Borges at Eighty: Conversations

by Jorge Luis Borges

  Una espada para la mano

  Que ganará un reino y perderá un reino,

  Una espada para la mano

  Que derribará la selva de lanzas.

  Una espada para la mano de Beowulf.

  This poem should be my best one since Rudyard Kipling wrote it and called it “The Thing.” But the occasion was different. I was staying a few months in Texas, in Austin, a city I greatly loved, and there I read, or reread, Historia del modernismo, History of Modernism, by Federico Riña, and therein I found a beautiful sonnet by a Bolivian poet. I will not try to translate, since it is untranslatable. I think I can recover the first stanza, and it runs thus—you should try to hear the lilt in Spanish:

  Peregrina paloma imaginaria

  que enardeces los últimos amores,

  alma de luz, de música y de flor,

  peregrina paloma imaginaria.

  (Imaginary pilgrim dove

  who gives fire to the final loves,

  soul of light, of music and of flower,

  pilgrim soul imagined.)

  Then I said to myself: This poem means absolutely nothing and it’s very beautiful. That thing happens. For example, to fall back on Shakespeare, when we read “Music to hear for here is how music saddens/ sweets with sweets warmed, joy delights in joy.” When we read those line that recall Verlaine, that prophesy Verlaine, we do not think of the meaning. We think of the sound and symbols and that’s that. Then I said I will attempt the same thing. I will write a beautiful poem—I wonder if I have succeeded—and, in order to succeed, a meaningless poem. I fell back on one of my passions, the passions of things Old English and Old Norse, and I recollected the kennings used by the Saxons and by the Norsemen. Then I wrote that poem rather in the manner of a nursery rhyme that begins “This is the house that Jack built,” and then you go on to other things. Well, I began merely by speaking of the sword, and then of the hand that wielded it, and then of the Nordics, and so on. And in the end I gave the solution. The solution was less important than the poem itself, less important than the sounds, the symbols, the presence of things Northern and ancient. In the end I said: Una espada para la mano de Beowulf “A sword to fit the hand of Beowulf.” I attempted this experiment, the one experiment I tried of writing beautiful and meaningless poetry. I hope I succeeded.

  THE MOON

  for María Kodama

  There is such loneliness in that gold.

  The moon of the nights is not the moon

  Which the first Adam saw. The long centuries

  Of human vigil have filled her

  With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.

  [Trans. Willis Barnstone]

  LA LUNA

  a María Kodama

  Hay tanta soledad en ese oro.

  La luna de las noches no es la luna

  Que vio el primer Adán. Los largos siglos

  De la vigilia humana la han colmado

  De antiguo llanto. Mírala. Es tu espejo.

  Perhaps we are allowed to ask a few words. I think that poetry, that memory, that oblivion have enriched the word. I wonder if the word moon, that lingering English word, is precisely the same as the Latin or Spanish luna. I suppose they are slightly different, and that slight difference may be all important, for all we know. But in this case I thought of generations of men looking long and long at the moon and thinking of it and changing it into myths, for example, the myth of Endymion on Latmos. And then I thought to myself: When I look at the moon I’m not looking simply at a luminous volume in the sky. I’m also looking at the moon of Virgil, of Shakespeare, of Verlaine, of Góngora. And so I wrote that poem. I think the first line should not be forgotten—Hay tanta soledad en ese oro “There is such loneliness in that gold”—since without it the poem might fall to pieces—perhaps it has. For after all, writing poetry is a very mysterious thing. The poet should not tamper with what he writes, he should not intrude himself into his writing. Let the writing do itself. Let the Holy Ghost or the muse or the subconscious—to give it an ugly contemporary name—have its way and then perhaps we make up poetry. Even I may write a poem.

  A YELLOW ROSE

  The illustrious Giambattista Marino, whom the unanimous mouths of Fame—to use an image dear to him—proclaimed the new Homer and the new Dante, did not die that afternoon or the next. And yet, the immutable and tacit event that happened then was in effect the last event of his life. Laden with years and glory, the man lay dying in a vast Spanish bed with carved bedposts. It takes no effort to imagine a lordly balcony, facing west, a few steps away, and, further down, the sight of marble and laurels and a garden whose stone steps are duplicated in a rectangle of water. A woman has placed a yellow rose in a vase. The man murmurs the inevitable verses which—to tell the truth—have begun to weary him a little:

  Blood of the garden, pomp of the walk,

  gem of spring, April’s eye….

  Then came the revelation. Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise. And he sensed that it existed in its eternity and not in his words, and that we may make mention or allusion of a thing but never express it at all; and that the tall proud tomes that cast a golden penumbra in an angle of the drawing room were not—as he had dreamed in his vanity—a mirror of the world, but simply one more thing added to the universe.

  This illumination came to Marino on the eve of his death, and, perhaps, it had come to Homer and Dante too.

