Speaking of Poetry 21 Jason Wilson / Borges in his poetry last 
[Excerpts. Full Text of print]
Each day counts
Geoffrey Grigson
Introduction. The late poetry of Jorge Luis Borges often read primarily because it was written by Borges, and also because many times in these texts is Borges himself who seduces the reader seeking clues biographical. In his fiction a person is projected complex literary, ironic, detached from itself, and in his later poems, however, the sincerity dimension takes on particular importance, allowing the curious reader intimate access to Borges. However this opening, in 70 years the poetry of Borges no longer dominated the fashion and innovating. Few young poets read it to discover or communicate with a teacher. Roberto Juarroz, according to Jorge Fondebrider assure you learned nothing of the poetry of Borges. There is a list of poets from the 60's that influenced a lot about the new poets "of them all ... you could learn. Borges, no. "The reception of the later poems Borges, one of the few Argentine poets' own deeply metaphysical weight "(as the same Fondebrider) changed sharply with the decline of the avant-garde. Another factor in the marginalization suffered by the poetry of Borges derives from the fact that he frequented only their favorite poets, often British, Anglo-Saxon or Nordic, and had little regard for contemporary poetry. He told the American poet Willis Barnstone: Nineteenth Century I'ma writer ... I do not think of myself as a contemporary of surrealism ... [I am a writer of the nineteenth century ... I do not see it as contemporary surrealism ...]
When he felt the desire to write, he resorted to dictation. Defined the poem as something involuntary. Lines created in your mind and then recite aloud. His craft and his skill metric assured the survival of his poems on the page after the slow process imposed by blindness. One consequence of the finding-the poem is not raised, the poem "happens" - is that the six poems collected late breeders what was happening to you as Borges did not submit an order, making nearly all these poems circumstantial pieces of time. It is difficult to tell whether the poems follow a chronology. Apparently, to reach sufficient numbers, his publisher for publishing. Formally, it changes little Throughout its last six books. Between deep pink (1975), to iron coin (1976), History of the night (1977), figure (1981), Atlas (1984) and The conspirators (1985) have formally homogeneous cycle of poems or musical variations composed by a poet of more than seventy years. The books call it the "miscellaneous" and sometimes went poems from one book to another to complete it or give it body. These last years were prolific in comparison to those that mediate between 1930 and 1958, during which time he wrote very little poetry (only twenty-one poems). [...]
late breeders in his books Borges continued to explore the excitement of the paradox of time exploring it no longer has the analytical nature of his first approaches to this issue. The allusions in the aphorism of Heraclitus about the flow of time like a river, are the best capture this obsessive process Borges. He apologized the abuse was the fragment of Heraclitus: "I've repeated too many times," he said. True, but never as an abstract concept. With aging, the concept took an emotional bias on the one hand stressed the uncertainties of the finite and, moreover, made him realize that nothing really ends at all. Heraclitean endorsed the sentence and, having spent life pondering the mystery and anxiety of time, say it is as if it had intended that sentence. Simultaneously, against the inexorable flow of time, the poem, echoing a vast poetic tradition (Homer, Dante, Milton, Browning, Verlaine, Yeats, Frost, etc..) Seems to stop this flow. From this tradition comes the lifeblood of the Borges interim idealism and "fiction" memorable, "The Secret Miracle" (another name for the magical effect of a poem.) Thus, the time fugitive, the act of reading a living tradition, a poem and art in general, become, for the old Borges, urgent matter, beyond literature. To explore the time and old age in the late poetry of Borges, it is necessary to analyze the oft blindness as a curse and blessing, adding life and loneliness, both the author and the reader, to reflect "the growth of the mind of a poet "(in the words of William Wordsworth's Prelude.) It is also necessary to outline the literary theme dear to Borges, the emotional resonance of the homeland and courage, adding some commentary on art as a journey to identity. Not to mention the surprise appearance of love poems in the late night legend (1977). [...]
