have to say that Whitman’s poetry takes a slightly different path, which is that of re-modeling traditional prosody and forms. What we mean is that, like him, we first learned how to write and translate poetry in the traditional way, and only after we had repeated exercises in this field, we started to work on the free verses of Leaves of Grass. So the kind of poetry shown earlier especially Fitzgerald’s and Joyce’s is not a common feature of the Leaves.
On the other hand, there are some features of the Leaves that certainly must be faced by any translators in order to re-create the content and revolutionary form of the original. The Leaves places two problems that become one: an illusory facility and a real difficulty. As it is a poetic work written in free, or blank, verse, which means the lines are not rhymed, apparently the translator’s work is softened. However, free verses are not exempt from some of the main elements of poetry: rhythm and meter. This is the illusory facility we have spoken of, since it looks like simple poetry, like a free flow of thoughts and feelings, without poetic or aesthetic elements that maintain it. We do not need to go too far in translation to realize the mistake. The brief examples of translations quoted above by Geir Campos, Ramos, Lopes and Meira are enough to show that it is not easy to grasp the aura of the Leaves, that distinctive quality that makes the Leaves so beautiful and inspiring, which makes the readers re-read it time and again. As the poet sings in section 4 of “I sing the Body Electric”, from “Children of Adam”, pointing to this ineffable, indescribable energy: “There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well; /All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.” He completes the idea in section 5, when he chants the Female: “This is the female form; / A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot; / It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!”. What he says of women can be said of his poetry. It has attracted readers with this force, like a magnet. It is part of the translator’s job to grasp this energy that permeates the Leaves, so that we can inject it in the veins of the poems in Portuguese. Without it, the Leaves are dead.
Apart from this spiritual work of feeling or catching this pervading energy that circulates through the book like “[…] circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out” (section 9), we must be careful not to lose track of semantic content, besides the structural ones. We must do this because the only poetic feature that is not always present in Leaves of Grass is the rhymes at the end of the lines (tail or end rhyme). The other aesthetic elements are there, as shown by Whitman’s critics and biographers cited in this work. In this manner, what we have called an illusory facility becomes the second and same problem: the real difficulty to translate the Leaves. For the poet de-constructs the form and content of past and even contemporary poetry to achieve the new model according to his close view of the world, modulating into his poetry the voices and events of his time, bringing into it the world observed outside of his internal space, mixing his feelings and thoughts with those of the common men, the masses. These voices and masses are present in the Leaves via the catalogues, through the long enumerations of people, places and things, or simply of them, as in this passage from section 24 of “Song of Myself”:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voice of sexes and lusts—voices veil’d, and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent, by me clarified and transfigur’d.
OUR RE-CREATION:
Através de mim muitas vozes longamente mudas,
Vozes das gerações intermináveis de prisioneiros e escravos,
Vozes dos doentes e desesperados e de ladrões e anões,
Vozes de ciclos de preparação e acreção,
E dos fios que conectam as estrelas, e de ventres e da matéria paterna,
E dos direitos daqueles que estão por baixo,
Dos deformados, triviais, molengas, tolos, desprezados,
Névoa no ar, besouros rolam bolas de bosta.
Através de mim vozes proibidas,
Vozes de sexos e luxúrias, vozes veladas e removo o véu,
Vozes indecentes por mim clareadas e transfiguradas.
Speaking of spiritual work, Whitman’s words indicate the transfiguration of the voices he hears. That means he is changing the evil in those voices to good. As a Christ, he too has his transfiguration, emanating his energy through his Leaves, to re-direct his followers to the Light of God, as a true Son of God must do. The Gospels record this event with little variance between them: Mark, 9:1-3 (see also Mt. 17.1-13; Lk. 9.28-36):
1And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.
The Transfiguration
2 And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into a high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured before them.
3 And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them. (The Holy Bible, King James Version, 2005)
In section 46 of “Song of Myself”, Whitman describes a similar experience[1]. The passage is a bit long, but it is worth quoting it in full, so that we can see his shining energy illuminating the eyes of his followers:
[…]
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, or exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.
[…]
This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heaven,
And I said to my Spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my Spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.
[…]
Sit a while, dear son,
[…]
Long enough have you dream’d contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
He is so sure of what he is doing that he performs a miracle, as is recorded of Jesus in the Bible[2], washing the “gum” from the eyes of his “son”, who is blind to the truth the Son of God is showing him, that is, he is literally giving the person the light. At this point, the question whether Whitman’s attitude is blasphemous or reverent is not an issue. He shows no disrespect for the Holy Scriptures or to Jesus Christ (the Son) or God (the Father). As he is claiming to be the “true Son of God”, who is also the poet, he could not be more devotional, for his poetry is a means to convey the Word of God to mankind. Everyone is sacred for him, for every body is sacred, as he expresses in section 6 of “I Sing the Body Electric”:
The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanest one in the laborer’s gang?
Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,
As we are discussing this distinctive quality of Leaves of Grass, this magnetic energy that pervades it, coming from the poet’s heart, the best thing is to place here our re-creations of the passages above, so that we can see whether our work was efficient. After these excerpts, we shall look at some more examples. We will see from nearer the methodological procedures in practice. First, the passage from section 46 of “Song of Myself”:
Não tenho cadeira, nem igreja, nem filosofia,
Não conduzo homem algum a uma mesa de jantar, biblioteca, câmbio,
Mas cada homem e cada mulher de vós conduzo a um outeiro,
Minha mão esquerda enlaçando vossa cintura,
Minha mão direita apontando paisagens de continentes e a via pública.
Nem eu, nem ninguém mais pode percorrer essa via por vós,
Devei percorrê-la por si mesmos.
[…]
Hoje antes da aurora escalei uma colina e contemplei o céu repleto,
E disse ao meu espírito Quando nos tornarmos os invólucros desses orbes, e o prazer e conhecimento de cada coisa neles, estaremos completos e satisfeitos então?
E meu espírito disse Não, só nivelamos essa subida para passar e ir além.
[...]
Senta-te um momento caro filho,
[...]
Há tempos tens sonhado sonhos vis,
Agora lavo a goma de tuas vistas,
Deves habituar-te ao fulgor da luz e de cada momento de tua vida.
In this scene, where the poet is taking the part of the Father, talking to a “dear son”, for if the Son and the Father are One, the Father and the Son must be One too (using a principle of equality), then, he can be the Father too, and show the way to the son, giving him the gift of free will with his “[…] right hand pointing to […] the public road.”, which he can not travel for the son, for he “[…] must travel it for” himself . Poetically speaking, these verses are very difficult to re-create, for example: “no chair, no church”, or the sequence of D’s in “This day before dawn I ascended […] crowded […]” and the last section. Fortunately, what we lose aesthetically in one part, we might gain in another, or if we can not re-issue the same string of sounds, we compensate for it with another sequence, as in: “Hoje antes da aurora escalei uma colina e contemplei o céu repleto”, with O, C, P and T sounds. The last four lines, with the M, N, V, O and A sounds, make these verses very clear and shining. Finally the “dazzle of the light”, re-designed in “fulgor da luz”, which embodies the “dazzle” in “da luz”; we lose the impact of the “DAZZ”, but at least we maintain the L’s and the D, and the Z in “luZ”. The end rhymes, completely natural, show the way from bad to good, the “lift” from “contemptible” dreams, through the opening of the eyes and then to “life, the “subida” (“lift”): “vis” / “vista” / “vida”. As for the other passage above, about the sacredness of the human body, from section 6 of “I sing the Body Electric”, we give its translation below. We think that the core of this segment is the first half of the second line: “No matter who it is, it is sacred”, for its directness, which establishes the criterion that encompasses all humanity, and which kept its original beat: “Não imPORta quem SEja, é saGRAdo”, with the syneresis (a drawing together or blending) of the ending vowel of “Não” and the beginning vowel of “importa”, so that the accent is on the second sound, “-POR-“, as in “No MAtter”. The rhythm of this part has a perfect flow, with another syneresis between “seja” and “é”:
O corpo do homem é sagrado e o corpo da mulher é sagrado,
Não importa quem seja, é sagrado–é o mais sórdido da malta de operários?
É um dos sombrios imigrantes recém-aportados no cais?
Cada um pertence aqui ou a qualquer lugar tanto quanto os favorecidos, tanto quanto tu,
We show now more passages from Leaves of Grass re-created in our vernacular. The second part, or stanza, of the first poem of “Inscriptions”, “One’s Self I Sing” (“Eu Canto um Eu”), reads:
WHITMAN:
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
OUR RE-CREATION:
Não só fisionomia nem só cérebro é digno da Musa,
digo que a Forma completa é muito mais digna,
A Feminina igualmente com a Masculina canto.
