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spenkevich's review against another edition
4.0
‘My God, my dreamer, keep dreaming me’
Borges. I simply adore the man. Every word from his pen traces a warm euphoria through my veins. If drug dealers sold books, Borges would be what you get when you ask ‘for that dank chronic, yo’. The man restructures reality and imparts infinity with prose alone. If you are unfamiliar with this writer, please, do yourself a massive favor and pick up a copy of [b:Ficciones|426504|Ficciones|Jorge Luis Borges|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174653529s/426504.jpg|1007116] or even just find the text of Garden of the Forking Paths online here. As a disclaimer, I am not responsible for cleaning up the mess when your mind bursts all over your wall when you reach the end of his stories. However, this review is not about his stories, it is about his poetry. If it was stunning how much he could convey in tiny stories, it is even more impressive the power contained in his lines of poetry. These poems, which span his entire career, are certainly worthy of 5 golden stars, yet, the translations in this collection do there best to tarnish the rating. Still, to step inside the mind of this master is to step into a magical realm of literature, knowledge and fantasy.
Not unlike his short fiction, Borges fills his poems with ethereal visions of winding labyrinths, notions of infinity, dreams, the sadistic and mystical nature of mirrors, and endless allusions to literature ranging from the famous Greek stories, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and spreading to the most esoteric myths he could conjure up. Huge armies clash and fall, kings are murdered in the dark, Pythagoras ponders, mirrors come alive while the moon muses the passage of time; these poems feel larger than life and as monumental as reading Homer for the first time. Time, death, and the fabric of reality are the major themes that run through these epic stanzas. Even after a quick flip through the book, the reader will notice Borges has something he really wants to tell you: ‘You are going to die’. These thoughts of death hang on his head like a heavy crown and permeate a vast majority of the poems.
‘To The One Who Is Reading Me’
You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read – on it, already written,
the date, the city, the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
Not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
The universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
Doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.
Through many of these poems, Borges shows us the frailty of our life, drawing out the infinite length time occupies to juxtapose it with our ephemeral existence. He reminds us ‘your matter is time, its unchecked and unreckoned/Passing. You are each solitary second’ while we collect and surround ourselves with lifeless belongings that ‘will endure beyond our vanishing and will never know that we have gone’. He even embraces his own death, yet offers up a hopeful sentiment acknowledging that even when he too enters the realm of shadows, that his words will remain. He will ‘assemble the great rumble of the epic and carve out my own place’, and we will keep him alive eternal through these words.
‘Through this indolent
arrangement of measured words I speak to you.
Remember Borges, your friend, who swam in you.
Be present to my lips in my last moment.’
Not all is dark and dreary however .It is clear through his poems that to him there is nothing greater than to create a lasting work of words, and hopefully he found peace and acceptance of death through this. ‘My fortune or misfortune does not matter. I am the poet.’ Most of this collection is uplifting and wildly inventive. His patterns of logic will send your mind spinning. Mirrors and dreams are toyed with often, and at the end I will include an excellent example of this. He also spends much time speaking lovingly of books and of Buenos Aires.
The major issues with this collection are the translations. Granted, there are 13 different translators at work here and some are much better than others. This does lend to a very uneven feel, and also it seems a shame that the better translators have the fewest number of poems. One aspect I really enjoyed of this collection was that it included the poem in its original language across from the translation. It may serve as a disclaimer for the translation, but it does not forgive the liberties that are taken with the poem. I never like when translators force a rhyme scheme, it really is not needed. Here, not only do they freely alter the structure and meaning to force a rhyme, but they don’t even use the same rhyme scheme as Borges! Borges will offer beautiful stanzas following a pattern such as ABBC CDDA while the translator gives us ABCB DEFE. What is the point in giving a cheap rhyme that insults the integrity of not only the prose, but the original flow? Plus, the words and order will be changed dramatically to fit this cheap rhyme and it all comes out as a farce. Especially because I can see right on the other page what he was really saying, so it almost feels like I am being lied right to my face. This is a perfect example of what my dear Goodreads friend Richard insightfully referred to as ‘he triumph of hope over experience’, (one of the many excellent quotes from him, there are several that future scholars should embrace, which make this site such a useful resource). They fail in my eyes. Also, the translation to the collection The Maker in this collection is different than those included in Collected Fictions put out by the same publisher. This is nice, as it offers a different view and flow, but I found the Collected Fictions to appeal more to my taste.
