Jorge Luis Borges

[liliella]

Limits


Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

Jorge Luis Borges

[liliella]

That One


Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
a body which will leave behind no child,
and blindness, which is semi-darkness and jail,
and old age, which is the dawn of death,
and fame, which absolutely nobody deserves,
and the practice of weaving hendecasyllables,
and an old love of encyclopedias
and fine handmade maps and smooth ivory,
and an incurable nostalgia for the Latin,
and bits of memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the loss of memory of names and dates,
and the cult of the East, which the varied peoples
of the teeming East do not themselves share,
and evening trembling with hope or expectation,
and the disease of entymology,
and the iron of Anglo-Saxon syllables,
and the moon, that always catches us by surprise,
and that worse of all bad habits, Buenos Aires,
and the subtle flavor of water, the taste of grapes,
and chocolate, oh Mexican delicacy,
and a few coins and an old hourglass,
and that an evening, like so many others,
be given over to these lines of verse.

[liliella]

Browning Decides to Be a Poet


In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words--
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin--
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is the river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas is real; I, alas, am Borges. Borges

It took a great poet - Octavio Paz says - to remind us that we are, at the same time, the archer, the arrow and the target.

[PrInCiPiEl]

...
Toward dawn, he dreamt he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: What are you looking for? Hladik answered: God. The Librarian told him: God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the 400,000 volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have sought after that letter. I've gone blind looking for it. He removed his glasses, and Hladik saw that his eyes were dead.
...

Jorge Luis Borges
"The Secret Miracle"(El milagro secreto)

[Cupke_pe_Korce]

Kur lexova "The Name of the Rose" te Umberto Eco-s, pata pershtypjen se kishte shume referenca nga Borges - libraria, labirinthi, madje u habita kur lexova pasthenien ne te cilen Eco e bente te qarte se murgu "fanatik" i librarise "Jorge" vertet i referohej J. L. Borges. Duke pasur ne mendje kete te fundit, kursesi nuk mendova se Eco do ta digjte librarine (nga fundi gati sa nuk me merrej fryma per te lexuar se libraria do shpetohej) :) por...."te imagjinosh nje histori mesjete pa nje zjarr - shpjegon Eco - eshte sikur te imagjinosh nje filme rreth luftes se II-te boterore pa nje aeroplan qe rrezohet ne flake" Dhe atehere me erdhen nder mend fjalet e William: "misioni i atyre qe e duan njerezimin eshte....te qeshin me te verteten, ta bejne te verteten te qeshe" Nese Eco do te kish ditur se c'fare ndjeva per perfundimin e librit, ai me siguri do te kish qeshur me mua ...Jo jo jo, Borges nuk do t'ja kish vene zjarrin librarise :) E, tere kjo per te thene se, Borges ka luajtur (qeshur) me filozofine gjithashtu. "The Circular Ruins" eshte nje nga tregimet e mia te preferuara (ne fakt kam lexuar nje perkthim tjeter nga ky me siper) ku Borges ka luajtur kaq bukur me filozofine e Shopenhauer. Eco e konsideron Borges si postmodernist, dhe me te drejte, vecse, ndryshe nga Eco qe shkruan per publikun (ndoshta kjo ngaqe eshte dhe filozof) Borges shkruan per veten.

ps. madje edhe tek "Foucault's Pendulum" pata pershtypjen se Eco i referohej "El Aleph" te Borges

[PrInCiPiEl]

"If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.
In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that library."

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

[PrInCiPiEl]

• “I would also like it to be clearly understood that Borges made his connection with Sufism through Spain where Sufism co-existed with the Arab culture for eight centuries.
  Viewed in this way, the Orientalism in his works would cease to be exotic and distant theme , since the author has simply retrieved through his objectivity , a valuable part of our Spanish heritage that was consigned to oblivion( save for the interest of a few Arabists) because of patriotic prejudices.
  But eight centuries of co-existence are not easily eliminated form a country's past , least of all in the case of Spain , where the Arab influence is evident in the physical aspects , the habits and the arts in general.
  ...
  Asin Palacios writes: ' But the diffusion of Sufi ideas was not limited to the Islamic sphere since, overcoming religion barriers, they influenced the philosophical life of Jewish and Christian thinkers practically from the start,' and Ana Maria Barrenechea writes : ' From the time of Ibn Masarra and because of him , Moslem Spain became the home of the greatest mystics.'
  ...
  Despite Borges' statements against all dogmas, he is probably closer to Jesus's real message than many orthodox Christians and his untiring investigations into the world(beyond) are probably the most authentic way of approaching religion for twentieth century man.
  At the age of seventy and almost completely blind, Borges says a prayer
  which the reader feels is like a farewell and at the same time a mirror that reflects his real self :
  
  " Thousand of time and in the two languages that are close to me, my lips have said and will go on saying the Lord's Prayer , but only in part do I understand it.
  This morning, the first day of July 1969, I want to attempt a prayer that will be my own, not handed down.
  I know this is an undertaking that demands an almost superhuman sincerity...
  I want to be remembered less as a poet than as a friend; let someone recall a verse of Frost or of Dunbar or of the nameless Saxon, who at midnight saw the shining tree that bleed the Cross, and let him think he heard it for the first time from my lips.
  
  The rest is of little importance; I hope oblivion will not be long in coming...
  My wish is to die wholly; my wish is to die with this companion, my body."
  (Darknes, p115)“

Nga libri :
"Jorge Luis Borges : Sources and Illumination"
nga Profesor Giovanna de Garayalde

• “The languages and culture of Islam were crucial to Borges’s imagination, and a translator must appreciate this. Indeed, there is no other contemporary author who has so assimilated Islamic traditions and motifs, and treated them with such loving familiarity, as Borges. Polyglot from childhood, fluent in English, French, German and, of course, Spanish, and having taught himself Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse in middle age, Borges finally embarked on the study of classical Arabic with an Egyptian tutor whom he met in Geneva in the last year of his life. He was then eighty-six. And though his ambition in studying Arabic was to be able to read Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, or The Thousand and One Nights, in the original, Borges had had a lifelong interest in, and considerable knowledge of, Arabic and Persian literature. Such a fascination, of course, is not so strange for an author in the Spanish tradition. Linguists estimate that there are still some four thousand words of Arabic origin in contemporary Spanish, and Spain has had a long line of outstanding (if eccentric) Arabists, including Miguel Asín-Palacios and Emilio García-Gómez, whose studies and translations of Andalusian Arabic literature Borges had read. “

Eric Ormsby, Profesor në Institutin për Studime Islame në McGill University






...

[StormAngel]

Dikush me tha per kete teme dhe me beni kureshtar,dhe shof qe paska pase te drejte.
Nuk kam patur mundesine te lexoj libra te Borges,po shpresoj ta largoj kete mangesi ne kohe te shkurter.
Sinqerisht me pelqeu shume thenia me larte,ku thote se evenimenti kryesor i jetes se tij eshte libraria e te atit.:)
Urime edhe nje here per temen.
Cdo te mire

[Blue_sky]

Eshte nje shkrimtar qe me pelqen shume,kam lexuar L'aleph dhe tregime te tjera dhe me la shume mbresa :)