IRINEU MONTEIRO:
Pois, nem só a fisionomia, nem só o cérebro
tem valor para a Musa, e afirmo que
a Forma completa é mais valiosa,
E por isso, eu canto igualmente a Fêmea como o Macho. (1984)
We took advantage of the Latin cognates to maintain the M, N, and F sounds (“fisionomia”, “Musa”, “Forma completa”, “Feminina”, “Masculina”). As for the rhythm, although the lines are long, they are internally divided into shorter sections accordion to the accents. In comparison to Monteiro’s translation, there is an issue to be debated: the original text does not contain the expressions “ onPois” (“Since”; conjunction) and “E por isso” (“And therefore”; conjunction and adverb). For us, literal translation is the faithful transposition of meaning from one language to another, which necessarily involves aesthetic loss. When there is an insertion of elements in the target language which were not present in the original text, the result is not a literal translation, understood as a word for word translation, but a free translation, since the translator does what he wants at will. Our point is that either we do a re-creation of the texts or a literal translation, when it is not possible to do the first. Sometimes, a literal translation is so perfect that it is not necessary to spend more time searching for any other textual arrangement. This is what we did with the first verses of Leaves of Grass.
WHITMAN:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
OUR RE-CREATION:
Eu celebro a mim mesmo, e canto a mim,
E o que assumo, tu deves assumir,
Pois todo átomo que pertence a mim também pertence a ti.
The two first lines and the first half of the third are natural decasyllables in Portuguese; the second half of the third line, “as good belongs to you”, three iambs, also received in our language perfect equivalence: “tamBÉM perTENce a TI” (with a syneresis of “pertence” and “a”). The only difference is that in English the second line has nine metrical syllables, according to the Brazilian poetic system. Despite looking for this perfect correspondence between the languages, we know that it is not the rule, especially because the words in Portuguese tend to have more syllables than in English. Besides, we have the extra difficulty that most two-syllable words in English are stressed on the first syllable (GILBERT, 1997, p.67), and the fact that English pronunciation is irregular. In Portuguese, we have a different classification for word stress. The words are classified according to the syllable which is stressed (BECHARA, p.54): words with stress on the last syllable are linguistically called oxitone: “gambá, tatú, tambor” (opossum, armadillo, drum), etc.; words with stress on the penultimate syllable are paroxitone: “casa, canto, beira” (house, corner, edge); and words accented on the antepenultimate syllable are called proparoxitone: “sólido, rápido, pílula” (solid, rapid, pill).
We have here another example of a literal translation that will work perfectly well for this line: “And I know I am solid and sound”, from section 20 of “Song of Myself” (1855 Edition; in the Deathbed edition, “And” was omitted). This is an anapestic trimeter, that is, a meter with three anapests per line (anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one; in quantitative verse, two short syllables followed by a long one). We have this type of verse in Portuguese with the designation of eneasyllable, a verse of nine syllables, with accents on the third, sixth and ninth syllables. In this case, the meters in the two languages coincide, despite the difference in naming. This verse was translated by Lopes (2005, p.70), as “Só sei que sou saudável e robusto,”. He maintained the number of syllables, but the accents are on the first, sixth and ninth ones, which broke the rhythm, with the added damage of eliminating the alliteration of “solid and sound” and introducing in our language a word that was not in English, “Só”, to replace “And”. Our translation: “E eu sei que sou sólido e saudável”, keeps all the elements of the grammatical structure, the rhythm, and even extends the alliteration: “sei [...] sou sólido [...] saudável”. Also, it re-creates the same sounds of the original: “SOlid and SOUnd” in “SÓlido e SAUdável”. We would even have another solution for this alliteration in “firme e forte”, if we chose to make it a verse of seven syllables: “E sei que sou firme e forte”. However, the other one is much more beautiful.
The line “The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul”, from section 30 of “Song of Myself”, also became five natural “anapests” in Portuguese in a literal translation: “O sereno da noite penetra mais fundo em minha alma.” (Capital letters to indicate the accents: “O seREno da NOIte peNEtra mais FUNdo em minh’ALma.”; syneresis in “fundo em” and “minha alma”). The sequence of D’s is re-issued via the N’s, M’s, R’s, T’s. Compare Lopes’s version (2005, p.85): “O rocio da noite cala fundo em minha alma.” (“O roCIO da NOIte CAla FUNdo em minh’Alma.”). The double D, which describes a profound feeling inscribed by plosive sounds, “drives deeper”, is lost in “cala fundo”. In our work, the D’s are replaced by the T’s of “noiTE peneTRA”; in English we have voiced sounds, in Portuguese, unvoiced, which is the only difference between D’s and T’s.