  [Trans. Anthony Kerrigan]

  THE OTHER TIGER

  I think of a tiger. Half-light exalts

  The vast busy library

  And seems to set the bookshelves back;

  Strong, innocent, bloodstained, fresh,

  It wanders through the jungle and its morning

  And prints its tracks on the muddy

  Banks of a river whose name it doesn’t know

  (In its world there are no names or past

  Or future, only a definite now)

  And slips through barbaric distances,

  Sniffing smells in the braided labyrinths

  Out of the smell of deer;

  Among the stripes of the bamboo tree

  I decipher the tiger’s stripes and feel

  Its bony frame under the splendid quivering hide.

  The curving seas and deserts of the planet

  Futilely intervene;

  From this house in a remote port

  In South America I track you and dream you,

  O tiger of the Ganges’ banks.

  As evening fills my soul I think

  The tiger addressed in my poem

  Is a tiger of symbols and shadows,

  A string of literary tropes

  And scraps from the encyclopedia

  And not the fatal tiger, the deadly jewel

  That under the sun or changing moon

  Goes on in Sumatra or Bengal fulfilling

  Its round of love, indolence and death.

  To the tiger of symbols I oppose

  The real one, with hot blood,

  Decimating a herd of buffaloes

  And today, August 3rd, 1959,

  A deliberate shadow spreads over the grass

  But already in the act of naming it

  And conjecturing its world

  It becomes a fiction, art, and not a living beast

  Among beasts roaming the earth.

  We will seek a third tiger. Like

  The others it will be a shape

  From my dream, a system of words,

  And not the vertebrate tiger

  That, beyond all mythologies,

  Paces the earth. I know all this

  Yet something drives me to this vague,

  Insane and ancient adventure, and I go on,

  Searching through hours of the afternoon

  For the other tiger, not in the poem.

  [Trans. Willis Barnstone]

  EL OTRO TIGRE

  And the craft that createth a semblance

  —Morris, Sigurd t
he Volsung (1876)

  Pienso en un tigre. La penumbra exalta

  La vasta Biblioteca laboriosa

  Y parece alejar los anaqueles;

  Fuerte, inocente, ensangrentado y nuevo,

  El irá por su selva y su mañana

  Y marcará su rastro en la limosa

  Margen de un río cuyo nombre ignora

  (En su mundo no hay nombres ni pasado

  Ni porvenir, sólo un instante cierto)

  Y salvará las bárbaras distancias

  Y husmeará en el trenzado laberinto

  De los olores el olor del alba

  Y el olor deleitable del venado;

  Entre las rayas del bambú descifro

  Sus rayas y presiento la osatura

  Bajo la piel espléndida que vibra.

  En vano se interponen los convexos

  Mares y los desiertos del planeta;

  Desde esta casa de un remoto puerto

  De América del Sur, te sigo y sueño,

  Oh tigre de las márgenes del Ganges.

  Cunde la tarde en mi alma y reflexiono

  Que el tigre vocativo de mi verso

  Es un tigre de símbolos y sombras,

  Una serie de tropos literarios

  Y de memorias de la enciclopedia

  Y no el tigre fatal, la aciaga joya

  Que, bajo el sol o la diversa luna,

  Va cumpliendo en Sumatra o en Bengala

  Su rutina de amor, de ocio y de muerte.

  Al tigre de los símbolos he opuesto

  El verdadero, el de caliente sangre,

  El que diezma la tribu de los búfalos

  Y hoy, 3 de agosto del 59,

  Alarga en la pradera una pausada

  Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo

  Y de conjeturar su circunstancia

  Lo hace ficción del arte y no criatura

  Viviente de las que andan por la tierra.

  Un tercer tigre buscaremos. Este

  Será como los otros una forma

  De mi sueño, un sistema de palabras

  Humanas y no el tigre vertebrado

  Que, más allá de las mitologías,

  Pisa la tierra. Bien lo sé, pero algo

  Me impone esta aventura indefinida,

  Insensata y antigua, y persevero

  En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde

  El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.

  Both poems, “The Yellow Rose” and “The Other Tiger,” are of course the same, using different symbols. I wrote the “Yellow Rose.” Years afterwards I thought that the yellow rose was of no avail, and I attempted it once more, with another symbol, not the rose but a tiger. Then I wrote “The Other Tiger.” Of course in the second poem we are not to think of three tigers. We have to think of an unending chain of tigers. They are all linked and they are all force. That is to say, this poem has, I am sorry to say, a moral. This poem stands for the fact that things are unobtainable by art. At the same time, though things may be unobtainable, though we shall never find the yellow rose or the other tiger, we are making structures of words, of symbols, of metaphors, of adjectives, of images, and those things exist, and that world is not the world of the rose and the tiger but the world of art, which may be as praiseworthy and as real. For all I know, these poems that came out of despair, out of feeling that art is hopeless, that you cannot express things and that you can only allude to them—these poems may also be hope and a token of felicity, since if we cannot ape nature we can still make art. And that might be sufficient for man, for any man, for a lifetime.

  THE CAUSES

  The sunsets and the generations.

  The days and none was the first.

  The freshness of water in Adam’s

  Throat. Orderly Paradise.

  The eye disciphering the darkness.

  The love of wolves at dawn.

  The word. The hexameter. The mirror.

  The Tower of Babel and pride.

  The moon which the Chaldeans gazed at.

