Selected Poems (Hardcover)

~ Jorge Luis Borges (Author), Alexander Coleman (Editor) "I have not rewritten this book..." (more)
Key Phrases: unending rose, las lanzas, iron coin, Buenos Aires, Walt Whitman, Macedonio Fernández (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

During his life, Jorge Luis Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. Born in Argentina in 1899, he lived for several years in Europe before eventually returning home to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. It was here that Borges started his career as a writer. At the age of 24, he published his first volume of poetry, and though he would go on to garner considerable acclaim as an essayist and crafter of fiction, he always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This bilingual edition of Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, gathers together 200 poems from different periods of Borges's life, including some that will be appearing in English for the first time.

Whether he was writing fiction, essays, or poetry, there were certain themes and subjects that Borges returned to time and again. His home town became a favorite topic--in his first collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, he wrote: "My soul is in the streets / of Buenos Aires," a sentiment that remained constant throughout his life. This collection reveals other preoccupations as well--with history in all its permutations, Borges's own ancestry, and his fascination with metaphysics, mazes, mirror images, and the blurry line between parallel realities:

The celibate white cat surveys himself
in the mirror's clear-eyed glass,
not suspecting that the whiteness facing him
and those gold eyes that he's not seen before
in ramblings through the house are his own likeness.
Who is to tell him the cat observing him
is only the mirror's way of dreaming?

This companion volume to Andrew Hurley's new translation of Collected Fictions boasts a stellar cast of translators, including W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and John Updike among others. Admirers of Borges will find Selected Poems a fitting memorial to the great man; and for those have never had the pleasure of reading him before, this book is a wonderful introduction. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

After a few decades devoted to the luminously precise prose for which he is known in the States, Borges (1899-1986), who began his career writing poetry, returned to it with fervor. This edition makes available for the first time in English an overview of every phase of his poetic oeuvre. Although his earliest book (1923's Fervor de Buenos Aires) represents a youthful Borges more directly concerned with the specific, local and vernacular, he develops his mature themesAtime, imagination, and identityAthroughout. Taken together, the poems distill those concerns, which famously preoccupy him in the brief ficciones. And, like the fictions, they are almost disturbingly comprehensible. One peak of the collection is 1960's The Maker, showing Borges at his most defined and refined, presenting sophisticated riffs on Arisosto, Luke and "The Other Tiger" with elegance and gusto. The poems of 1969's In Praise of Darkness confront encroaching blindness, old age and the possibility of ethics, reaching beyond the expectations created by Borges's mastery of the fantastic and the metaphysical. The result is poems at times as moving as Stevens's "The Rock." The translations, edited by New York Univ. professor emeritus Coleman, and realized by varying hands as accomplished as W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand and Charles Tomlinson, are for the most part fluid, although the occasional infelicity, revealed by the original en face, does rankle. Still, gratitude is the only proper response to this invaluable volume, the second of three planned releases. First serial to Harper's and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 477 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Thus edition (April 1, 1999)
• Language: Spanish, English
• ISBN-10: 0670849413
• ISBN-13: 978-0670849413
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #531,277 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Borges shines, translations are uneven, February 15, 2004

By	Stephen Taylor (Chapel Hill, North Carolina) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Borges: Selected Poems (Paperback)

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. ˇQué 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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dreamtigers on catnip, December 31, 1999

By	vic spicer (winnipeg, canada) - See all my reviews

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant translations of a brilliant poet., August 6, 1999

By A Customer

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!