blindness and old age. The poetry of old age was defined by WB Yeats in his poem A Prayer for Old Age. In that poem, "a wise old man", a "foolish, passionate man", as perceived decrepitude as wisdom and passion of youth and ignorance. In the beautiful poem An Acre of Grass, the poet, "at the end of his life," seeks "the frenzy of an old and refers to Timon, Lear, and William Blake with his old man's eagle mind [mind eagle old]. The notion of some "old" images of a bearded Merlin, gurus, Bible prophets and wise old men (Jungian archetypes) abound in our culture. In a now distant time when a few reached old age, were seen as old as sources of wisdom. There is definitely a strange freedom in old age. In the wonderful poem "In Praise of Shadows," the poet Borges defines a "this" against a finding that "the animal is dead or almost dead." The poet could face death, freedom of sexuality, fashion and the ambition. But to understand how in the late poetry of Borges managed the categories of the "wise" and the "free" is necessary to link both to blindness, both biographical and literary, drawing on the poetry of Milton. It is obvious that Borges She went to Milton by empathy, discovered that Milton is totally blind in 1652. However, there is much that is foreign to Milton Borges, starting from a very puritanical version of God and ending with the political regicide that marked him. As for the poems, Borges avoids Latin syntax, the epic ambition and the long poem, but instead exploits the use of blank verse (unrhymed, but measured). Borges leaves out many critics, from Dr Johnson to TS Eliot, who see the poetry of Milton "strangled" by the weight of the erudition, lacking "real passion" and sensuality "blighted" by so much reading (Eliot). Robert Graves's poems found Milton's "detestable" and concluded that Milton was a minor poet with an acute ear for music. At the same time, there are similarities Biographical that contribute to mutual identification, although the obvious affinity between the two poets is blindness. For Milton, blindness was not a sin or a calamity, but the opportunity to penetrate Things Merely of Their color and surface [things by their mere color and size]. Blindness forced them both Milton and Borges, to look inside, to contemplate what is "real and permanent" (Milton Platonism). A lack physical endowed them with a great moral force, a Christian back also evident in Borges. As is so Milton thanked God for having given an inward light and far surpassing [an inner light and more intense]. It is for the blind poet see and tell / of Things invisible to mortal sight [see and tell things invisible to mortal sight]. This is the calm acceptance of the "inner happiness" of blindness, but, as in the case of Borges, there are also dark sides, especially in the famous last sonnet of 1658, about the death of his second wife. Milton's "saw" in a dream, rescued from death, dressed in white and veiled, and concludes his sonnet: But o as to embrace me she inclined / I waked, she Fleder, Brought back my day and night [O bending for hold me / I woke, the day she ran away and returned it to me at night].
In his passion to understand "his blindness, Milton made a record of all blind poets before him in the classical tradition, including Tiresias. The blind old Homer sung by the blind was exploited by Tennyson in his Tiresias (1885), where the blind says "the truth that no man can believe." To TS Eliot in The Waste Land, this "old man with wrinkled breasts" became a model of how to penetrate beyond sex differences. There is an invitation to understand "no eyes", the eyeless of Milton. The first poem in the figure of Borges entitled "Round", evokes blindness as a "sensitive shadows" and concludes with: "a recreation of jasmine / and a faint sound of water, which conjured / memory deserts" (references to smell and hearing, but not the view).
Borges offers us a life-won wisdom from the top of his age and blindness. Almost all the poems end with any sense of the place or the identity or art. The last verse of the deep pink, "my eyes Dead" plays with the impending death and blindness through the Persian blind Attar. The poem "Proteus", with its obvious title, ends with "you, who are one and many men," summarizing the single version but is expected to Borges about identity. Several poems end with the word "nothing", referring to the Buddhist extinction of personality and dissolved in the literature, as in the poem "I": "I echo, oblivion, nothing." Borges was preparing his own death. In "The Dream" portrays the poet as "resigned and smiling." That resignation and that joy was similar to those of Milton, they also reached via the old age and blindness. Milton, however, is more ambiguous. In Samson Agonistes, the poet laments: O loss of sight, of thee I complain MOST! / Blind Among enemies, O Worse Than chains, / Dungeon, or beggery, or decrepit age! [O loss of sight, I just complain more. / Blind among enemies, O worse than chains, / jail, or begging or decrepitude!]. But the book concludes with: And calm of mind all passion Spent [having consumed a calm mind and all passion], agreeing with the target. Borges in his Introduction to English literature, says that the "masterpiece" of Milton's Samson fighter, with "splendid verses, where the blind Samson, surrounded by enemies, is a faithful mirror of Milton. In the essay "Blindness" Seven Nights (1980), Milton is a poet who overcomes blindness and running his work, "as Borges himself, made" casual people. " In the same way, Borges was released from the animal passions of his body, thanks to the privilege of being "old" and "blind."
