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A review by sarahreadsaverylot
Selected Poems: Volume 2 by Jorge Luis Borges
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."