Customer Reviews

Fervor de Buenos Aires (Spanish Edition)

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I read these poems in English translation so my comments will not speak to their true musical quality. They are the poems of Borges beginning and not among his greatest. The only one he mentions later on as a real poem, perhaps his first real poem ,' Simplicity' Borges says of these poems that they would 'foreshadow all that comes afterwards' But despite his depictions of his own rich perceptions of the city, his listing of realities in his own special way, his concern with courage and poetry and the city's poor, and funerals and tombs, and the Streets of Buenos Aires, and much else- I do not believe these poems have the metaphysical depth and the emotional richness of his later poems. The fantasy and the counterfactual - imagination, the mythological elements are not here in the way they are in the later poems.
Still they are Borges. And Borges writes and sees as only he can, what Stevenson, Schopenhauer, and above all Whitman may have helped show him but what he alone makes as his home in the city which now has its meaning connected too with his name.