jorge luis borges

Born in 1899, Borges began writing poems as a boy and published his first volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires, in 1923, a decade before he started writing his best-known ficciones. Throughout his life (he died in 1986) Borges deemed himself principally a poet, secondarily a writer of fiction. In his prologue to a revised edition of Fervor (1969), Borges said he had “moderated its baroque excesses” and “eliminated sentimentality and haziness.” He declined to renounce his younger self, however, and said: “At the time, I was seeking out late afternoons, drab outskirts, and unhappiness; now I seek mornings, the center of town, peace.” The poem chosen by Efraín Kristal to open Poems of the Night, “The Forging,” is taken fromFervor de Buenos Aires. Here is Christopher Maurer’s English version:

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

jorge luis borges

Like the blind man whose hands are precursors
that push aside walls and glimpse heavens
slowly, flustered, I feel
in the crack of night
the verses that are to come.
I must burn the abominable darkness
in their limpid bonfire:
the purple of words
on the flagellated shoulder of time.
I must enclose the tears of evening
in the hard diamond of the poem.
No matter if the soul
walks naked and lonely as the wind
if the universe of a glorious kiss
still embraces my life.
The night is good fertile ground
for a sower of verses.