As Leaves of Grass is written in free verse and does not have fixed stanzaic forms with end rhymes, except for a couple of poems such as “O Captain! My Captain!” from “Memories of President Lincoln”, and “Eidólons”, from “Inscriptions”, we take advantage of these characteristics to modulate our re-creations according to the tone of the passages and also to adapt the poems to the prosody of our language, specially this transition from the accentual syllabic system of English to the syllabic base of Portuguese. In rare occasions when they coincide, we make a point of it. As we have shown that the structure of our language is less synthetic than English: our language has more verbal tenses than English; for example: for the Simple Past in English, Indicative Mood (I sang), there are three tenses in Portuguese: 1. Pretérito Perfeito / Perfect Past: Eu Cantei; 2. Pretérito Imperfeito / Imperfect Past: Eu cantava; 3. Pretérito Mais que Perfeito / More than Perfect Past: Eu cantara. Besides, each verb in Portuguese has six forms for each tense in general, one for each person (the first, the second and third persons), singular and plural (I, You, He/She/it; We, You, They) (BECHARA, p.128). Whereas each verb in English has at most three forms: present, simple past, past participle. Another grammatical aspect is that verbs in our vernacular indicate person (first, second, third), number (singular, plural), tense (present, past, future) and mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative) in its form. Taking the verb “cantar” (“to sing”) as an example: “(Eu) cantei”: first person (I sang), singular, Perfect Past, Indicative; “(Nós) cantamos”: first person (We sang), plural, Perfect Past, Indicative. The most important feature here is the fact that we may omit the pronouns in Portuguese with no damage to meaning, something which is practically impossible to do in English: if we omit the pronouns, we do not know who is speaking. If we say “sang”, we do not know who did it. This will lead to a discussion whether we may or not do it in translating Leaves of Grass. We have chosen to omit the personal pronouns in general, since they become excessive repetition of inherent information, particularly because there are sections where there is a repetitive use of the first person (in catalogues), which makes its use extremely tiring to the reader in our language. However, we kept the pronouns whenever its use is necessary to remove ambiguity or to emphasize the poet’s voice. Thus we allowed ourselves this flexibility in linguistic use in search of the best expression for the text.
The next excerpt demonstrates this kind of sensibility to suit the tone of the passage. The line is from section 11 of “Song of Myself”, about the lady who is behind the curtains of her window observing the boys bathing by the shore, dreaming of touching them. The poet tells her that he sees her innermost desire: “You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.” on”Splash” means to move through fluid or fall into it, or to scatter fluids in flying masses, so one can splash in or through the water (pool, river or sea). This verb conveys the lady’s emotional disturbance, which comprises two states: a physical and a spiritual one. Her state of mind is agitated, like the boys’ agitation in the water, for she wishes she were there amid them, while physically she is unmoving, “stock still” in her position. In this manner, the two contradictory states of the lady, the desire to jump in the water and its impossibility, are expressed by the phono-morphological structure of the verse. The S and L (a liquid consonant) of splash carry the meaning of movement. The chain of T’s of “yet stay stock still”, like the beating of her heart, indicates her bodily outer stillness, and the inner perturbation of the lady. We have been able to re-construct the verse with the same sounds as the original, maintaining the vibration of L and the T, A, and O sounds, mixing the vowel opening and consonant closing movements: “Tu te espalhas lá na água, contudo, estás estática em tua sala.”
Now, two lines from section 21 of “Song of Myself”: “Night of south winds—night of the large few stars! / Still nodding night—mad naked summer night.” (in this section, the poet speaks to people, night, earth and sea). The most important element of these verses is the combination of “ar” in “large few stars”, where one sound echoes the other. The meaning of “large […] stars” points to an ample whole, the all-embracing orbs with their burning energy that sustains planets like our own. Whitman was very fond of astronomy (ALLEN, 1955, p.124), the branch of science he knew more (he used to study and attend lectures on it), however, we do not know if he was aware of the fact that around sixty percent of all stars are twins, or binaries, which means that most of the solar systems in the universe have two suns[3] (sometimes, there are even systems with three suns). The fact is that solar systems with double suns are more stable and last more, and systems with an only sun are not the rule. Notwithstanding, it was very difficult to re-create this double sound. onFirst we tried with “as” in “vastos astros”, but it sounded too obvious. Later we looked for a compensation for the double “ar”, re-constituted in “raras” (rare), an oblique version of “few”, while “poucas”, the literal translation, did not harmonize very well with the rest of the line. We even experimented with “vastas estrelas raras”, with double “as” and “ar”, to configure the nocturnal “atmosphere”. Finally, we arrived at “noite das grandes estrelas raras”, with three pairs of double sounds: “as” (das, raras), “ra”, “es”. As for the second line, the chain of N’s and M’s is the main feature to be preserved, with the added internal rhymes in “ventos”, “serena”, “pendente”, “demente”. In sum, it reads like this: “Noite dos ventos sul – noite das grandes estrelas raras! / Serena noite pendente–noite de estio nua demente.”
