Translated by A.Z. Foreman
We're already the oblivion we will be, the elemental dust that does not know us and that was red Adam and is now
all men. The dust that we shall never see.
We're already the two dates on the tomb:
The end and the beginning. Now. The casket.
Decomposition and the shroud to mask it.
Triumph of death. The dirges in the gloam.
I'm not the sort of fool who mindlessly
clings to his own name's magic sound. I can
be hopeful as I think about the man
who will not know this earth was home to me.
Under the heavens' indifferent blue yonder
This is a most consoling thing to ponder.
The Original:
Aquí. Hoy
Jorge Luís Borges
Ya somos el olvido que seremos.
El polvo elemental que nos ignora
y que fue el rojo Adán y que es ahora
todos los hombres, y que no veremos.
Ya somos en la tumba las dos fechas
del principio y el término. La caja,
la obscena corrupción y la mortaja,
los triunfos de la muerte, y las endechas.
No soy el insensato que se aferra
al mágico sonido de su nombre.
Pienso con esperanza en aquel hombre
que no sabrá que fui sobre la tierra.
Bajo el indiferente azul del cielo,
esta meditación es un consuelo.
Verses Written in a Copy of Beowulf By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Sometimes I ask myself the reasons why I'm driven, with no hope of satisfaction as my night pushes onward now, to try and learn the language of the roughneck Saxon.
Used up by years, my memory begins to lose its grip upon the uselessly repeated word, the way my own life spins and soon unspins its weary history.
The soul (or so I tell myself) must have some secret, some sufficent wherewithall to know it does not end, that its vast, grave circle can take all in and take on all.
Beyond this yearning and beyond this verse it waits endless for me: the universe.
The Original:
Composición Escrita en un Ejemplar de la Gesta de Beowulf
Ewigkeit
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Let Spanish verse turn on my tongue, affirm Once more in me what it has always said Since Seneca in Latin: that true dread Sentence that all is fodder for the worm. Let it turn back with song to hail pale ashes, Death's calends and the final victory Of that word-ruler queen whose footfall smashes The banners of our empty vanity.
Not that. I'll cravenly deny not one Thing that has blessed my clay. I know of all Things, one does not exist: oblivion. That in eternity beyond recall The precious things I've lost stay burning on: That forge, that risen moon, that evening-fall.
Audio of me reading this poem in Spanish
The Original:
Ewigkeit
Jorge Luis Borges
Torne en mi boca el verso castellano
a decir lo que siempre está diciendo
desde el latín de Séneca: el horrendo
dictamen de que todo es del gusano.
Torne a cantar la pálida ceniza,
los fastos de la muerte y la victoria
de esa reina retórica que pisa
los estandartes de la vanagloria.
No así. Lo que mi barro ha bendecido
no lo voy a negar como un cobarde.
Sé que una cosa no hay. Es el olvido;
sé que en la eternidad perdura y arde
lo mucho y lo precioso que he perdido:
esa fragua, esa luna y esa tarde.
Dreamtigers
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
As a child, I was a zealous worshiper of the tiger: not the piebald "tiger" of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of verdure afloat on the Panará river, but the striped, Asiatic, royal tiger which can only be faced down by war-men fortified on elephantback.
I used to linger endlessly in front of one of the cages at the zoo; I judged the gigantic encyclopedias and natural history books according to the majesty of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations; I who cannot rightly recall a woman’s brow or smile.)
Childhood passed, the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but they endure in my dreams. In the submerged dimension, at that level of the chaotic, they persist. So, as I sleep, some dream distracts me and I know at once it is a dream. I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and now that my power is limitless, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams bear forth the wild beast I yearn for. A tiger appears indeed, but autopsied or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or far too fleeting, or with something of the bird or the dog.
The Original
Dreamtigers
En la infancia yo ejercí con fervor la adoración del tigre: no el tigre overo de los camalotes del Paraná y de la confusión amazónica, sino el tigre rayado, asiático, real, que sólo pueden afrontar los hombres de guerra, sobre un castillo encima de un elefante.
