Erudition about love (Erudición sobre el amor)

When lecturing Introduction to Law at university, my Dad often invoked the wisdom of classic philosophers. Now he is making me research the Greek Hesiod, Parmenides, Aristophanes and Agatón!

From his book Urgent Poetry (Poesía de urgencia).

Erudition about love (Erudición sobre el amor)

Plato’s Dialogues. Reading of the second edition of The Banquet,

translated by Juan David García Bacca – Caracas – Madrid. Some original text used.

                                                                                                       

It is necessary to reflect about Love

when you walk along such a short road

where beside it Hatred walks parallel

skirting along the hasty or sluggish footsteps of man.

Although Hesiod defends that Chaos was first,

then the Earth and later Love,

I adhere to Parmenides who defines love

as the first invention.

In Aristophanes I find accurate that that as beings

we are segments of men on our way to the Hades

of a common death.

Agatón thinks that Love nests in the soul of gods and men

and never in the external physical ugliness or beauty,

and that when conceiving wisdom and poetry it enriches beings

Love, tenderness, hunger, dreams for the sorrows!

But Socrates, quoting the wisdom of Biotima

affirms that Love is a diabolic being,

mediocrity between the divine and the human,

alchemist and sophist witch,

Love, because it is the is the genesis of the Good and the Beautiful,

a feeling that the mortal appearance is immortal,

staircase that leads from transitory realities

to one that is not perishable, essentially pure,

the immutable and abstract Beauty.

Love like a strike of light on the eyes

its complex concept

marvellously untranslatable!