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| Jorge Luis Borges |
Many years ago I learned to speak Spanish by reading the poems of Jorge Luis Borges, and Frederico Garcia Lorca, with a girlfriend who was fluent in the language. It was all very romantic and I still have some of the poems by heart. But languages, like love, fall into a jumbled state of affairs if they are not attended to on a regular basis. In an attempt to rekindle my fires, I've therefore been working on some translated versions of Borges' poems - my first ever attempt to work at some serious translations.
The poems I'm most interested in are, what I call, Borges' "suburban poems", and I'm hoping that ten or so of these will form a central section in a new manuscript of mine, which I'm provisionally calling
Exurbia - the
exurbs are the outermost suburbs of a city. My own poems begin in the suburbs (where I grew up) and move out towards the coast (where I now live) from where, with a ricorso symbolised by a flock of homing geese, the poems come full circle. Borges wrote a number of poems in which the suburbs of his own city feature very strongly, more often than not troubled by sunsets and strange dawns. I've been trying to stay true to the suburban gardens, courtyards and sunsets of these poems, but have been re-versioning them in a simpler, less baroque language than many of the existing translations.
I'm keeping the suburban translations under wraps for the moment, but here are three other Borges sonnets I've also been versioning, much more in the metaphysical and symbolic vein for which his work is so well known:
The Enigmas
I who am now singing these lines
will soon be among the mysterious number
who inhabit that magical desert
with no ‘before’, no ‘after’ and no ‘when’.
So say the mystics. I trust
I am unworthy of hell or glory
and predict nothing – our history
changes form like Proteus.
What meandering maze, what
flash of blinding glory will be my fate
when this adventure presents me with
the curious experience of death?
I want to drink its crystalline oblivion,
to be forever, but never to have been.
The White Doe
From what rough ballad of green England,
or what Persian etching; from which obscure region
of nights and days that encircle our pasts
did the white doe spring, as I dreamed her this morning?
It lasted a second. I saw her cross the meadow
and vanish in an illusory evening gold,
mild creature made of shreds of memory
and a little forgetfulness, doe with just one side.
The things which govern this curious world
let me dream of you, but not be your owner.
Perhaps in a nook of the deep future
I will find you again, white doe of my dream.
I too am a fugitive dream lasting only a few days more
than the dream of the meadow, the whiteness.
To A Saxon Poet
The snowfalls of Northumbria have known
and forgotten the prints of your feet;
and the sunsets that have fallen between
your time and mine are myriad, ghostly brother.
Slowly, in the creeping shadows, you made
metaphors of swords on the great oceans,
of the horrors that dwell in the pines,
and of your solitary days.
How can I unearth your features, your name?
They are held in secret by oblivion.
I shall never know how this same
earth was for you my fellow man.
You wandered the lonely roads of exile
leaving only these, your songs of iron.