Yo solía demorarme sin fin ante una de las jaulas en el Zoológico; yo apreciaba las vastas enciclopedias y los libros de historia natural, por el esplendor de sus tigres (todavía me acuerdo de esas figuras: yo que no puedo recordar sin error la frente o la sonrisa de una mujer.)
Pasó la infancia, caducaron los tigres y su pasión, pero todavía están en mis sueños. En esa napa sumergida o caótica siguen prevaleciendo y así: dormido, me distrae un sueño cualquiera y de pronto sé que es un sueño. Suelo pensar entonces: éste es un sueño, una pura invención de mi voluntad, y ya que tengo un ilimitado poder, voy a causar un tigre.
¡Oh, incompetencia! Nunca mis sueños saben engendrar la apetecida fiera. Aparece el tigre, eso sí, pero disecado o endeble, o con impuras variaciones de forma, o de un tamaño inadmisible, o harto fugaz, o tirando a perro o a pájaro.
Limits
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Of all those boulevards that sink in sunset There’s one (I know not which) I've made my way Across for the last time, indifferent And without realizing it, in sway To One who predesigns almighty norms, A rigorous and secret scale to gauge The dreams and shadows, formulas and forms Which ravel and unravel our life and age. If to all things there is a terminus, A last time and oblivion, who will tell Any of us whom in this house we have Unwittingly already bid farewell? Now through the dawn-greyed window night withdraws And there amid the stack of books that shed A craze of shadows on the hazy table, There shall be one I'll have to leave unread. Out in the south stands more than one worn gate There with its cactus and cemented urns Whose entry is forbidden to my feet As in a lithograph. Nothing returns: You’ve bolted shut a certain door forever; A mirror waits in vain, expecting you; The crossroads seem to lie unbarred before you But four-faced Janus watches all you do. Among your many memories is one Which has been lost to you forevermore; They will not see you by that fountain nor Beneath the yellow moon, or the white sun. Your voice shall never come to what the Persian Said in his tongue of roses, wine and birds, When under dusk before the light is scattered You wish to say some unforgettable words. The ceaseless Rhône? My European lake? That yesterday I hunch upon today Will be erased as Carthage by the Romans Whose salt and fire it could not hold at bay. At dawn I think I hear a multitude Receding out of earshot, out of mind: Those who have loved me and forgotten me. Borges and Space and Time leave me behind.
Audio of me reciting this poem in Spanish
The Original:
Límites
Jorge Luis Borges
De estas calles que ahondan el poniente,
una habrá (no sé cuál) que he recorrido
ya por última vez, indiferente
y sin adivinarlo, sometido
a Quién prefija omnipotentes normas
y una secreta y rígida medida
a las sombras, los sueños y las formas
que destejen y tejen esta vida.
Si para todo hay término y hay tasa
y última vez y nunca más y olvido
¿quién nos dirá de quién, en esta casa,
sin saberlo nos hemos despedido?
Tras el cristal ya gris la noche cesa
y del alto de libros que una trunca
sombra dilata por la vaga mesa,
alguno habrá que no leeremos nunca.
Hay en el Sur más de un portón gastado
con sus jarrones de mampostería
y tunas, que a mi paso está vedado
como si fuera una litografía.
Para siempre cerraste alguna puerta
y hay un espejo que te aguarda en vano;
la encrucijada te parece abierta
y la vigila, cuadrifronte, Jano.
Hay, entre todas tus memorias, una
que se ha perdido irreparablemente;
no te verán bajar a aquella fuente
ni el blanco sol ni la amarilla luna.
No volverá tu voz a lo que el persa
dijo en su lengua de aves y de rosas,
cuando el ocaso, ante la luz dispersa,
quieras decir inolvidables cosas.
¿Y el incesante Ródano y el lago,
todo ese ayer sobre el cual hoy me inclino?
Tan perdido estará como Cartago
que con fuego y con sal borró el latino.
Creo en el alba oír un atareado
rumor de multitudes que se alejan;
son los que me han querido y olvidado;
espacio y tiempo y Borges ya me dejan.
