Los defraudé. No fui feliz. Cumplida
No fue su joven voluntad. Mi mente
Se aplicó a las siméntricas porfías
Del arte, que entreteje naderías.
Me legaron valor. No fui valiente.
No me abandona. Siempre está a mi lado
La sombra de haber sido un desdichado.
It comes to me at this moment that Wordsworth wrote that poetry came from emotion recollected in tranquility. That is to say, we undergo happiness or pain. Then we’re merely patient. But afterwards, when we recollect it, we are not the actors, but the spectators, the onlookers, and that, according to Wordsworth, is the best for elicitation of poetry. Now, since I wrote this sonnet some four or five days after my mother’s death, when I was still overwhelmed by it, the sonnet cannot be good. But on the other side, many people remember it, many people in Buenos Aires know it by heart, there are discussions of it, they reread it. Personally I think that technically it is worth nothing. But it may be good in some secret way. And now that I have heard it, I like it. Perhaps because Enguídanos read it so well, and perhaps because Willis Barnstone bettered it, improved on it greatly.
THE SEA
Before our human dream (or terror) wove
Mythologies, cosmogonies, and love,
Before time coined its substance into days,
The sea, the always sea, existed: was.
Who is the sea? Who is that violent being,
Violent and ancient, who gnaws the foundations
Of earth? He is both one and many oceans;
He is abyss and splendor, chance and wind.
Who looks on the sea, sees it the first time,
Every time, with the wonder distilled
From elementary things—from beautiful
Evenings, the moon, the leap of a bonfire.
Who is the sea, and who am I? The day
That follows my last agony shall say.
[Trans. John Updike]
EL MAR
Antes que el sueño (o el terror) tejiera
Mitologías y cosmogonías,
Antes que el tiempo se acuñara en días,
El mar, el siempre mar, ya estaba y era.
¿Quién es el mar? ¿Quién es aquel violento
Y antiguo ser que roe los pilares
De la tierra y es uno y muchos mares
Y abismo resplandor y azar y viento?
Quien lo mira lo ve por vez primera,
Siempre. Con el asombro que las cosas
Elementales dejan, las hermosas
Tardes, la luna, el fuego de una hoguera.
¿Quién es el mar, quién soy? Lo sabré el día
Ulterior que sucede a la agonía.
I think this poem should be good since the subject is the sea. The sea has been haunting poetry ever since Homer, and in English poetry the sea has been there since earliest times. You find it in the first verses of Beowulf, when we are told of the ship of Scyld, the king of Denmark. Then they sent him out to sea in a ship. Then the writer says they sent him to travel far on the power of the sea. And the sea has been always with us. The sea is far more mysterious than the earth. And I don’t think you can speak of the sea without the memory of that first chapter of Moby Dick. Therein he felt the mystery of the sea. What have I done? I have merely tried to rewrite those ancient poems about the sea. I think back to Camöes of course—Por mares nunca de antes navegades “O seas never sailed before”—to The Odyssey, to ever so many seas. The sea is haunting us all the time. It is still mysterious to us. We do not know what it is or, as I say in the poem, who he is, since we do not know who we are. That is another mystery. I have written many poems about the sea. This one may perhaps be worth your attention. I don’t think I can say anything more, since this poem is not intellectual. That’s all to the good. This poem arises from emotion, so it shouldn’t be too bad.
G. L. BÜRGER
I can never quite understand
Why I am so bothered by the thing
That happened to Bürger
(his dates are in the encyclopedia),
there, in one of the cities on the plain,
next to the river which has only one bank,
where the palm tree grows, not the pine.
Like all other men,
he told and heard lies,
betrayed and was betrayed,
often agonized over love,
and after sleepless night
saw the gray winter panes of dawn,
but he merited the great voice of Shakespeare
(in which others are heard)
and the voice of Angelus Silesius of Breslau,
and with affected carelessness he polished a line
the way others did in his day.
He knew the present to be nothing
but a fleeting particle of the past
and that we are made of oblivion,
of wisdom useless as Spinoza’s corollaries
or the wonders of fear.
In the city by the still river,
about two thousand years after a god’s death
(the story I refer to is ancient),
Bürger is alone and now,
precisely now, he is polishing a few lines.
[Trans. Willis Barnstone]
G. L. BÜRGER
No acabo de entender
por qué me afectan de este modo las cosas
que le sucedieron a Bürger
(sus dos fechas están en la enciclopedia)
en una de las ciudades de la llanura,
junto al río que tiene una sola margen
en la que crece la palmera, no el pino.
