The religious dialogue Theron and Aspasio earned James Hervey the repudiation of his mentor, John Wesley, for his antinomism; that is, his conviction that it is faith and not submission to divine law that guarantees grace. Or, to put it another way, that sin does not necessarily deny salvation. A character from Jerusalem , the second novel by the famous comic writer Alan Moore - creator, among other works, of Watchmen and V for Vendetta - reads a biography of Wesley that Theron and Aspasio considerAnticipation of postmodern literature for its radical alternation of tones, styles, and genres, including “narrative descriptions, scientific news, internal monologues, anecdotes, autobiography, face-to-face testimony, pen portraits, stories, sermons, language studies, naturalistic portraits, diaries , poems and hymns ”, including structural solutions typical of the film script. Moore is playing the abyss there, because what he quotes can be applied to his own novel, a cathedral of more than a thousand and a half pages that, in fact, includes more abysses than a baroque galaxy: from condensation on tiles from the biography of the Rev. Philip Doddridge, a key figure in Anglican nonconformity, to the art exhibition that closes the story, whose pieces recap the entire work; not forgetting the metalinguistic game of the second volume, supposedly written by one of its characters at times lost in fissures of space-time.
After The Voice of Fire , which now seems like a humble dress rehearsal, Jerusalem is a beautiful, exhausting and overwhelming monstrosity, the dream fulfilled (or the nightmare unleashed) of that total work that the author could not culminate in the field of comics with Big Numbers , a work that had to reach 500 pages and ended up taking two cartoonists ahead: Bill Sienkiewicz and Al Columbia, who left behind overwhelmed.
Jerusalem is an outrageous love song to the Boroughs, the author's impoverished hometown, transcended as a true mystical center of the universe, a place historically marked by war and religious dissent, a magnetization area for visionaries and a territory of experimentation on force devastating metaphors: Moore attributes to the construction of an incineration plant in the neighborhood the consolidation of the insurmountable sentence that exterminated the dreams and hopes of the local working class.
A firm believer in the transforming power of art, Moore raises the antithesis of that destroyer who left in the air a spiritual metastasis capable of surviving its demolition in the 1930s. His novel aspires to eternalize in the salvific space of art what it annihilated: the voices of the disadvantaged, the collective memory, even the unconscious, the dreams and fantasies of those who once set foot on the site.
Jerusalem unfolds its narrative of stories in three parts: the first intersects characters and weaves a network of echoes and connections through time, while burning the layout of the neighborhood's streets - their transformations throughout history - in the neural circuits of the exhausted reader; the second works as a metaphysical adventure of the Five written by an acid enid Blyton and includes such powerful moments as the combat of two cyclopean archangels or the climatic race on the back of a ghost mammoth, and the third ties ends in a burst of pyrotechnic style exercises —from Joyce to Beckett, passing through the sextine or the hardboiled bufo—, privileging various modulations of a panoptic vision in a sustained tour de force that details the economic, racial and cultural history of the place and attests to the recurrence of female sacrificial figures — Lucia Joyce, Lady Di, and Audrey Vernall, counter-figure to a relative of Moore's.
With excess and overflow as an architectural key and secret source of pleasure, the megalomaniac Jerusalem is a challenge for the translation that José Torralba solves with a competence that alternates debatable decisions —the speech of the Boroughs— and brilliant solutions —the description of the arboreal phraseology of the archangels - until reaching almost a thousand pages.
From there, the chaotic transvestism of grammatical genres, the aberrant displacement of punctuation marks and the appearance of puzzling interferences raise suspicion of the potential use of some translation program and leave clear evidence that there has been no correction phase in the editorial process: how can “forty years or so along the linger of his life” become “some forty years later, in the United States, the course of his life” (sic)? In the chapter that Moore dedicates to Lucia Joyce, written in the Finnegans Wake key , Torralba decides to unravel the meaning, disregarding all verbal games, preserving a rude effect of estrangement through arbitrary spelling errors, which convert the linguistic emulation of a schizophrenic mind, marked by the supersaturation of sounds and senses, in an unjustifiable folly: between that “Awake, Lucia gets up wi 'the wry sing of de light” that degrades into “Lucia wakes up with the lus” and the “An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight, Lucia dawnsees on the meadhows grase forever ”reduced to“ Emperatris of the existence and incarnation of the lus, Lucia dances on the grass forever ”, the translation of the chapter is catastrophic, with solutions as difficult to assimilate as conversion from "Alchembold" in "Salbador Dalí"! Not even the most generous antinomist could grant grace to this edition that turns a difficult and demanding work into an ordeal.
Jerusalem
Alan Moore
Translation by José Torralba
Minotaur, 2019
1,698 pages. 60 euros
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