Texas
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Here too it is all there. Here too, as at the Americas' other edge: the measureless plain where a cry dies unattended. Yes, here too, the Indian, mustang, lariat. Here too the secret bird that ever yet over the clamorings of history sings for an evening and its memory; here too the stars with mystic alphabet that dictate to my pen today a few names that no ceaseless maze of days will blow away now: San Jacinto and the new Thermopylae they call the Alamo. Here, too, it is a place forever rife with that unknown, brief, anxious thing called life.
Texas
Jorge Luis Borges
Aquí también. Aquí, como en el otro
confín del continente, el infinito
campo en que muere solitario el grito;
aquí también el indio, el lazo, el potro.
Aquí también el pájaro secreto
que sobre los fragores de la historia
canta para una tarde y su memoria;
aquí también el místico alfabeto
de los astros, que hoy dictan a mi cálamo
nombres que el incesante laberinto
de los días no arrastra: San Jacinto
y esas otras Termópilas, el Álamo.
Aquí también esa desconocida
y ansiosa y breve cosa que es la vida.
I think this may be the best poem in the Spanish language about Christ's crucifixion (and there are a lot of Spanish poems on that topic. Few interesting.) Borges here portrays Jesus as a simple human being, shorn of the Christian God-made-Flesh that he will be turned into. This enables Borges to do two things: (1) By mentioning the future acts committed in his name amid a handful of otherwise terrestrial woes, Borges implies that it would wound this human Jesus greatly were he aware of what ideas and ideologies he would be resurrected as following his death as a person. In a sense he is to be forever on the cross, the nails of historic Christendom ever skewering him in effigy. Jesus is therefore lucky he doesn't know what will become of him as Christ. And if Jesus were divine, and did survive death, then Christian history would be above all else a source of torment for Him as he watched from his non-corporeal vantage point. But now I digress. (2) Thus fully humanized as a man and nothing but, he can be a metaphor with which Borges can reveal, or at least intimate, his own suffering in the final lines without arrogance or aggrandizement. After all, Borges is here not comparing himself to a god, but to another human being like himself. Paradoxically this effectuates a kind of textual reverse-kenosis. In ceasing to be God, being truly empty of any godhood, Jesus fulfills the premise of truly becoming Man, the flesh that dwells among us, in a way relatable to the equally human Borges. In this light, we can furthermore see the post mortem deification as what, in the logic of the poem, it would have to be: dehumanization in the fullest sense. Christ on the Cross
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Christ on the cross. The two feet touch the earth. The three beams made of wood are the same height. Christ is not in the middle. He's the third. The black beard hangs down heavy over his chest. His face is not the face from the engravings. It's harsh and Jewish. I do not see him And will keep questing for him till the final Day of my steps falling upon this earth. The broken man is suffering and silent. The cutting crown of thorns is hurting him. He's unreached by the jeering of the mob Which has so often seen his agonies. His or another's. It is the same thing. Christ on the cross. Confusedly he thinks About the kingdom that perhaps awaits him, About the woman that was never his. It's not for him to see Theology, The indecipherable Trinity, The Gnostics, the cathedrals, Occam's razor, The purple, the mitre, the liturgy, Guthrum's conversion by the sword of Alfred, The Inquisition hallowed, blood of martyrs, Crusade atrocities, young Joan of Arc Afire, the Vatican that blesses armies. He knows he is no god and is a man That dies with day. To him it is no matter. What matters is the nails' hard piercing iron. He's not a Roman. Not a Greek. He moans. He has left us some splendid metaphors And a doctrine of pardon with the power To cancel out the past. (This is a dictum Written down by an Irishman in gaol.) The soul seeks for the end, frenetically. It has grown dark a bit. Now he is dead
And a fly walks on over the still flesh. What good does it all do me that that man Has suffered so, when I am suffering now?
The Original:
Cristo En La Cruz
Jorge Luis Borges
Cristo en la cruz. Los pies tocan la tierra.
Los tres maderos son de igual altura.
Cristo no está en el medio. Es el tercero.
La negra barba pende sobre el pecho.
El rostro no es el rostro de las láminas.
Es áspero y judío. No lo veo
y seguiré buscándolo hasta el día
último de mis pasos por la tierra.
El hombre quebrantado sufre y calla.
