Jorge Luis Borges poem pack 3

Jorge Luis Borges was born in an educated middle-class family in August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances, but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires. They resided in Palermo, then a poorer suburb of the city. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of "pure" criollo (Spanish) descent. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and she spoke often of their heroic actions.[9] Borges's 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borges grew up hearing about the faded family glory. On the other side, Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English, also the son of a colonel. Borges Haslam, whose mother was English, grew up speaking English at home, and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded the family home.

Jorge Luis Borges Poems

Jorge Luis Borges Poems

A Patio

AT EVENING

they grow weary, the patio’s two or three colours.

Tonight, the moon, bright circle,

fails to dominate space.

Patio, channel of sky.

The patio is the slope

down which sky flows into the house.

Serene,

eternity waits at the crossroad of stars.

It’s pleasant to live in the friendly dark

of entrance-way, arbour, and cistern.

Simplicity

IT OPENS, THE GATE TO THE GARDEN

with the docility of a page

that frequent devotion questions

and inside, my gaze

has no need to fix on objects

that already exist, exact, in memory.

I know the customs and souls

and that dialect of allusions

that every human gathering goes weaving.

I’ve no need to speak

nor claim false privilege;

they know me well who surround me here,

know well my afflictions and weakness.

This is to reach the highest thing,

that Heaven perhaps will grant us:

not admiration or victory

but simply to be accepted

as part of an undeniable Reality,

like stones and trees.

Limits

OF THESE STREETS THAT DEEPEN THE SUNSET,

There must be one (but which) that I’ve walked

Already one last time, indifferently

And without knowing it, submitting

To One who sets up omnipotent laws

And a secret and a rigid measure

For the shadows, the dreams, and forms

That work the warp and weft of this life.

If all things have a limit and a value

A last time nothing more and oblivion

Who can say to whom in this house

Unknowingly, we have said goodbye?

Already through the grey glass night ebbs

And among the stack of books that throws

A broken shadow on the unlit table,

There must be one I will never read.

In the South there’s more than one worn gate

With its masonry urns and prickly pear

Where my entrance is forbidden

As it were within a lithograph.

Forever there’s a door you have closed,

And a mirror that waits for you in vain;

The crossroad seems wide open to you

And there a four-faced Janus watches.

There is, amongst your memories, one

That has now been lost irreparably;

You’ll not be seen to visit that well

Under white sun or yellow moon.

Your voice cannot recapture what the Persian

Sang in his tongue of birds and roses,

When at sunset, as the light disperses,

You long to speak imperishable things.

And the incessant Rhone and the lake,

All that yesterday on which today I lean?

They will be as lost as that Carthage

The Romans erased with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear a turbulent

Murmur of multitudes who slip away;

All who have loved me and forgotten;

Space, time and Borges now leaving me