This time we will bring a passage from section 24 of “Song of Myself”: “To behold the day-break! / The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows, / The air tastes good to my palate.” Here we concentrated on the smaller segments, sub-dividing the verses to better work on them. We did like this: “To behold / the day-break”. The problem is the short words in English and the mirror sounds in “BeholD” and “Day-Break”. After many years, we could find this pair of opposites not in consonants, but in vowels: “COntemplAr” and “AurOra”. The choice is a perfect hexasyllable in our language, with accents on the third and sixth syllables. Then we went on to the next line, using the same method: “The little light / fades the immense / and diaphanous shadows”. There was less difficulty in this part, except to find the solution for “little”, solved by “frágil”, which does not carry exactly the same meaning, although a light that is little must be fragile, too. And to find “desfaz” (undo) as a near meaning for “fades” (actually, almost an anagram). In this context, in which the “light fades” the “shadows”, it conveys this significance of undoing them. The other words were practically literal translations. The last line, “The air / tastes good / to my palate”, an octosyllable, became a decasyllable in Portuguese, in a literal translation, with the “air” (“AR”) rhyming with “palate” (“paladAR”). It goes as follows: “Contemplar a aurora! / A frágil luz desfaz as imensas e diáfanas sombras, / O ar tem gosto bom a meu paladar.”.
Another beautiful passage that deserves quoting here is the poem “For You O Democracy”, from “Calamus”. By making use of his extreme power to unite the nation, in his disillusionment with politics, he establishes the energy which will make this union. He indicates the solidity of his construction, which will be “indissoluble”; the brightness given by the sun, to shine upon this race of heroes; the height reaching the divine, and the “life-long” duration of this union based on (meta) physical love. The poem does have a definite physical quality, interwoven through its chains of sounds, deeply connected. In English, there is a long series of L’s in the five lines and also one of nasal sounds, and D’s. They did not pose a big problem, with the exception of the word “love” in the last two verses, which in Portuguese means “amor”, with no L’s. Consequently, we would not be able to keep the same sequence, for “love” is irreplaceable! So we had to alter the phonic arrangements to harmonize with “amor”, in order to re-build the consistency of the stanza. The word “duradouro” was our solution for “life-long”, because it is made of two words: the verb “durar” (to last) plus “-douro” (a suffix that means “capable of”), then, it means “to last long”. Luckily, “camaradas”, a literal translation of “comrades”, has got an M, an A and an R, and the verb “amar” (to love) in the middle of it: “cAMARadas”. The element that permeates the idea of a united democratic race is inscribed in the very word that designates its members. This is the gold found while we were digging the mines of Leaves of Grass to re-create this temple of love in our language: “duradOURO” has in itself the word for gold in Portuguese:
Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
OUR RE-CREATION:
Vem, tornarei o continente indissolúvel,
Farei a mais esplêndida raça que o sol já iluminou,
Farei terras divinas magnéticas,
Com o amor de camaradas,
Com o duradouro amor de camaradas.
The poetic power of languages is amazing. The first verse, “Vem, tornarei o continente indissolúvel”, is a dodecasyllable with accents on the first, fourth, eighth and twelfth syllables; “Farei terras divinas magnéticas” and “Com o duradouro amor de camaradas” are perfect decasyllables. “Com o amor de camaradas” is a heptasyllable. These verses were formed naturally, without much rearrangement of its constituent parts. Nevertheless, the most important thing in all this work of poetic re-creation is to “Listen to the sound that it makes”. As Pound (1987, pp.192-201) said about Whitman, the best part of Whitman’s production, his “real writing”, was when his predecessor got rid of all the “barbed wire” of meter and forms and concentrated only on letting poetry flow, like a river, without constraints.
[1] The poem “Whoever You are, Holding Me now in Hand”, from “Calamus”, depicts a like scene, in which Whitman is even more explicit in what he wants. He has no time to lose, for the message he brings is definitive; so he tells the person: “You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard, / Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting, / The whole past theory of your life, and all conformity to the lives around you, would have to be abandon’d,”.
[2] The Gospels narrate the story of Jesus healing a blind man in a similar fashion. For example, in John, 9: 1-7, we have: “Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind 1 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? 3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. 4 I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay, 7 and said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Silo’am, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing” (The Holy Bible, King James Version, 2005).
[3] The NASA webpage might be helpful in this case, providing more information on this issue; available at: <http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/spitzer-starwars.cfm>. Accessed on 13 June 2007.
