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- Biographical information
- Adam Cast Forth
- Browning Decides To Be A Poet
- Buenos Aires Death; I. La Chacarita
- Buenos Aires Death; II. La Recoleta
- Deathwatch On The Southside
- Elegy
- Farewell
- Instants
- Limits
- Mythical Founding Of Buenos Aires
- New England
- Remorse For Any Death
- Shinto
- Simplicity
- Susana Soca
- That One
- The Art Of Poetry
- The History Of The Night
- The Other Tiger
- To A Cat
- Vacant Room
- We Are The Time. We Are The Famous
- You
Biographical information- Name: Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
Place and date of birth: Buenos Aires (Argentina); August 24, 1899
Place and date of death: Geneva (Switzerland); June 14, 1986 (aged 86)- Adam Cast Forth
- Was there a Garden or was the Garden a dream?
Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed myself and queried,
Almost for consolation, if the bygone period
Over which this Adam, wretched now, once reigned supreme,
Might not have been just a magical illusion
Of that God I dreamed. Already it's imprecise
In my memory, the clear Paradise,
But I know it exists, in flower and profusion,
Although not for me. My punishment for life
Is the stubborn earth with the incestuous strife
Of Cains and Abels and their brood; I await no pardon.
Yet, it's much to have loved, to have known true joy,
To have had -- if only for just one day --
The experience of touching the living Garden.
Browning Decides To Be A Poet- In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words--
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin--
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.
Buenos Aires Deaths; I. La Chacarita- The core of the Southside cemetery
was satiated with yellow fever until it said uncle;
the deep conventicles of the Southside
put death on Buenos Aires' face
and Buenoes Aires could not look upon it
so they shoveled you open
far on the west,
behind dirt storms
and the heavy primordial ruck of teamsters.
Naught but the world
and starhabits upon farms,
and a train leaving a Bermejo shed
with the dead and gone:
dead with saggy beards eyes open
dead with heartless flesh magicless.
Death's swindles dirty as birth
still multiplying your subsoil thus recruited
with souls, your clandestine boneheap,
hitting bottom in your interréd night
as if at sea,
death not swallowed up in victory.
A hard vegetation of orts in perdition
as a force against your interminable walls of death,
of hell,
convinced of the corruptible the suburbs
spend their hot life at your feet
in streets shot through with blaze of mire
or knock themselves out with wheeze of squeezeboxes
bleat of carnival horns.
(Fate's latest forever,
I heard that night your night
when the guitar and the hand
and the words said:
Death is the life you live,
life is death on its way).
High man on the cemetery totem pole, La Quema
gestures parvenu death to your feet.
Spoils and infection of reality: 210 cartloads
defame each morning, lugging
to this necropolis of smoke
the quotidian things we have contaminated with death.
Outré cupolas of wood and crossed on high
bestir black chesspieces of a last game in your streets
and your feeble majesty goes to cover
the shame of your deaths.
In your disciplined quarter
death is colorless, hollow, numerical
and comes down to dates and names,
deaths in a manner of speaking.
Chacarita:
sink of this Buenos Aires, final rise,
neighborhood outliving all others, outdying,
lazaret of death and not of life to come,
I have heard your caducous word and disbelieve it,
because your conviction of tragedy is life in action
and a rose fullblown is more than marble.
Buenos Aires Deaths; II. La Recoleta- Death is an affair of honor here,
a demure seaport death,
kith of lasting blessed light
from the Socorro's cloister
and the minutial ash of braziers
and fine sweet birthday milk
and deep dynasties of yards.
They go well with you
old sweetness old rigor.
Your brow is the valorous portico
and a tree's blind generosity
and birds discussing, all unknowing, death
and ruffles, enthusing breasts, of drums
in the military plots;
your shoulder, the tacit conventicles of the North
and the wall of Rosas's executioners.
Feeding on dissolution with marble suffrage
the unrepresentable dead
dehumanized in your darkness
since Maria de los Dolores Maciel, daughter of Uruguay
sown here for heaven
slept, so little, in your open country.
I would pause a moment,
your pious commentary of frilly flowers
yellow soil under the acacias,
commemorative flowers hoisted in your crypts
sleepy and graceful stays for what reason
joined to the terrible relics of those we love?
Problem posed and answer:
Flowers always watch the dead,
because we know uncomprehendingly
that their sleepy and graceful existence
is the best to go with them
without offense of living,
without being more alive than they.
Deathwatch On The Southside- By reason of a death
the mystery whose vacant name I know and whose reality
we cannot grasp
a Southside house is open until dawn
unknown undestined for revisiting
but awaiting me tonight
with watchful light late when people sleep,
gaunt with bad nights, distinct,
minutial with reality.