For example, in CF as translated by Andrew Hurley, the final line of Ragnorok (one of my favorite Borges lines) reads: ‘We drew heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were revolvers) and exultantly killed the gods.’
As by Kenneth Krabbenhoft: ‘We drew our heavy pistols (in the dream, they just appeared) and cheerfully put the gods to death.’
In the collection [b:Labyrinths|17717|Labyrinths|Jorge Luis Borges|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166852117s/17717.jpg|376514]: ‘We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.’
I suppose, as with any translated work, you should shop around and see which works best for you.
This collection of poetry shows Borges as a master of language. Despite some translation issues (at least you can see the original and hopefully know enough Spanish to get by), this is a truly mind blowing collection. I highly recommend it, and please enjoy your stay in the labyrinth of Borges’ mind.
3.5/5
Remorse
I have committed the worst of sins
One can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Take and engulf me, mercilessly.
My parents bore me for the risky
And the beautiful game of life,
For earth, water, air and fire.
I failed them, I was not happy.
Their youthful hope for me unfulfilled.
I applied my mind to the symmetric
Arguments of art, its web of trivia.
They willed me bravery. I was not brave.
It never leaves me. Always at my side,
That shadow of a melancholy man.
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 sadness--such 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 Suicide
Not a single star will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.
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.
Limits
Of these streets that deepen the sunset,
There must be one (but which) that I’ve walked
Already one last time, indifferently
And without knowing it, submitting
To One who sets up omnipotent laws
And a secret and a rigid measure
For the shadows, the dreams, and forms
That work the warp and weft of this life.
If all things have a limit and a value
A last time nothing more and oblivion
Who can say to whom in this house
Unknowingly, we have said goodbye?
Already through the grey glass night ebbs
And among the stack of books that throws
A broken shadow on the unlit table,
There must be one I will never read.
In the South there’s more than one worn gate
With its masonry urns and prickly pear
Where my entrance is forbidden
As it were within a lithograph.
Forever there’s a door you have closed,
And a mirror that waits for you in vain;
The crossroad seems wide open to you
And there a four-faced Janus watches.
There is, amongst your memories, one
That has now been lost irreparably;
You’ll not be seen to visit that well
Under white sun or yellow moon.
Elegy For a Park
The labyrinth is lost. Lost too
all those lines of eucalyptus,
the summer awnings and the vigil
of the incessant mirror, repeating
the expression of every human face,
everything fleeting. The stopped
clock, the tangled honeysuckle,
the arbour, the frivolous statues,
the other side of evening, the trills,
the mirador and the idle fountain
are things of the past. Of the past?
If there’s no beginning, no ending,
and if what awaits us is an endless
sum of white days and black nights,
we are already the past we become.
We are time, the indivisible river,
are Uxmal, Carthage and the ruined
walls of the Romans and the lost
park that these lines commemorate.
Borges. I simply adore the man. Every word from his pen traces a warm euphoria through my veins. If drug dealers sold books, Borges would be what you get when you ask ‘for that dank chronic, yo’. The man restructures reality and imparts infinity with prose alone. If you are unfamiliar with this writer, please, do yourself a massive favor and pick up a copy of [b:Ficciones|426504|Ficciones|Jorge Luis Borges|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174653529s/426504.jpg|1007116] or even just find the text of Garden of the Forking Paths online here. As a disclaimer, I am not responsible for cleaning up the mess when your mind bursts all over your wall when you reach the end of his stories. However, this review is not about his stories, it is about his poetry. If it was stunning how much he could convey in tiny stories, it is even more impressive the power contained in his lines of poetry. These poems, which span his entire career, are certainly worthy of 5 golden stars, yet, the translations in this collection do there best to tarnish the rating. Still, to step inside the mind of this master is to step into a magical realm of literature, knowledge and fantasy.
Not unlike his short fiction, Borges fills his poems with ethereal visions of winding labyrinths, notions of infinity, dreams, the sadistic and mystical nature of mirrors, and endless allusions to literature ranging from the famous Greek stories, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and spreading to the most esoteric myths he could conjure up. Huge armies clash and fall, kings are murdered in the dark, Pythagoras ponders, mirrors come alive while the moon muses the passage of time; these poems feel larger than life and as monumental as reading Homer for the first time. Time, death, and the fabric of reality are the major themes that run through these epic stanzas. Even after a quick flip through the book, the reader will notice Borges has something he really wants to tell you: ‘You are going to die’. These thoughts of death hang on his head like a heavy crown and permeate a vast majority of the poems.
