Jorge Luis Borges

BORGES

Jorge Luis Borges

Born in 1899, Borges began writing poems as a boy and published his first volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923, a decade before he started writing his best-known ficciones. Throughout his life (he died in 1986) Borges deemed himself principally a poet, secondarily a writer of fiction. In his prologue to a revised edition of Fervor (1969), Borges said he had “moderated its baroque excesses” and “eliminated sentimentality and haziness.” He declined to renounce his younger self, however, and said: “At the time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace.” The poem chosen by Efraín Kristal to open Poems of the Night, “The Forging,” is taken fromFervor de Buenos Aires. Here is Christopher Maurer’s English version:

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Stories & Other Writings

Borges in 1951, by Grete Stern

POEMS OF THE NIGHT BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

Like the blind man whose hands are precursors
that push aside walls and glimpse heavens
slowly, flustered, I feel
in the crack of night
the verses that are to come.
I must burn the abominable darkness
in their limpid bonfire:
the purple of words
on the flagellated shoulder of time.
I must enclose the tears of evening
in the hard diamond of the poem.
No matter if the soul
walks naked and lonely as the wind
if the universe of a glorious kiss
still embraces my life.
The night is good fertile ground
for a sower of verses.

JORGE LUIS BORGES: A 25 AÑOS DE SU MUERTE.

112th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges, 1899 - 1986

Jorge L Borges

The Art of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges

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.

Jorge Luis Borges picture

Jorge_Luis_Borges

Borges caricatura