Al igual de todos los hombres,
dijo y oyó mentiras,
fue traicionado y fue traidor,
agonizó de amor muchas veces
y, tras la noche del insomnio,
vio los cristales grises del alba,
pero mereció la gran voz de Shakespeare
(en la que están las otras)
y la de Angelus Silesius de Breslau
y con falso descuido limó algún verso,
en el estilo de su época.
Sabía que el presente no es otra cosa
que una partícula fugaz del pasado
y que estamos hechos de olvido:
sabiduría tan inútil
como los corolarios de Spinoza
o las magias del miedo.
En la ciudad junto al río inmóvil,
unos dos mil años después de la muerte de un dios
(la historia que refiero es antigua),
Bürger está solo y ahora,
precisamente ahora, lima unos versos.
This poem was given me one afternoon in my apartment in Buenos Aires. I felt very sad and dreary, woebegone, and then I said to myself: Why on earth should I worry what happens to Borges? After all, Borges is nothing, a mere fiction. And then I thought I would write this down. And I bethought myself etymologically—I am always thinking etymology—and I thought: My name, a very common Portuguese name, Borges, means a burger. Then I thought of a German poet, a well-known German poet whose works I suppose I have read. His name is the same as mine, Bürger. Then I thought of a literary trick. I would write a poem about Bürger. And as the reader goes on, he’ll find out that Bürger is not Bürger but Borges. After all, we share the same name. Then I began, and I spoke of the city of the plain. That may be the lowlands more than Germany, but also the province of Buenos Aires. And then I gave a hint. I spoke of a palm tree, not the pine, and then I spoke of a river, a river with only one bank to it. And then I remembered the beautiful title of a book by Mallea, La ciudad junto al rio, The City on the River, and I worked in the line. The reader would find at the end that the poem was not about Bürger but about myself, and that I had played a legitimate trick on him. I hope it works.
BORGES AND I
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop f
or a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
[Trans. James E. Irby]
We have just heard the great name, perhaps the forgotten name, of Robert Louis Stevenson. Of course you all remember that he wrote Jekyll and Hyde, and from Jekyll and Hyde came this page. But in Stevenson’s fable the difference between Jekyll and Hyde is that Jekyll is compounded, as all of us, of good and evil while Hyde is compounded of pure evil. And by evil Stevenson did not think of lust, since he did not think of lust as being evil. He thought of cruelty. He thought that cruelty was the forbidden sin, the sin that the Holy Ghost himself would not forgive. Of course the same scheme was used by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray, not so effectively as Stevenson’s, but in my case the difference between Borges and I is other. Borges stands for all the things I hate. He stands for publicity, for being photographed, for having interviews, for politics, for opinions—all opinions are despicable I should say. He also stands for those two nonentities, those two imposters failure and success, or, as he called them: where we can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. He deals in those things. While I, let us say, since the name of the paper is “Borges and I,” I stands not for the public man but for the private self, for reality, since these other things are unreal to me. The real things are feeling, dreaming, writing—as to publishing, that belongs, I think, to Borges, not to the I. Those things should be avoided. Of course I know that the ego has been denied by many philosophers. For example, by David Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Moore, by Macedonio Fernández, by Frances Herbert Bradley. And yet I think we may think of it as a thing. And now it comes to me that I am being helped at this moment by no less a person than William Shakespeare. Remember Sergeant Rolles. Sergeant Rolles was a miles gloriosus, a coward. He was degraded. People found out that he wasn’t really a brave man. And then Shakespeare came to his aid, and Sergeant Rolles said: “Captain I’ll be no longer, simply the thing I am shall make me live, the thing I am.” And that of course reminds us of the great words of God: “I am that I am.” Ego sum qui sum. Well, you may think I stand simply for the thing I am, that intimate and secret thing. Perhaps one day I will find out who he is, rather than what he is.
ENDYMION ON LATMOS
I was sleeping on the summit and my body
Was beautiful, now worn out by years.
High in the Hellenic night, the centaur
Slowed his fourfold race
To spy into my dream. I liked
To sleep in order to dream and for the other
Lustrous dream eluding memory
That purifies us from the burden
Of being what we are on earth.
Diana, goddess who is also the moon,
Saw me sleeping on the mountain
And slowly came down into my arms
Gold and love in the flaming night.
I held her mortal eyelids,
I wanted to see her lovely face
Which my lips of dust profaned.
I tasted the moon’s perfume
And her unending voice called my name.
O pure faces seeking each other,
O rivers of love and of night,
O human kiss and the bow’s tension.