‘To The One Who Is Reading Me’
You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read – on it, already written,
the date, the city, the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
Not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
The universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
Doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.
Through many of these poems, Borges shows us the frailty of our life, drawing out the infinite length time occupies to juxtapose it with our ephemeral existence. He reminds us ‘your matter is time, its unchecked and unreckoned/Passing. You are each solitary second’ while we collect and surround ourselves with lifeless belongings that ‘will endure beyond our vanishing and will never know that we have gone’. He even embraces his own death, yet offers up a hopeful sentiment acknowledging that even when he too enters the realm of shadows, that his words will remain. He will ‘assemble the great rumble of the epic and carve out my own place’, and we will keep him alive eternal through these words.
‘Through this indolent
arrangement of measured words I speak to you.
Remember Borges, your friend, who swam in you.
Be present to my lips in my last moment.’
Not all is dark and dreary however .It is clear through his poems that to him there is nothing greater than to create a lasting work of words, and hopefully he found peace and acceptance of death through this. ‘My fortune or misfortune does not matter. I am the poet.’ Most of this collection is uplifting and wildly inventive. His patterns of logic will send your mind spinning. Mirrors and dreams are toyed with often, and at the end I will include an excellent example of this. He also spends much time speaking lovingly of books and of Buenos Aires.
The major issues with this collection are the translations. Granted, there are 13 different translators at work here and some are much better than others. This does lend to a very uneven feel, and also it seems a shame that the better translators have the fewest number of poems. One aspect I really enjoyed of this collection was that it included the poem in its original language across from the translation. It may serve as a disclaimer for the translation, but it does not forgive the liberties that are taken with the poem. I never like when translators force a rhyme scheme, it really is not needed. Here, not only do they freely alter the structure and meaning to force a rhyme, but they don’t even use the same rhyme scheme as Borges! Borges will offer beautiful stanzas following a pattern such as ABBC CDDA while the translator gives us ABCB DEFE. What is the point in giving a cheap rhyme that insults the integrity of not only the prose, but the original flow? Plus, the words and order will be changed dramatically to fit this cheap rhyme and it all comes out as a farce. Especially because I can see right on the other page what he was really saying, so it almost feels like I am being lied right to my face. This is a perfect example of what my dear Goodreads friend Richard insightfully referred to as ‘he triumph of hope over experience’, (one of the many excellent quotes from him, there are several that future scholars should embrace, which make this site such a useful resource). They fail in my eyes. Also, the translation to the collection The Maker in this collection is different than those included in Collected Fictions put out by the same publisher. This is nice, as it offers a different view and flow, but I found the Collected Fictions to appeal more to my taste.
For example, in CF as translated by Andrew Hurley, the final line of Ragnorok (one of my favorite Borges lines) reads: ‘We drew heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were revolvers) and exultantly killed the gods.’
As by Kenneth Krabbenhoft: ‘We drew our heavy pistols (in the dream, they just appeared) and cheerfully put the gods to death.’
In the collection [b:Labyrinths|17717|Labyrinths|Jorge Luis Borges|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166852117s/17717.jpg|376514]: ‘We took out our heavy revolvers (all of a sudden there were revolvers in the dream) and joyfully killed the Gods.’
I suppose, as with any translated work, you should shop around and see which works best for you.
This collection of poetry shows Borges as a master of language. Despite some translation issues (at least you can see the original and hopefully know enough Spanish to get by), this is a truly mind blowing collection. I highly recommend it, and please enjoy your stay in the labyrinth of Borges’ mind.
3.5/5
Remorse
I have committed the worst of sins
One can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Take and engulf me, mercilessly.
My parents bore me for the risky
And the beautiful game of life,
For earth, water, air and fire.
I failed them, I was not happy.
Their youthful hope for me unfulfilled.
I applied my mind to the symmetric
Arguments of art, its web of trivia.
They willed me bravery. I was not brave.
It never leaves me. Always at my side,
That shadow of a melancholy man.
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 sadness--such 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 Suicide
Not a single star will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.