get older poet's increasing capacity to wonder and at the same time, undermining any pretense and bluster. The direct and prosaic language of classical poetry in a poem is defined as "the dialect of today / [which] will say to my eternal things." In the foreword to the figure (1981) reveals his keen awareness of a poet whose work lacks the magical rhythms, strange metaphors and long poems, including a tradition of poets "intellectuals" as his beloved Emerson. Insists that "no single beautiful word" in his work. This refusal to pretend beauty also emerge as a recognized ignorance and carried through all his later work with expressions like "I can not understand," and know nothing, "I do not understand the game, true to the simplicity of Montaigne . In the preface to Atlas, summarizes his life and old age as a continuous discovery "by the near-certainty of his own ignorance." This modesty appellant persuades because it manifests in the selection of the words themselves. Even the technical resources are limited an obvious metric, which does not stand out, especially his use of endecalsilabo, the Alexandrian, the sonnet "protein", his rhymes and the enumeration (as enumerations fascinated!) to its abuse of anaphora also evident in Whitman. Modesty lexical and rhythmic achieved in these poems out of fashion and history now we are immersed in reading, she also timeless.
addition, blindness helps us to respect the suffering of the poet, as Borges tells us it is both a key, a freedom, a cry of self-pity. The very title of the deep pink draws the veil of appearances and returns us to the archetypes que yacen detrás: la rosa mistica de Dante. El poeta reconoce este estrato de la experiencia universal: “rosa profunda, ilimitada, íntima”. Abundan las referencias a la ceguera y a la mala memoria. Todo se desvanece; también los libros son “simulacros de la memoria”, y una vieja foto “ya puede ser de cualquiera”. Borges típicamente reduce los escritores a nombres genéricos como El Marino, el griego, el persa, el sajón, el tirano, Virgilio, Shakespeare; él mismo llega convertirse en Judas o en Browning, porque en el acto de escribir o de leer no hay lugar para la individualidad; solamente hay lugar para la tradición y sus asociaciones. Esta necesidad de ir a lo esencial (What is beyond the visible) proposed the condensation and ellipsis as first-class creative tools, which generate and gain the confidence of the reader, that reader that Borges can be expected to continue delving into the key words from your vocabulary as the tension between the sword and pen, the significance of dreams, nostalgic versions of the country, mirrors, tigers, labyrinths, the love of books and reading, and time always irreversible. [...]
Love the old . The biographical narrative of the muses and love of Borges is well known. In his poems of old age there is a kind of loving outcome. History of the night, a delightful short poem entitled "Thorgilsson Gunnar (1816-1879)" offers six verses about the past, with swords, empires and Shakespeare, to conclude emphatically, "I want to remember that kiss / to kiss me in Iceland. " That "that" isolates the kiss and pleasure league with Icelandic associations. Nothing worth remembering in the history except that kiss. This poem seems to surprise late WB Yeats poem entitled Politics, where that girl standing there makes a mockery of Roman politics, Russian and English, all the wars and alarms, to conclude: But O That I were young again / And held her in my arms! [Oh to be young again and shake it in my arms]. But the desire of the Yeats old (does not touch on the verbal memory) differs from the old kiss Borges (a physical memory). "Anthem" includes a long list works as denial of the importance of history, again thanks to the blessing of a kiss, "because a woman has kissed you." The love song "The lover" provides a list from the binomial anaphoric "I believe", generating a sequence of mental illusions about the world. He concludes: "Only you. You, my misfortune / and my happiness, inexhaustible and pure. " The Muse, beyond the senses and the torments of sex excites the poet, like any lover who hesitates. Old age has not diminished the uncertainty of love. How strange that a poet like Borges to echo the common places of Becquer's "Poetry ... is you!" Of the Rimas. "Causes" is another list that ends with the fate of the lovers: "All those things were needed / to find our hands." Another physical reference: hands. "Waiting", the common place of poetry in which the lover trembling doubt, is a poem that makes a concept about what happens in the universe while waiting for his beloved, says: "(In my chest, measured blood watch / the fearful time the wait). " As expected the old poet, a monk ring with an anchor, die in Sumatra tiger and nine men will die in Borneo. This love of an adolescent pseudo claims against the reality of old age. The poet looks into a mirror and sees his soul bruised with shadows and sins, "but without naming them. Another