To its vigil deathheavy I go
through streets like memories,
time's abundant night,
nothing audible
save vague men at a closed shop
and someone whistling alone in the world.
Slow walk, in the possession of hope,
to the block and house and sincere door I seek
and men receive me bound to be grave
who had a share in my elders' years,
and we weigh destinies in a habilitated room with a view of
the yard
under the power and integrity of night
and say, because reality is more, indifferent things
and listless are and Argentine in the mirror
and mate measures our vain hours.
Thin wisdom lost in death
I'm moved by
books, a key, a body among others
irrecoverable frequencies that for him
were friendship in this world.
I know all privilege, obscure however, is in the line of
miracles
and much this is to share this vigil,
gathered round one unknown: the Dead,
gathered to incommunicate or guard his first night in death.
(This wake wastes everyone's face;
our eyes die on high like Jesus.)
And the dead, the unbelievable?
His reality oddly beflowered
amd mortal hospitality give us
yet another memory for time
and sententious Southside streets to merit slowly
and an obscure breeze on my face turning
and night that from the greater anguish frees us:
the prolix real.
Elegy- Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.
Farewell- My love and me shall have between us
three hundred nights like walls
and the ocean will be magic there.
Time uproots
the streets in my breast.
I shall have nothing but memories.
(O evenings earned with pain,
nights hoping to see you,
dejected fields, poor humiliated
sky in the deeps of puddles
like a fallen angel
And you live to requite my longing
and this rotten nice neighborhood
now in the light of my love made splendiferous)
Definitive as a statue
your absence will sadden other fields.
Instants- If I could live again my life,
In the next I'll try,
to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed,
I'll be more full than I am now,
In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,
I'll be less hygenic,
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more sunsets,
I'll climb more mountains,
I'll swim more rivers,
I'll go to more places I've never been,
I'll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,
I'll have more real problems and less imaginary
ones,
I was one of those people who live
prudent and prolific lives
each minute of his life,
Offcourse that I had moments of joy but,
if I could go back I'll try to have only good moments,
If you don't know thats what life is made of,
Don't lose the now!
I was one of those who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hotwater bottle,
and without an umberella and without a parachute,
If I could live again I will travel light,
If I could live again I'll try to work bare feet
at the beginning of spring till
the end of autumn,
I'll ride more carts,
I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children,
If I have the life to live but now I am 85,
and I know that I am dying.
Limits- Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.
If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?
Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.
There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.
There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, fourfaced, is a Janus.
There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.
You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.
And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.
At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.
Mythical Founding Of Buenos Aires- Was this the sleepy muddy river
that led the prows to found a nation?
Up and down the little painted boats plied
amongst the clustered roots in the chestnut current.
Think about it, suppose the river
was blueglazed like the sky's scion
with a little red star marking the spot
where Juan Díaz ate nothing but was eaten.
What's sure is a thousand men and thousands
traveled over the sea of five moons' width
inhabited by mermaids and sea monsters
and stones of magnetic force maddening the compass.
They built up tremulous ranches on the coast,
and slept a little. So they say on the Riachuelo,
but that's pure bunkum from the Boca.
It was one square city block where I've lived in Palermo.
A square city block in the middle of nowhere
witnessed by sunups and rains and winds.
Like the block where I've lived:
Guatemala, Serrano, Paraguay, Gurruchaga.
A general store pink as the back of a card
shone and in the barroom talk of cards;
a pink general store become a blooming friend,
a streetcorner boss, hard and resented.
The first hurdygurdy cleared the horizon
looking frail with habanera and gringo.
A vacant lot decided for Yrigoyen,
a piano demanded Sabarido's tangos.
A cigar store scented rosaceous
the desert. Evening deepened with yesterday,
everyone shared a past that was fiction.
One thing was missing: the other sidewalk.
It seems to me a fable that Buenos Aires was begun.
It is eternal like water and air I judge.
New England- Changed are the forms in my dreams;
now are lateral red houses
and delicate bronze leaves
and chaste winter and pious firewood.
As on the seventh day, the earth
is good. At twilight there persists
something nearly not, bold and sad,
an antique rumor of Bible and war.
Soon (they say) will fall the snow
and America awaits me on each corner,
but I feel in the declining afternoon
today so tardy and yestern so brief.
Buenos Aires, I make my way
past your corners, sans why or when.
Remorse For Any Death- Free of memory and of hope,
limitless, abstract, almost future,
the dead man is not a dead man: he is death.
Like the God of the mystics,
of Whom anything that could be said must be denied,
the dead one, alien everywhere,
is but the ruin and absence of the world. We rob him of everything,
we leave him not so much as a color or syllable:
here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see,
there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait.
