Excuse this apology but I don’t like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference." This borrowed strategy of first apologizing, then dazzling, was an intrinsic aspect of Borges’s public persona we find it, too, in the doubled being of his well-known little essay "Borges and I." There he writes: "news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings…. In the introduction to his Obra Poética 1923–1985, brought out by Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires in 1989, Borges recalls a passage from a letter of his beloved literary ancestor Robert Louis Stevenson: "I do not set up to be a poet. Kessler includes Borges’s first known sonnet in Spanish, "Pedro Luis in Martigny," a portrait of a friend enclosed in a letter to another friend in Geneva in 1920, when Borges was 21, and both editors include work from Borges’s last publications in 19, the year of his death, which found him as well in Geneva. Merwin) but otherwise stayed out of each other’s way as they culled poems from the entirety of Borges’s career. The editors of these volumes, Stephen Kessler for the sonnets and Efraín Kristal for the poems of night, called upon some of the same translators (including Robert Fitzgerald, Alastair Reid and W.S. To say so, however, is to oversimplify, for Borges wrote many sonnets on nocturnal themes, and his night poems, like most nocturnes, poetic or musical, wander and return in line with our experience of night itself. One, The Sonnets, is organized by form the other, Poems of the Night, by theme. During this year’s long white winter, blank with snow and early dark, I kept two volumes from the South close at hand-just-published Penguin paperbacks of the poems of Jorge Luis Borges in facing-page translations.
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