How long has my wandering lasted?
There are things unmeasured by grapes
Or flower or slender snow.
People run from me, are threatened
By the man loved by the moon.
Years have gone by. One worry
Horrifies my vigil. I wonder
If that uproar of gold in the mountain
Was true or merely a dream.
Why fool myself that a memory
Of yesterday and a dream are the same?
My loneliness drifts along the ordinary
Roads of the earth, but in the ancient night
Of the Numens, I always seek
The indifferent moon, daughter of Zeus.
[Trans. Willis Barnstone]
ENDIMIÓN EN LATMOS
Yo dormía en la cumbre y era hermoso
Mi cuerpo, que los años han gastado.
Alto en la noche helénica, el centauro
Demoraba su cuádruple carrera
Para atisbar mi sueño. Me placía
Dormir para soñar y para el otro
Sueño lustral que elude la memoria
Y que nos purifica del gravamen
De ser aquel que somos en la tierra.
Diana, la diosa que es también la luna,
Me veía dormir en la montaña
Y lentamente descendió a mis brazos
Oro y amor en la encendida noche.
Yo apretaba los párpados mortales,
Yo quería no ver el rostro bello
Que mis labios de polvo profanaban.
Yo aspiré la fragancia de la luna
Y su infinita voz dijo mi nombre.
Oh las puras mejillas que se buscan,
Oh ríos del amor y de la noche,
Oh el beso humano y la tensión del arco.
No sé cuánto duraron mis venturas;
Hay cosas que no miden los racimos
Ni la flor ni la nieve delicada.
La gente me rehuye. Le da miedo
El hombre que fue amado por la luna.
Los años han pasado. Una zozobra
Da horror a mi vigilia. Me pregunto
Si aquel tumulto de oro en la montaña
Fue verdadero o no fue más que un sueño.
Inútil repetirme que el recuerdo
De ayer y un sueño son la misma cosa.
Mi soledad recorre los comunes
Caminos de la tierra, pero siempre
Busco en la antigua noche de los númenes
La indiferente luna, hija de Zeus.
“Endymion on Latmos” is a mythological poem, and perhaps the one personal poem I have ever written. Because Endymion, like all myths, is not a figment or mere reason. Endymion stands for all men. So you say when a man has been loved, then he has been loved by divinity, he has been loved by a goddess, he has been loved by the moon. So I think I have the right to compose this poem, since like all men I have been, at least once or twice, or thrice in my life, Endymion. I have been loved by a goddess. Afterwards I felt unworthy of it, at the same time, grateful. For why should good things last? As Keats had it, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The fact of having loved or having been loved, that may be represented by the story of Endymion and the moon, and I have done my best to make this poem alive
and not to make you feel that it is based on Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, but upon my personal fate and the personal fate of all men, all over the world, all over time.
FRAGMENT
A sword,
An iron sword hammered out in the cold of dawn,
A sword carved with runes
That no one will overlook, that no one will interpret in full,
A sword from the Baltic that will be celebrated in Northumbria,
A sword that poets
Will equate to ice and fire,
A sword that will be handed from king to king
And from king to dream,
A sword that will be loyal
To an hour known only to Destiny,
A sword that will light up the battle.
A sword to fit the hand
That will guide the beautiful battle, the web of men,
A sword to fit the hand
That will stain with blood the wolf’s fangs
And the raven’s ruthless beak,
A sword to fit the hand
That will squander red gold,
A sword to fit the hand
That will deal death to the serpent in its golden lair,
A sword to fit the hand
That will gain a kingdom and lose a kingdom,
A sword to fit the hand
That will bring down the forest of spears.
A sword to fit the hand of Beowulf.
[Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni]
FRAGMENTO
Una espada,
Una espada de hierro forjada en el frío del alba,
Una espada con runas
Que nadie podrá desoír ni descifrar del todo,
Una espada del Báltico que será cantada en Nortumbria,
Una espada que los poetas
Igualarán al hielo y al fuego,
Una espada que un rey dará a otro rey
Y este rey a un sueño,
Una espada que será leal
Hasta una hora que ya sabe el Destino,
Una espada que iluminará la batalla.
Una espada para la mano
Que regirá la hermosa batalla, el tejido de hombres,
Una espada para la mano
Que enrojecerá los dientes del lobo
Y el despiadado pico del cuervo,
Una espada para la mano
Que prodigará el oro rojo,
Una espada para la mano
Que dará muerte a la serpiente en su lecho de oro,
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 6