poem lists everything that could have happened, including "the son I never had." However all experienced, and repetitively, the poet never left the library of his father, never grew up, and now finds himself alone. In a dramatic monologue, giving voice to Cervantes, repeat "I will not be who I am" old "in my sad flesh celibate." But everything happens, happens even love, as in the poem "GA Bürger, useless wisdom of the old Heraclitean follows the evolution of time:" I knew that this is nothing / that last fleeting particle / and we are made to forget ... "In his lecture on blindness, Seven Nights, Borges quoted verses of the greatest poets of Spain, Fray Luis de León, where old age is conceived as a solitary life," free love, jealousy , / hate, hope and suspicion ", which somewhat contradicts however the final words of the conference:" But I think to live without love is impossible, fortunately impossible, "where Borges certainly refers to the female love, not divine. In his work, love is idealized, distances of sexuality and desire, emerges in old age as a "new and simple happiness." Borges always felt attracted by the possibility of happiness, but life's disallowed to old age (see his poem "Happiness"), as confirmed, in English, I no Longer Regard as unattainable happiness, eleven, long ago, I did [I can not conceive of happiness as something unattainable, once, long ago, I did]. Late love poems by women reveal intimate aspects of his personality, but without falling into the details of a confession. Kiss mask the platonic love, purely mental, lacks the sensuality of the kiss of Rubén Darío: "red hot kiss." According to Borges, passionate and lonely life of Emily Dickinson was based on a preference for "dream of love and perhaps imagine," a phrase that provides a key to grab his later poems of love. Borges in his dream of love is not enough to participate in the free look and honest assessment of Montaigne on the subject, who in his essay on Virgil confessed: "I find more pleasure watching the sweet intercourse of two beautiful young people, or just imagining , which involved me in a sad mixture without form. "
Conclusion
. The old poet's poems are their own, I mean, do not constitute a poetic on the subject. There is a poetics of aging because every old is old in its way, no sociological equivalent. Borges does not resemble the old poet WB Yeats and the passionate old Robert Graves, whom he visited in his "patriarchal splendor." The poetry of Borges is old literary classic and its techniques are obvious and repetitive. However, there are a delicacy and sincerity that constantly reaffirm the integrity of poetry. In addition, a refinement of the references to the other senses, hearing, smell, taste, somewhat offsetting status of blind, the fact that he transformed into what Milton called eyeless in Gaza. What we hear is the subtle music of colloquial diction, his voice never ugly with the use of slang, the smell is associated with roses and jasmine that abound in his work, the flavor is highlighted in several partnerships with water. For example, "the taste of water" can sometimes defeat "misery." This element-water-going down the throat suggests a Heraclitean flow internalized, which summarizes the Borges thought about time and identity. The water cools the poet's voice, like a spring or fountain. Water is archetypal, primordial, "The cool water in the throat / of Adam "or repeating themselves almost verbatim, the" freshness / water elemental in the throat. " In the poem "Someone", 1966, the poet drew up a list of the essentials of life as "the taste of water." This feeling of freshness liquid momentarily relieved, perhaps because as time passes and life. We are close to the archetype of the old, offering wisdom about the vital sensations and fleeting time, and Oedipus at Colonus (in the translation of Yeats), when the aged and blind hero finds his predestined place of death, bringing blessings to the land I agree. In the poem "Góngora" another dramatic monologue, the Baroque cordobes confesses too dependent on mythologies, of Virgil, the Latin, in poems that are mazes arduous, with replacing the world metaphors (pearls instead of tears). The criticism of himself that makes Gongora / Borges poems leads other old-age, ruling out the erudition, intellectual mazes and metaphors in favor of plain-talk of Milton: "I want to return to those common things / water, bread, a jug, roses, another list of archetypal associations. The elemental poetic form that takes is evident in the closure of the poems always end with a formula that summarizes everything. They are like fables, didactic poems close to, but based on hard experience of aging blind. We teach us, the readers who come to the end (the endgame), what important role to play can get art in the last stage of life. At the crossroads of old age and blindness, Borges said that "the words come from Milton" poetic rather than philosophical.
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