Liske translates Yeats poem with link to dystopian sci-fi

© Cyprian Liske; used by permission.

My friend and scholar-translator Cyprian Liske has prepared a Polish translation (image) of W.B. Yeats's "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (1899).

Here is the Yeats original:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Liske is a doctoral student in sustainable development and international trade law. We worked together in the American Law Program of the Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America and the law school of Jagiellonian University in Poland.

I don't speak Polish beyond a few words, so can't well appreciate Liske's skill as a translator. But I was intrigued by this project because, Liske informed me, the poem was inspiration for a 2002 science fiction film starring Christian Bale, Equilibrium.

The film didn't do very well. In the patriotic wake of 9/11, a dystopian parable might have been just a bit ahead of its time. I might now revisit it.  Ostensibly a romantic poem, "Cloths of Heaven" gets a lot of play in popular culture; its use in this context is compelling.  Equilibrium is set in a world in which emotion is outlawed: a response to the violence and hatred that rent the world in a third great war.  As the United States and Turkey condemn the burning of the Koran in Sweden, igniting, if you will, a perennial free speech debate, Equilibrium seems not as terribly far fetched as its précis suggests.

I just finished watching HBO's Succession (s4), and it struck me that its Sorkin-esque dialog, timing, and staging marks it as a dystopian antithesis of my beloved West Wing: respective representations of our times, now and then.  Our dystopian restatements of contemporary society, perhaps like the corporatocracy itself, seem as yet not to have found rock bottom.