xolotlll's review
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.
marram_99's review
5.0
His poems touch your soul and speak to your heart, not one miss, all of them met the heart
harleyburch's review against another edition
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
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
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.
jonasd's review
5.0
Nothing like it. I will likely be reading these poems now and then, in English and eventually Spanish, for the rest of my life.
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