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.
Limits
Of these streets that deepen the sunset,
There must be one (but which) that I’ve walked
Already one last time, indifferently
And without knowing it, submitting
To One who sets up omnipotent laws
And a secret and a rigid measure
For the shadows, the dreams, and forms
That work the warp and weft of this life.
If all things have a limit and a value
A last time nothing more and oblivion
Who can say to whom in this house
Unknowingly, we have said goodbye?
Already through the grey glass night ebbs
And among the stack of books that throws
A broken shadow on the unlit table,
There must be one I will never read.
In the South there’s more than one worn gate
With its masonry urns and prickly pear
Where my entrance is forbidden
As it were within a lithograph.
Forever there’s a door you have closed,
And a mirror that waits for you in vain;
The crossroad seems wide open to you
And there a four-faced Janus watches.
There is, amongst your memories, one
That has now been lost irreparably;
You’ll not be seen to visit that well
Under white sun or yellow moon.
Elegy For a Park
The labyrinth is lost. Lost too
all those lines of eucalyptus,
the summer awnings and the vigil
of the incessant mirror, repeating
the expression of every human face,
everything fleeting. The stopped
clock, the tangled honeysuckle,
the arbour, the frivolous statues,
the other side of evening, the trills,
the mirador and the idle fountain
are things of the past. Of the past?
If there’s no beginning, no ending,
and if what awaits us is an endless
sum of white days and black nights,
we are already the past we become.
We are time, the indivisible river,
are Uxmal, Carthage and the ruined
walls of the Romans and the lost
park that these lines commemorate.
asburris325's review against another edition
"A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people. Shortly before he died he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face" - Jorge Luis Borges
james_j_igoe's review against another edition
4.0
I have little experience reading poetry, and even less academic knowledge, but overall found most of the poems engaging and thoughtful, although I found Borges' occasional mentions of past European writers, as well as his excursions into descriptions of war, a bit off-putting.
xolotlll's review against another edition
4.0
- To My Reader
You are invulnerable. Have they not shown you,
The powers that preordain your destiny,
The certainty of dust? Is not your time
As irreversible as that same river
Where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
Of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
Which you will not read - on it, already written,
The date, the city, and the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
Not everlasting bronze nor shining gold;
The universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that expects you,
Doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you by now are dead.
- Daybreak
In the deep universal night
scarcely dispelled by the flickering gaslamps
a gust of wind coming out of nowhere
stirs the silent streets
with a trembling presentiment
of the hideous dawn that haunts
like some lie
the tumbledown outskirts of cities all over the world.
Under the spell of the refreshing darkness
and intimidates by the threat of dawn,
I felt again that tremendous conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares the world
an activity of the mind,
a dream of souls,
without foundation of purpose or volume.
And since ideas
are not like marble, everlasting,
but ever-renewing like a forest or a river,
the previous speculation
took another form in the dawn,
and the superstition of the hour,
when the light like a vine
begins twining itself to walls still in shadow,
dominated my reason
and projected the following whim:
If all things are devoid of matter
and if this populous Buenos Aires
comparable to an army in complexity
is no more than a dream
arrived at in magic by souls working together,
there's a moment
in which the city's existence is at the brink of danger and disorder
and that is the trembling moment of dawn
when those who are dreaming the world are few
and only a handful of night owls preserve
ashen and sketchy
a vision of the streets
which they will afterward decline for others.
The hour in which the persistent dream of life
is in danger of breaking down,
the hour in which God might easily
destroy all his work!
But once more the world comes to its own rescue.
The light streaks in inventing dirty colors
and with a tremor of remorse
for my complicity in the daily rebirth
I seek my house,
amazed and icelike in the white glare,
while a songbird holds the silence back
and the spent night
lives on in the eyes of the blind.
You are invulnerable. Have they not shown you,
The powers that preordain your destiny,
The certainty of dust? Is not your time
As irreversible as that same river
Where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
Of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
Which you will not read - on it, already written,
The date, the city, and the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
Not everlasting bronze nor shining gold;
The universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that expects you,
Doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you by now are dead.
- Daybreak
In the deep universal night
scarcely dispelled by the flickering gaslamps
a gust of wind coming out of nowhere
stirs the silent streets
with a trembling presentiment
of the hideous dawn that haunts
like some lie
the tumbledown outskirts of cities all over the world.