  The uncountable sands of the Ganges.

  Chuang-Tzu and the butterfly that dreams him.

  The golden apples on the islands.

  The steps in the wandering labyrinth.

  Penelope’s infinite tapestry.

  The circular time of the Stoics.

  The coin in the mouth of the dead man.

  The sword’s weight on the scale.

  Each drop of water in the water-clock.

  The eagles, the memorable days, the legions.

  Caesar on the morning of Pharsalis.

  The shadow of crosses over the earth.

  The chess and algebra of the Persians.

  The footprints of long migration.

  The sword’s conquest of kingdoms.

  The relentless compass. The open sea.

  The clock echoing in the memory.

  The king executed by the axe.

  The incalculable dust that was armies.

  The voice of the nightingale in Denmark.

  The calligrapher’s meticulous line.

  The suicide’s face in the mirror.

  The gambler’s card. Greedy gold.

  The forms of a cloud in the desert.

  Every arabesque in the kaleidoscope.

  Each regret and each tear.

  All those things were made perfectly clear.

  So our hands could meet.

  [Trans. Willis Barnstone]

  LAS CAUSAS

  Los ponientes y las generaciones.

  Los días y ninguno fue el primero.

  La frescura del agua en la garganta

  De Adán. El ordenado Paraíso.

  El ojo descifrando la tiniebla.

  El amor de los lobos en el alba.

  La palabra. El hexámetro. El espejo.

  La Torre de Babel y la soberbia.

  La luna que miraban los caldeos.

  Las arenas innúmeras del Ganges.

  Chuang-Tzu y la mariposa que lo sueña.

  Las manzanas de oro de las islas.

  Los pasos del errante laberinto.

  El infinito lienzo de Penélope.

  El tiempo circular de los estoicos.

  La moneda en la boca del que ha muerto.

  El peso de la espada en la balanza.

  Cada gota de agua en la clepsidra.

  Las águilas, los fastos, las legiones.

  César en la mañana de Farsalia.

  La sombra de las cruces en la tierra.

  El ajedrez y el álgebra del persa.

  Los rastros de las largas migraciones.

  La conquista de reinos por la espada.

  La brújula incesante. El mar abierto.

  El eco del reloj en la memoria.

  El rey ajusticiado por el hacha.

  El polvo incalculable que fue ejércitos.

  La voz del ruiseñor en Dinamarca.

  La escrupulosa línea del calígrafo.

  El rostro del suicida en el espejo.

  El naipe del tahur. El oro ávido.

  Las formas de la nube en el desierto.

  Cada arabesco del calidoscopio.

  Cada remordimiento y cada lágrima.

  Se precisaron todas esas cosas

  Para que nuestras manos se encontraran.

  Our hands had met at long last, and I was aware that, in order for that felicitous thing to happen, the whole of the past was needed. When something happens, it has been formed by the profound, by the unfathomable, past, by the chain of causes and effects and of course there is no first cause. Every cause is the effect of another. All things branch out into infinity. This may be an abstract idea. At the same time I felt it to be true. And I think that this poem is a true poem in the sense that, though it includes many tropes and metaphors, the strength of the poem does not lie in each line or metaphor or in adjectives or in rhetorical tricks but in the fact that what the poem says is true: that all the past, all the unfathomable past, has been made in order to arrive at the particular moment. Then the past is jus
tified. If there is a moment of happiness, of human happiness, then that is due to many terrible things that have come before, but also to the many beautiful things. The past is making us, making us all the time. I think of the past not as something awful but as a kind of fountain. And all things come from that fountain. That was the feeling I had, the awareness I had, and I did my best to deal with it. And speaking of the past, I refer not only to things that have historically happened—since history is frivolous and irrelevant—but to myths. Myths are far more important. And so I began with myth. I spoke of Hamlet, I spoke of Greek mythology, of things that have happened not in history but in the dreams of men. So I think this poem may be justified.

  CONJECTURAL POEM

  Doctor Francisco Laprida, assassinated September 22, 1829, by the irregulars of Aldao, reflects before he dies:

  The bullets whine on the last afternoon.

  The wind is up, and full of ashes,

  dispersing the day and the formless

  war, and victory belongs to them,

  to the barbarians: the gauchos have won.

  And Francisco Narciso de Laprida, I,

  who studied canon law and civil,

  whose voice declared the independence

  of these harsh provinces, am overthrown,

  covered with blood and sweat,

  without fear or hope, lost,

  fleeing south through the farthest outskirts.

  I’m like that captain in Purgatorio

  fleeing afoot and leaving a trail of blood,

  blinded and felled by death

  where a dark river loses its name:

  that’s the way I’ll fall. Today’s the end.

  The lateral night of the plains

  lies in ambush to waylay me. I hear the hoofs

  of my own hot death, searching me out,

  I longed to be something else, a man of

  sentiments, books, judgment,

  and now will lie in a swamp under the open sky.

  And yet, a secret joy inexplicably

  exalts me. I’ve met my destiny,

  my final South American destiny.

  The manifold labyrinth my steps

  wove through all these years since childhood

  has brought me to this ruinous afternoon.