Customer Reviews

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems

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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. 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). 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. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. 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. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. 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. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well. Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.

Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert...). His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. ¡Qué lastima!

Alistair Reid did most of the work here. 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. 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. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one.

i got this wonderful book as a very unexpected christmas gift. i don't speak spanish, so can't address the claims that the translations are inadequate.

what is here in english, taken on those terms alone, is till great. recurring themes of tigers, mirrors, his beloved hometown, the history of literature, the bible, memory, distortions in time & space, heaven and hell weave themselves through over six decades of dazzling images and heartbreaking tenderness.

it's also playful- filled with bits from imagined histories and books which i almost find myself wanting to locate, as these little bits are too beautiful to be unreal.

The Selected Poems of Jorges Luis Borges presents both a significant contribution to the world of poetry, and strong achievement in and of itself. With translations by major poets of our time, from W.S. Merwin to John Updike to Mark Strand, the reader will witness, possibly for the first time, the poems of Borges, rendered in English, as he had intended them in his own native tongue. Despite the apparent ease of the Latin tongue to the English ear, Borges' poems, like those of Neruda and Lorca, are difficult to render in the English language. English, spoken in a twentieth century style, is unlike Spanish (or Italian) in that it can not easily maintain a rhythm consistent with smooth rhyme and still avoid the appearance of decadence or sentimentality. To complicate matters further, Borges poems are of a complex nature that use subtle ironies and twists within his own language (not to mention the frequent colloquialisms that appear in his earlier work).

Borges, a precurser of the "Magical Realists" (such as Fernado Pessoa and Eugenio Montale, and as well, possibibly, Umberto Eco) weaves often unlikely images and situations together into a richly complex tapestry that arouses questions of identity and the self, of reality and the possibilty for dreams. All the translators of this collection skillfully rework and adapt Borges deeply personal mythic style poems in an English that is at once accessible, and overwhelming. A superb project!

It is strange reviewing it. It's like reviewing some sacred book...
The whole World is here. And more... Here is Argentina with its familiar (to Borges) streets; here is a poem about chess, the Moon, tigers. Men. Here is Iceland in all its beauty and past; in a way no one else can ever portray it. Beautiful poems about art, God, history, mirrors, death, life, war, Shinto, Love, time, eternity, blindness, mortality, emotion, thoughts... everything and nothing...
Through this precious book we may perceive all of this through Borges' blind, ever watching, tired eyes.
I love to be lost in all those words...

I bought this book as a birthday present to myself, and it was one of the best presents I've ever received or given! Borges's poetry is as great as his short stories. Some of the English translations are a bit shaky, but since the original Spanish versions are in this collection, too, those of you who read Spanish can translate it for yourselves. Read the poem "James Joyce" and then read some James Joyce, too.

This review is about a single question. 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 ? 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 the language of poetry is more dense and ambiguous and breaks the flow of the story. Perhaps it is because on the nonetheless more extended palette of the story a more extensive picture can be painted. 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? 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. And perhaps and this the real paradox Borges poetry is too more prose- like than poetic in many ways. 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?
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. The Borges name is connected with those tales from The Aleph to Funes to Borges and I . It is less connected with any of the poems
And all of this review seems now to me somehow unfair. Borges is a great writer and his words mean more than anything written about them. 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.

Even though I speak Spanish fluently, I feel that Borges is often just as good translated into English as in the original Spanish, so I enjoy reading his work in both languages, particularly his stories translated by Giovanni in collaboration with the author; English was the preferred language of Borges, and these stories are the closest we can get to what Borges would have written had English been his first language.
For this reason, I wanted to read his poetry, both in Spanish and English. He writes in a way that makes translating him into other languages easy, at least compared to most great Latin American writers.
I was pleased at first; the first few poems are grand, and their English translations are equally mesmerizing.
However, I quickly encountered a problem: Alastair Reed. You would think a man with a reputation as high as his would know better than to butcher great poetry, but that is exactly what he does. He is liberal in his translations to the point where it almost seems that he is not pleased with the original poetry and has to change it to fit his own ideas. His translations are inaccurate and, I believe, vain. He never changes the poetry for the better, and even if he did it would be beside the point.
Most of the other dozen or so translators are good at their interpretations and, if nothing else, stay true to the original. Alastair Reed is the exception and, unfortunately, his renderings take up most of the book.
Read Borges, and savor him, but, if you don't read Spanish, keep in mind that when you see "A.R." at the end of a poem, you are not reading Borges.

Is a fabulouse collection of Borges poems. What I found dissapointing are the translations into English. They do no convey the real message of the poet.

A selected poems translated by various translators has always seemed to me a questionable undertaking as it erases the overarching style and power of the poet. That is certainly the case here. Some translations are brilliant and capture the unique feel for the "labyrinthine" mind of Borges, while others are flat or prosaic or simply uninspired. This unevenness inevitably shadows the poet, and creates the impression of arbitrariness in Borges as a poet.

This is an excellent bilingual book for the fervent admirers of "el maestro Borges" as well as those just beginning to read him. 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. 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. 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. He went back to those forms because he became blind. He needed to compose poems in his head and dictate them to his loyal wife or his friends. One of his finest sonnets, "La lluvia" can be found on page 114 of this book. 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.

You will also find works from his youth in Fervor de Buenos Aires and all of his other major poems. I cannot emphasize how much I love this book. You must have it if you love poetry. Who could ever dispute the beauty of his poetry? As he said:

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.