Jorge Luis Borges: Poems of the Night

Poetry was a more or less new area for me when I started reading the Penguin collection of Borges’ poetry called Poems of the Night. I had read a number of plays by Shakespeare and Yeats and a collected works of Arthur Rimbaud, that was all.

Poems of the Night contains a number of poems (around 50, I would say. I couldn’t be bothered to count them) written by Borges from 1922 to 1985, dealing with ‘the night’ in its broadest sense. Apart from the night itself, issues like death, blindness (as you know, Borges went blind when he grew older) and religion.

That alone makes for an interesting collection of poetry. The fact that it was all written by Borges, whom I now think is a superb poet, only makes it better. Borges brings just the right mix of cultural and literary allusions, strong emotions and perplexing imagery in his poems. Granted, not all of them are great. Some really didn’t do much for me at all. I have marked a couple of my favourites though. Here’s my own personal favourite (I think; it’s a difficult choice to make):

Quote:

Historia de la noche A lo largo de sus generaciones los hombres erigieron la noche. En el principio era ceguera y sueño y espinas que laceran el pie desnudo y temor de los lobos. Nunca sabremos quién forjó la palabra para el intervalo de sombra que divide los dos crepúsculos; nunca sabremos en qué siglo fue cifra del espacio de estrellas. Otros engendraron el mito. La hicieron madre de las Parcas tranquilas que tejen el destino y le sacrificaban ovejas negras y el gallo que presagia su fin. Doce casas le dieron los caldeos; infinitos mundos, el Pórtico. Hexámetros latinos la modelaron y el terror de Pascal. Luis de León vio en ella la patria de su alma estremecida. Ahora la sentimos inagotable como un antiguo vino y nadie puede contemplarla sin vértigo y el tiempo la ha cargado de eternidad. Y pensar que no existiría sin esos tenues instrumentos, los ojos. History of the night Throughout the course of the generations men constructed the night. At first she was blindness; thorns raking bare feet, fear of wolves. We shall never know who forged the word for the interval of shadow dividing the two twilights; we shall never know in what age it came to mean the starry hours. Others created the myth. They made her the mother of the unruffled Fates that spin our destiny, they sacrificed black ewes to her, and the cock who crows his own death. The Chaldeans assigned to her twelve houses; to Zeno, infinite words. She took shape from Latin hexameters and the terror of Pascal. Luis de Leon saw in her the homeland of his stricken soul. Now we feel her to be inexhaustible like an ancient wine and no one can gaze on her without vertigo and time has charged her with eternity. And to think that she wouldn’t exist except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

I think it’s really beautiful. I don’t like trying to explain it.

And here’s another little quote, because we’ve got a nice little post for the collection now:

Quote:

“A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”

I was very much moved by the collection as a whole and as far as I can judge, the translations are superb. The results are very good at any rate and they seem to stay very close to the original. So, with some reservations due to my inexperience with poetry: five stars.