La corona de espinas lo lastima.
No lo alcanza la befa de la plebe
que ha visto su agonía tantas veces.
La suya o la de otro. Da lo mismo.
Cristo en la cruz. Desordenadamente
piensa en el reino que tal vez lo espera,
piensa en una mujer que no fue suya.
No le está dado ver la teología,
la indescifrable Trinidad, los gnósticos,
las catedrales, la navaja de Occam,
la púrpura, la mitra, la liturgia,
la conversión de Guthrum por la espada,
la inquisición, la sangre de los mártires,
las atroces Cruzadas, Juana de Arco,
el Vaticano que bendice ejércitos.
Sabe que no es un dios y que es un hombre
que muere con el día. No le importa.
Le importa el duro hierro con los clavos.
No es un romano. No es un griego. Gime.
Nos ha dejado espléndidas metáforas
y una doctrina del perdón que puede
anular el pasado. (Esa sentencia
la escribió un irlandés en una cárcel.)
El alma busca el fin, apresurada.
Ha oscurecido un poco. Ya se ha muerto.
Anda una mosca por la carne quieta.
¿De qué puede servirme que aquel hombre
haya sufrido, si yo sufro ahora?
On Embarking on a Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
This translation dedicated to Christina Von Nolcken
I, after fifty generations
(Time opens such gulfs out to us all)
Return to the far bank of a mighty river
The Norsemen's longships never reached,
To the harsh, hard-wrought words
Which, with a tongue now long gone to dust,
I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia
Before becoming Haslam1 or Borges.
Last Saturday, we read how Julius Cæsar
Was the first to come from Romeburg to unveil Britain;
Before the grapes grow back, I shall have heard
The nightingale of the riddle
And the elegy spoken by the twelve
Warriors round their king's burial mound.
To me, these words seem symbols of other symbols,
Variants of German or English-to-be,
But they were once images of the actual
Used by a man to proclaim a sword or the sea;
Tomorrow they will come alive again,
Tomorrow, fyr will not be fire, but rather that lot
Of tamed and changeling god
Whom none can face without feeling an ancient fear.
Glory be to the unending weft
Of cause and effect
Which, before showing me the mirror
In which I shall see no one or some other,
Grants me this perfect contemplation
Of a language at its dawn.
Notes: 1Frances Haslam: The grandmother of Borges, born in Staffordshire in 1845.
The Original:
Al Iniciar el Estudio de la Gramática Anglosajona
Jorge Luis Borges
Al cabo de cincuenta generaciones
(Tales abismos nos depara a todos el tiempo)
Vuelvo en la margen ulterior de un gran río
Que no alcanzaron los dragones del viking,
A las ásperas y laboriosas palabras
Que, con una boca hecha polvo,
Usé en los días de Nortumbria y de Mercia,
Antes de ser Haslam o Borges.
El sábado leímos que Julio el César
Fue el primero que vino de Romeburg para develar a Bretaña;
Antes que vuelvan los racimos habré escuchado
La voz del ruiseñor del enigma
Y la elegía de los doce guerreros
Que rodean el túmulo de su rey.
Símbolos de otros símbolos, variaciones
Del futuro inglés o alemán me parecen estas palabras
Que alguna vez fueron imágenes
Y que un hombre usó para celebrar el mar o una espada;
Mañana volverá a vivir,
Mañana fyr no será fire sino esa suerte
De dios domesticado y cambiante
Que a nadie le está dado mirar sin un antiguo asombro.
Alabada sea la infinita
Urdimbre de los efectos y de las causas
Que antes de mostrarme el espejo
En que no veré a nadie o veré a otro
Me concede esta pura contemplación
De un lenguaje del alba.
To a Saxon Poet
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman This translation dedicated to Christina Von Nolcken, who taught me Old English as a callow undergraduate, and subsequently guided me through the text of Beowulf with consistant brilliance and heroic patience. The snowscape of Northumbria has known And now forgotten footprints left by you. Innumerable are the days the sun Has set, gray brother, in between us two. Slow in slow shadow you would work your lines Out into metaphors of swords at sea, and of the horror dwelling in the pines and of the lonely thing that time could be. Where shall I seek your features and your name? Such things as these antique oblivion can never divulge. I'll never know what came of you when you on earth were yet a man. You walked the ways of exile in your day. Now you are nothing but your iron lay.
