Poetry: Jorge Luis Borges in English El otro el mismo - 1969 - parte 2 - Two English Poems
Posted by Ricardo Marcenaro | Posted in Poetry: Jorge Luis Borges in English El otro el mismo - 1969 - parte 2 - Two English Poems | Posted on 6:23
TWO ENGLISH POEMS
To Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich
I
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all hues of deep
spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away,
half, withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated
friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things
my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We
talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your
laughter: these are illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray
starsdogs and the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I
want your hidden look, your real smile –that lonely, mocking smile your cool
mirror knows.
II
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely
moon. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have
honoured in marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two
bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of
a cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twenty four- heading a charged of three
hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour
my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow –the central heart that
deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by
adversities.
I offer you the memory of yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and
surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to
bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
1934
Poetry: Jorge Luis Borges in English El otro el mismo - 1969 - parte 2 - Two English Poems
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