|
You must have it if you love poetry. You will also find works from his youth in Fervor de Buenos Aires and all of his other major poems. He went back to those forms because he became blind. Who could ever dispute the beauty of his poetry. One of his finest sonnets, "La lluvia" can be found on page 114 of this book. This is an excellent bilingual book for the fervent admirers of "el maestro Borges" as well as those just beginning to read him.
In his old age, Borges went back to classical Spanish forms, especially the sonnet; the kind modified and developed by Garcilaso and Boscan, which they in part took from the Italian sonnet. I cannot emphasize how much I love this book. An avid reader of the best poets of the Spanish and English canons of literature--and a very erudite literary critic--, Borges was an amazing poet. Take a peek at both the Spanish and English versions to get a taste of his gorgeous melancholy and depth of thought, while he plays with the notion of water and time. As he said: To see in every day and year a symbolof all the days of man and his years,and convert the outrage of the yearsinto a music, a sound, and a symbol.To see in death a dream, in the sunseta golden sadness--such is poetry,humble and immortal, poetry,returning, like dawn and the sunset. His poems are haunting and have traces of Francisco de Quevedo's "conceptismo," a literary school that emphasizes more on the concepts, or ideas, rather than form and complicated language, which is not to say that he is not a master of form.
He needed to compose poems in his head and dictate them to his loyal wife or his friends.
This review is about a single question. Or perhaps too Borges whether he likes it or not is in his lists and his recollections really more a figure of prose than of poetry. Why is the most loved Borges not found in the poems when the poems too do at times like the stories tell stories. Perhaps it is because on the nonetheless more extended palette of the story a more extensive picture can be painted.
It is less connected with any of the poems And all of this review seems now to me somehow unfair. And perhaps and this the real paradox Borges poetry is too more prose- like than poetic in many ways. I ask this as prelude to saying a few words about these poems most of which I have read, and few of which I remember.And this too is part of it. Borges is a great writer and his words mean more than anything written about them. The Borges name is connected with those tales from The Aleph to Funes to Borges and I. Why if Borges considered himself a poet above all, and if this book contains as it does contain most of his major themes are his real readers and his real fame the readers of his stories essays and short prose-pieces.
Perhaps his way of going on in such intellectual questioning fashion renders his poetry more mind- like and less in deep lyric feeling than the deepest poetry means. Reading these poems will give so much pleasure , so much material for reflection, so many characters, stories, moods, ideas, dreams, passages of life, labyrinths, ships, coffee cups, imitations, duels in the sun and duels in the darkness, light as a metaphor and light as light, darkness as darkness and darkness as sight, worlds within and more worlds within and more worlds within and without and words as literature true literature literature of the tradition that the maker Borges makes and remakes and makes and remakes a poem. Perhaps it is because the language of poetry is more dense and ambiguous and breaks the flow of the story. Perhaps it is because too the element of mystery so great in Borges work comes to us in a stronger way in a narrative telling.
And more. everything and nothing. It's like reviewing some sacred book.
Here is Iceland in all its beauty and past; in a way no one else can ever portray it. Through this precious book we may perceive all of this through Borges' blind, ever watching, tired eyes. Beautiful poems about art, God, history, mirrors, death, life, war, Shinto, Love, time, eternity, blindness, mortality, emotion, thoughts.
It is strange reviewing it. Men. I love to be lost in all those words.
The whole World is here. Here is Argentina with its familiar (to Borges) streets; here is a poem about chess, the Moon, tigers.
It contains almost every important poem, with conjectures being his most famous. While I certainly can appreciate the irony of this translation and its potential irony, i think borges, as an incredible mind, should be left to decide these matters for himself.
Nonetheless Borges'poetry is overshadowed by his shortstories (Ficciones and El Aleph), and I recommend all to read this book. Unless the cover first lists the translators'names.
Borges possesses a very universal mind, as anyone who has read him knows. For instance, one work title ¨El enemigo generoso¨ (the generous enemy) is translated into english as ¨The generous friend¨.
Great diversity, and a very original mind For this reason his poetry is also relatively translatable.
The translation provided is fairly good, although there are several instances of misjudgement, or that is my opinion anyway.
¡Qué lastima.Alistair Reid did most of the work here. Lorca, for example, wrote in a distinctively Andalusian idiom, and nobody who has never read his poetry in the original can understand how stilted he sounds in English. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous.
And even after he lost his eyesight in mid-age, most of the books he went on reading in his mind were in English.Consequently, he sounds good in translation. For example, he took an excellent translation of "Limits" (which appeared in a 1967 book called "A Personal Anthology", which basically launched Borges's reputation in the United States) and altered it to make the words stick more closely to the original Spanish word order. Borges was fascinated by English. As a kid, he grew up speaking it with his English grandmother and he spent the rest of his life ransacking the treasure-chest of English and American literature. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies.
Reid is a perfect example of a fine translator who did some really great stuff back in the '60s, then apparently revised it to make stuffy literalists like Barnstone happy. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. His reading in many different literatures left a deep imprint on him linguistically and helps explain why his work translates so well into other languages. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. In a famous prose-poem published in 1960, "Borges and I", he could cite Robert Louis Stevenson's prose as one his favorite things (alongside the taste of coffee and the strumming of a guitar).
Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert.). Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well.
|