Under the spell of the refreshing darkness
and intimidates by the threat of dawn,
I felt again that tremendous conjecture
of Schopenhauer and Berkeley
which declares the world
an activity of the mind,
a dream of souls,
without foundation of purpose or volume.
And since ideas
are not like marble, everlasting,
but ever-renewing like a forest or a river,
the previous speculation
took another form in the dawn,
and the superstition of the hour,
when the light like a vine
begins twining itself to walls still in shadow,
dominated my reason
and projected the following whim:
If all things are devoid of matter
and if this populous Buenos Aires
comparable to an army in complexity
is no more than a dream
arrived at in magic by souls working together,
there's a moment
in which the city's existence is at the brink of danger and disorder
and that is the trembling moment of dawn
when those who are dreaming the world are few
and only a handful of night owls preserve
ashen and sketchy
a vision of the streets
which they will afterward decline for others.
The hour in which the persistent dream of life
is in danger of breaking down,
the hour in which God might easily
destroy all his work!
But once more the world comes to its own rescue.
The light streaks in inventing dirty colors
and with a tremor of remorse
for my complicity in the daily rebirth
I seek my house,
amazed and icelike in the white glare,
while a songbird holds the silence back
and the spent night
lives on in the eyes of the blind.
apollonium's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
marram_99's review against another edition
5.0
His poems touch your soul and speak to your heart, not one miss, all of them met the heart
harleyburch's review
dark
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
"I do not have to save myself - I too am a whim of time, that shifty element"
Delightful. The existential threads of imagery running through these poems of mirrors, nostalgic cities, time, nature, and momentary realisations and Borges' simplistic but three dimensional writing makes his voice entirely unique. As I read through these collections, I read through his life's changes. As he got closer to death, he spoke of his blindness in such an intimate way I felt I was reading something I should not be reading. As he pursued his academic studies, I read love poems to language and literature. Several prologues gave advice on the craft that I am now practicing as this man is - clearly - a passionate and humble professional. Of course, not every piece here was for me but Borges' is definitely for me.
Delightful. The existential threads of imagery running through these poems of mirrors, nostalgic cities, time, nature, and momentary realisations and Borges' simplistic but three dimensional writing makes his voice entirely unique. As I read through these collections, I read through his life's changes. As he got closer to death, he spoke of his blindness in such an intimate way I felt I was reading something I should not be reading. As he pursued his academic studies, I read love poems to language and literature. Several prologues gave advice on the craft that I am now practicing as this man is - clearly - a passionate and humble professional. Of course, not every piece here was for me but Borges' is definitely for me.
sarahreadsaverylot's review against another edition
5.0
A thorough, thoughtful, comprehensive, and awe-inspiring collection from a master poet.
On par with the excellence of the poems themselves is the careful inclusion of Borges' own prologues and prefaces. The chronological composition and the insightful comments and deprecations of Borges in his introductions to his work are perhaps the best criticism possible and certainly the most thought provoking.
"Pater wrote that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, perhaps because in music meaning is form, since we are not able to recount a melody in the way we can recount the outline of a short story. If we accept this statement, poetry would be a hybrid art--the subjection of a set of abstract symbols which is language to musical ends. Dictionaries are to blame for this erroneous concept. It is often forgotten that they are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. The Dane who pronounced the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor did not know whether these words represented the god of thunder or the rumble that is heard after the lightning flash. Poetry wants to return to that ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it makes its way in a hesitant, daring way, as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after I am dead." --J.L.B. 1969
And what of these poems? From an artist who denies an aesthetic and who eschews categorization, they are undeniably recognizable in form, voice, and theme. From his invocations of Heraclitus to his obsession with reflections and labyrinths, his poems speak with a clarity and mystery that will not fail to bewitch their readers. Blindness, tigers, Buenos Aires, the doppleganger, the labyrinth, the paradox of time and change, the nature of the self...they are all here in this spellbinding collection.
"Ars Poetica
To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.
To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of the days of man and of the years,
To transmute the outrage of the years
Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,
To see in death sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold--such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our face.
They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithica
Of green eternity, not of marvels.
It is also like the river with no end
That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end."
and
"Invocation to Joyce
Scattered in scattered capitals,
solitary and many,
we played at being the first Adam
who gave names to things.