The Original:
A Un Poeta Sajón
La nieve de Nortumbria ha conocido
y ha olvidado la huella de tus pasos
y son innumerables los ocasos
que entre nosotros, gris hermano, han sido.
Lento en la lenta sombra labrarías
metáforas de espadas en los mares
y del horror que mora en los pinares
y de la soledad que traen los días.
¿Dónde buscar tus rasgos y tu nombre?
Esas son cosas que el antiguo olvido
guarda. Nunca sabré cómo habrás sido
cuando sobre la tierra fuiste un hombre.
Seguiste los caminos del destierro;
ahora sólo eres tu cantar de hierro.
Rain
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
The afternoon has brightened up at last For rain is falling, sudden and minute. Falling or fallen. There is no dispute: Rain is a thing that happens in the past.
Who hears it fall retrieves a time that fled When an uncanny windfall could disclose To him a flower by the name of rose And the perplexing redness of its red.
Falling until it blinds each windowpane, Within a suburb now long lost this rain Shall liven black grapes on a vine inside
A certain patio that is no more. A long-awaited voice through the downpour Is from my father. He has never died.
The Original:
Lluvia
Bruscamente la tarde se ha aclarado
Porque ya cae la lluvia minuciosa.
Cae o cayó. La lluvia es una cosa
Que sin duda sucede en el pasado.
Quien la oye caer ha recobrado
El tiempo en que la suerte venturosa
Le reveló una flor llamada rosa
Y el curioso color del colorado.
Esta lluvia que ciega los cristales
Alegrará en perdidos arrabales
Las negras uvas de una parra en cierto
Patio que ya no existe. La mojada
Tarde me trae la voz, la voz deseada,
De mi padre que vuelve y que no ha muerto.
Everness
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and the dross, his key
Ciphers in his prophetic memory
The moons to come, and moons of evenings gone.
All there: reflections in the looking-glass Which, between the huge twilights of the day,
Your face has long been leaving where you pass,
And those it will keep leaving on your way.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystal of memory, the universe;
Unending are the mazes it engenders
Of doors that shut behind as you walk through;
Only from sunset’s farther side shall you
Behold at last the Archetypes and Splendors.
The Original:
Everness
Jorge Luis Borges
Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el olvido.
Dios, que salva el metal, salva la escoria
Y cifra en Su profética memoria
Las lunas que serán y las que han sido.
Ya todo está. Los miles de reflejos
Que entre los dos crepúsculos del día
Tu rostro fue dejando en los espejos
Y los que irá dejando todavía.
Y todo es una parte del diverso
Cristal de esa memoria, el universo;
No tienen fin sus arduos corredores
Y las puertas se cierran a tu paso;
Sólo del otro lado del ocaso
Verás los Arquetipos y Esplendores.
A Rose and Milton
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by A.Z. Foreman
Amid the generations of the rose
That in the deep of ages lie long gone
I want one to be spared oblivion,
Unmarked and undistinguished among those
Bygone. I am bequeathed by destiny
The privilege of bestowing the first name
Upon that silent rose, the last and same
Flower that Milton held and could not see
Before his face. O you vermillion, white
Or yellow rose from a garden long erased,
Your immemorial past, by magic placed
In the one present, is this verse's light:
Gold, ivory, or blood, the shades enclose
You, as his fingers once, invisible rose.
The Original:
Una Rosa Y Milton
De las generaciones de las rosas
que en el fondo del tiempo se han perdido
quiero que una se salve del olvido,
una sin marca o signo entre las cosas
que fueron. El destino me depara
este don de nombrar por vez primera
esa flor silenciosa, la postrera
rosa que Milton acercó a su cara,
sin verla. Oh tú bermeja o amarilla
o blanca rosa de un jardín borrado,
deja mágicamente tu pasado
inmemorial y en este verso brilla,
oro, sangre o marfil o tenebrosa
como en sus manos, invisible rosa.
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