Borges and I

I am a big fan of Borges' speculative and experimental fiction. Stories like "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The Library of Babel" are what I cut my teeth on, back in college days Comp Lit courses. And his essay-parable about writing: "Borges and I" is just the tops. But I often forget that Borges was also a wonderful poet. For this reason I am thankful for the fantastic translation of one of his poems in the recent issue of Poetry:


That One

O days consecrated to the useless
office of forgetting the biography
of a lesser poet from the hemisphere
below, to whom the shades or the stars
bequeathed a body that leaves behind no son
and blindness, penumbra and prison,
and old age, aurora of death,
and fame, which nobody deserves,
and the habit of devising hendecasyllabics
and an old love of encylopedias
and of fine calligraphic maps
and of fragile ivory and the incurable
nostalgia for Latin and fragmentary
memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the oblivion of dates and of names
and the cult of the Orient, which the peoples
of the miscellaneous Orient do not share,
and vigils glimmering with expectation,
and the abuse of etymology
and the iron of Saxon syllables
and the moon, which always surprises us,
and that bad habit, Buenos Aires,
and the flavor of grapes and of water
and of cocoa, confection of Mexico,
and a few coins and a clock made of sand
and who, one afternoon, like so many others,
resigns himself to these verses.


—translated from the Spanish by Srikanth Reddy


Wow.