Even what we are thinking,
he could be thinking;
we have divvied up like thieves
the booty of nights and days.
Shinto- When sorrow lays us low
for a second we are saved
by humble windfalls
of the mindfulness or memory:
the taste of a fruit, the taste of water,
that face given back to us by a dream,
the first jasmine of November,
the endless yearning of the compass,
a book we thought was lost,
the throb of a hexameter,
the slight key that opens a house to us,
the smell of a library, or of sandalwood,
the former name of a street,
the colors of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date we were looking for,
the twelve dark bell-strokes, tolling as we count,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million Shinto deities
travel secretly throughout the earth.
Those modest gods touch us--
touch us and move on.
Simplicity- Opens the garden gate
docilely as a page
a frequent devotion interrogates
and inside the glance
need not fix on objects
now firmly in memory.
I know each custom and soul
and that dialect of allusions
every human aggregation weaves.
I need not speak
nor lie about privileges;
well they know me hereabouts,
my anguish and weakness.
This is as high as one may reach,
what Heaven perhaps will grant us:
neither admiration nor victories
but merely to be admitted
as part of undeniable Reality
like stones and trees.
Susana Soca- With lingering love she gazed at the dispersed
Colors of dusk. It pleased her utterly
To lose herself in the complex melody
Or in the cunous life to be found in verse.
lt was not the primal red but rather grays
That spun the fine thread of her destiny,
For the nicest distinctions and all spent
In waverings, ambiguities, delays.
Lacking the nerve to tread this treacherous
Labyrinth, she looked in on, whom without,
The shapes, the turbulence, the striving rout,
(Like the other lady of the looking glass).
The gods that dwell too far away for prayer
Abandoned her to the final tiger, Fire.
That One- Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semidarkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving hendecasyllables,
and an old love of encyclopedias
and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory,
and an incurable nostalgia for the Latin,
and bits of memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the loss of memory of names and dates,
and the cult of the East, which the varied peoples
of the teeming East do not themselves share,
and evening trembling with hope or expectation,
and the disease of entymology,
and the iron of AngloSaxon syllables,
and the moon, that always catches us by surprise,
and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires,
and the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes,
and chocolate, oh Mexican delicacy,
and a few coins and an old hourglass,
and that an evening, like so many others,
be given over to these lines of verse.
The Art Of Poetry- To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.
To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadnesssuch is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.
The History Of The Night- Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
dividing the two twilights;
we shall never know in what age it came to mean
the starry hours.
Others created the myth.
They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates
that spin our destiny,
they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock
who crows his own death.
The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses;
to Zeno, infinite words.
She took shape from Latin hexameters
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland
of his stricken soul.
Now we feel her to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.
And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.
The Other Tiger- A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.
It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.
We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.
To A Cat- Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.
Vacant Room- The mahogany furniture perpetuates
amid brocade indecision
its regular klatsch.
Daguerreotypes
belie the nearness
of age cloistered in a mirror
and before our eyes slip away
like useless dates
of blurred anniversaries.
With sketchy gestures
the anxious nearvoice
runs after our souls
with half a century of tardiness
and barely if it be now
in the mornings of our childhood.
Actuality constant
convincing and sanguineous
feasts in the street
its irrefutable plenitude
of present apotheosis
while the light
bores a hole in the glass
to humiliate senile armchairs
and corner and hang
the lank voice
of the ancestors.
We Are The Time. We Are The Famous- We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.
We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.
We are the river and we are that greek
that looks himself into the river. His reflection
changes into the waters of the changing mirror,
into the crystal that changes like the fire.
We are the vain predetermined river,
in his travel to his sea.
The shadows have surrounded him.
Everything said goodbye to us, everything goes away.
Memory does not stamp his own coin.
However, there is something that stays
however, there is something that bemoans.
You- In all the world there's been one man alive and dead.
Statistics to the contrary, statistics don't add up at all.
Add the smell of rain and your dream the other night.
That man's Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first to sort out
constellations, the first pyramidbuilder, the writer of the
Book of Changes' hexagrams, the smith who cut the runes
on Hengist's sword, the bowman Einar Tamberskelver, Luis
de Léon, the bookseller who sired Samuel Johnson,
Voltaire's gardener, Darwin in the Beagle's prow,
some Jew in the gas chamber, with time, me and you.
One man died at Troy, Metaurus, Hastings, Austerlitz,
Trafalgar, Gettysburg.
One man died in hospitals, boats, hot solitude, alcoves of
habit and love.
One man looked at vasty sunrise.
One man sampled the coolness of water, the fruits of the
flesh.
I speak of the one and only who's always alone.