Metaphors and other dimensions. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-­Five

Metaphors and other dimensions

When Billy finally got home to Ilium after the airplane crash, he was quiet for a while. He had a terrible scar across the top of his skull. He didn’t resume practice. He had a housekeeper. His daughter came over almost every day.
And then, without any warning, Billy went to New York City, and got on an all-­‐night radio program devoted to talk. He told about having come unstuck in time. He said, too, that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967. The saucer was from the planet Tralfamadore, he said. He was taken to Tralfamadore, where he was displayed naked in a zoo, he said. He was mated there with a former Earthling movie star named Montana Wildhack.
Some night owls in Ilium heard Billy on the radio, and one of them called Billy’s daughter Barbara. Barbara was upset. She and her husband went down to New York and brought Billy home. Billy insisted mildly that everything he had said on the radio was true. He said he had been kidnapped by Tralfamadorians on the night of his daughter’s wedding. He hadn’t been missed, he said, because the Tralfamadorians had taken him through a time warp, so that he could be in Tralfamadore for years, and still be away from Earth for only a microsecond.
Another month went by without incident, and then Billy wrote a letter to the Ilium News Leader, which the paper published. It described the creatures from Tralfamadore.
The letter said that they were two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each
shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.
Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:
“The most important thing I learned in Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone for ever.
“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’”

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-­Five

ACTVITIES
1. Try to understand the text without using a dictionary. You should guess the meaning of difficult words from the context.
2. Now, if there are some words that still don’t make any sense to you, look them up in a dictionary.
3. A metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to something (A) by referring to something else (B), and eliciting an analogy between the two things (A and B) in the process. The text is trying to explain a difficult concept (dimensions unknown to humans) by means of analogies (i.e. comparisons). Can you
spot an example of such analogies?
4. Metaphors are more difficult to understand than comparisons, because what is meant (A) is left out, and the only thing mentioned is the thing A is compared to (i.e. B). By means of our imagination, we must rebuild the connexion between A and B and understand A when B is mentioned. Imagine that the author
of this text had said ‘mountain range’ instead of ‘life’, without mentioning ‘life’. What would that be, an analogy or a metaphor?
5. Do you think that human suffering could be eliminated if we could see other dimensions of reality?

[Aquí va mi traducción del fragmento]

Cuando Billy finalmente llegó a su casa en Ilium tras el accidente de aviación, permaneció tranquilo una temporada. Una cicatriz pavorosa le atravesaba la parte superior del cráneo. No regresó al trabajo. Tenía una asistenta. Su hija se acercaba a verlo casi todos los días.
Y entonces, sin avisar, Billy fue a Nueva York y participó en un programa de radio nocturno en el que hablaba la gente. Contó que había quedado desprendido del tiempo. Dijo también que lo había secuestrado un platillo
volante en 1967. El platillo venía del planeta Tralfamadore, dijo. Lo llevaron a Tralfamadore, donde lo exhibieron desnudo en un zoo, dijo. Allí lo emparejaron con una antigua estrella cinematográfica terrícola llamada Montana Wildhack.
Algunos trasnochadores de Ilium oyeron a Billy en la radio y uno de ellos llamó a Barbara, la hija de Billy.
Barbara se disgustó. Ella y su marido se acercaron a Nueva York y se llevaron a Billy de vuelta a casa. Billy insistió débilmente en que todo lo que había dicho en la radio era cierto. Dijo que había sido secuestrado por tralfamadorianos la noche de la boda de su hija. No lo habían echado de menos, dijo, porque los tralfamadorianos lo habían metido por una aberración espacio-­‐temporal, de modo que pudo pasar años en Tralfamadore y, aun así, estar ausente de la tierra no más de un microsegundo.
Pasó otro mes sin incidentes y entonces Billy escribió una carta al News Leader de Ilium, que fue publicada por el periódico. En ella describía a las criaturas de Tralfamadore.
La carta decía que medían algo más de medio metro de altura, que eran verdes, y que tenían forma de desatascadores de cañerías. Las ventosas las apoyaban en el suelo, y los mangos, que eran extremadamente flexibles, normalmente señalaban al cielo. Al final de cada mango había una pequeña mano con un ojo verde en la palma. Las criaturas eran amistosas, y podían ver en cuatro dimensiones. Compadecían a los terrícolas por sólo poder ver tres. Tenían muchas cosas maravillosas que enseñar a los terrícolas, en especial sobre el tiempo. Billy prometió contar cuáles eran algunas de esas cosas maravillosas en su próxima carta.
Billy estaba trabajando en su segunda carta cuando publicaron la primera carta. La segunda carta comenzaba así:
“Lo más importante que aprendí en Tralfamadore fue que cuando una persona se muere, sólo parece morirse.
Aún sigue bien viva en el pasado, por lo que resulta un poco bobo que la gente llore en su funeral. Todos los momentos, pasados, presentes y venideros, han existido siempre y siempre existirán. Los tralfamadorianos pueden mirar todos los distintos momentos del mismo modo que nosotros miramos un trecho de las Montañas Rocosas, por poner un caso. Ellos ven lo permanentes que son todos los momentos, y pueden fijarse en cualquier momento que les interese. No es más que una ilusión que tenemos aquí en la tierra pensar que un momento
sigue a otro, como cuentas en un collar, y que cuando un momento ha pasado, ha pasado para siempre.
“Cuando un tralfamadoriano ve un cadáver, no piensa sino que el muerto se encuentra en malas condiciones en ese momento particular, pero que la misma persona está perfectamente en un buen número de otros momentos. Ahora, cuando yo mismo oigo que alguien ha muerto, simplemente me encojo de hombros y digo lo que los tralfamadorianos dicen de los muertos, o sea: ‘Es lo que tiene’.”