BORGES AND I - by Jorge Luis Borges

- " Some honest narcissism without the distracting mirrors ?"

BORGES AND I

- by Jorge Luis Borges

The other one, Borges, is
the one to whom things happen.

I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause,
perhaps mechanically nowadays, to gaze
at an entrance archway and its metal gate;

I hear about Borges via the mail,
and read his name on a list of professors
or in some biographical dictionary.

I enjoy hourglasses, maps,
eighteenth century typography, etymology,
the savour of coffee and Stevenson’s prose:

the other shares my preferences but in a vain way
that transforms them to an actor’s props.
It would be an exaggeration to say

that our relationship is hostile; I live,
I keep on living, so that Borges can weave
his literature, and that literature justifies me.

It’s no pain to confess that certain of his pages
are valid, but those pages can’t save me,
perhaps because good writing belongs to no one,

not even the other, but only to language and tradition.
For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively,
and only some aspect of me can survive in the other.

Little by little, I will yield all to him,
even though his perverse habit of falsifying
and exaggerating is clear to me.

Spinoza understood that all things want
to go on being themselves; the stone eternally
wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger.

I am forced to survive as Borges, not myself
(if I am a self), yet I recognise myself less
in his books than in many others, less too

than in the studious strumming of a guitar.
Years ago I tried to free myself from him,
and passed from suburban mythologies

to games of time and infinity, but now
those are Borges’ games and I will
have to think of something new.

Thus my life is a flight
and I will lose all and all will belong
to oblivion, or to that other.

I do not know which
of us is writing this page.

* * *
- translated from the Argentine Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentinian writer, poet & social critic