Down the vast slopes of night
that extend into dawn
we searched (I remember it still) for the words
of the moon, of death, of the morning,
and of other usages of man.
We were imagism, cubism,
the conventicals and sects
that the credulous universities venerate.
We invented the lack of punctuation,
the leaving out of capital letters,
the stanzas in the form of a dove
from the libraries of Alexandria.
Ash, the work of our hands,
and the glowing fire our faith.
You, meanwhile, forged
in the cities of exile
in that exile which was
your loathed and chosen instrument,
the weapon of your art,
you raised your arduous labyrinths,
infinitesimal and infinite,
admirably ignoble,
more populous than history.
We shall have died without having made out
the biform beast or the rose
which are the center of your labyrinth,
but memory holds on to its talismans,
its Virgilian echoes,
and so in the streets of the night
your splendid infernos survive,
your many cadences and metaphors,
the gold glints of your shadow.
What does our cowardice matter if there is on earth
a single valiant man,
what does sadness matter if there was in time
somebody who called himself happy,
what does my lost generation matter,
that vague mirror,
if your books justify it.
I am the others. I am all those
whom your obstinate rigor has redeemed.
I am those you do not know and those you continue to save."
On par with the excellence of the poems themselves is the careful inclusion of Borges' own prologues and prefaces. The chronological composition and the insightful comments and deprecations of Borges in his introductions to his work are perhaps the best criticism possible and certainly the most thought provoking.
"Pater wrote that all the arts aspire to the condition of music, perhaps because in music meaning is form, since we are not able to recount a melody in the way we can recount the outline of a short story. If we accept this statement, poetry would be a hybrid art--the subjection of a set of abstract symbols which is language to musical ends. Dictionaries are to blame for this erroneous concept. It is often forgotten that they are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. The Dane who pronounced the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor did not know whether these words represented the god of thunder or the rumble that is heard after the lightning flash. Poetry wants to return to that ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it makes its way in a hesitant, daring way, as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after I am dead." --J.L.B. 1969
And what of these poems? From an artist who denies an aesthetic and who eschews categorization, they are undeniably recognizable in form, voice, and theme. From his invocations of Heraclitus to his obsession with reflections and labyrinths, his poems speak with a clarity and mystery that will not fail to bewitch their readers. Blindness, tigers, Buenos Aires, the doppleganger, the labyrinth, the paradox of time and change, the nature of the self...they are all here in this spellbinding collection.
"Ars Poetica
To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.
To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.
To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of the days of man and of the years,
To transmute the outrage of the years
Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,
To see in death sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold--such is poetry,
Which is immortal and poor. Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our face.
They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithica
Of green eternity, not of marvels.
It is also like the river with no end
That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And is another, like the river with no end."
and
"Invocation to Joyce
Scattered in scattered capitals,
solitary and many,
we played at being the first Adam
who gave names to things.
Down the vast slopes of night
that extend into dawn
we searched (I remember it still) for the words
of the moon, of death, of the morning,
and of other usages of man.
We were imagism, cubism,
the conventicals and sects
that the credulous universities venerate.
We invented the lack of punctuation,
the leaving out of capital letters,
the stanzas in the form of a dove
from the libraries of Alexandria.
Ash, the work of our hands,
and the glowing fire our faith.
You, meanwhile, forged
in the cities of exile
in that exile which was
your loathed and chosen instrument,
the weapon of your art,
you raised your arduous labyrinths,
infinitesimal and infinite,
admirably ignoble,
more populous than history.
We shall have died without having made out
the biform beast or the rose
which are the center of your labyrinth,
but memory holds on to its talismans,
its Virgilian echoes,
and so in the streets of the night
your splendid infernos survive,
your many cadences and metaphors,
the gold glints of your shadow.
What does our cowardice matter if there is on earth
a single valiant man,
what does sadness matter if there was in time
somebody who called himself happy,
what does my lost generation matter,
that vague mirror,
if your books justify it.
I am the others. I am all those
whom your obstinate rigor has redeemed.
I am those you do not know and those you continue to save."
adrianasturalvarez's review against another edition
4.0
Although I got sort of suspicious of some of these translations (despite the celebrity names), Borges' eclectic humor and intelligence rang clear throughout most of these works. My favorite English versions came from W.S. Merwin, but when I was able to read the Spanish versions, they trumped all.