Borges Poetry III – Late Poems

The mission of the poet is to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.
—Jorge Luis Borges, preface to “The Unending Rose,” 1975.

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Borges Works: Poetry III—Later Works

This page presents Borges’ poetry from 1969–1985. The collections are presented in chronological order.

Elogio de la sombra / In Praise of Darkness (1969)
El oro de los tigres / The Gold of the Tigers (1972)
La rosa profunda / The Unending Rose (1975)
La moneda de hierro / The Iron Coin (1976)
Historia de la noche / The History of Night (1977)
La cifra (1981)
Los conjurados (1985)

Clicking the image of a book takes you directly to Amazon.com, unless it’s the original first edition, which just enlarges the image. Wherever possible, links to the Internet Archive are provided. These “online editions” may or may not match the exact edition of the corresponding book.

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Elogio de la sombra
In Praise of Darkness 

Elogio de la sombra
By Jorge Luis Borges
Illustrations by Hector Basaldua
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1969
Online at: Internet Archive

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In Praise of Darkness
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translation by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974

Borges’ sixth book of poems, “In Praise of Darkness,” uses his increasing blindness as a metaphor to reflect on death: “Adding to the mirrors, mazes, and swords that my resigned reader expects, two new themes have appeared: old age and ethics.” To this I would add James Joyce, as the Irish writer is the subject of two complete poems. Israel also features prominently, Borges having visited the country for the first time in 1969 as a guest of David Ben-Gurion. The work also contains some prose narratives in the style of El hacedor, most notably “Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel” and “His End and His Beginning.” The former contains the well-known sentence, “Happy are the loved and the lovers and those who can do without love,” and the latter is a meditation on the metaphysics of death.

The original edition of Elogio de la sombra included the thirty-three poems listed below, with all of them appearing in Dutton’s In Praise of Darkness. The poems found in Viking’s Selected Poems are marked by an asterisk (*).

• Juan, I, 14 (“John I:14”)
• Heráclito (“Heraclitus”)
• Cambridge*
• Elsa
• New England, 1967*
• James Joyce*
• The Unending Gift
• El Laberinto (“The Labyrinth”)*
• Laberinto (“Labyrinth”)
• Mayo 20, 1928
• Roberto Güiraldes
• El etnógrafo (“The Anthropologist”)
• A cierta sombra, 1940 (“To a Certain Ghost, 1940”)
• Las cosas (“Things”)*
• Rubaiyat*
• Pedro Salvadores
• A Israel (“To Israel”)
• Israel
• El guardián de los libros (“The Guardian of the Books”)*
• Los gauchos (“The Gauchos”)
• Acevedo
• Milonga de Manuel Flores
• Milonga de Calandria
• Invocación de Joyce (“Invocation to Joyce”)*
• Israel, 1969
• Dos versiones de “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” (“Two Versions of ‘Knight, Death, and the Devil’”)*
• Buenos Aires
• Fragmentos de un evangelio apócrifo (“Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel”)*
• Leyenda (“Legend”)
• Una oración (“A Prayer”)
• His End and His Beginning*
• Un lector (“A Reader”)
• Elogio de la sombra (“In Praise of Darkness”)*

The revised version of Elogio de la sombra in Obras completas shifted the milongas to Para las seis cuerdas, dropped “Elsa” and “Laberinto,” and added “June, 1968,” which also appears in Dutton’s In Praise of Darkness and Viking’s Selected Poems.

In Praise of Darkness
In the early seventies, Normal Thomas di Giovanni worked closely with Borges to create English translations as fresh and vivid as the Spanish originals. Indeed, Borges came to prefer some of the English translations, and even revised the title poem by translating it back from the English draft! E.P. Dutton also included some of the Darkness prose pieces in their edition of Dr. Brodie’s Report.

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El oro de los tigres
The Gold of the Tigers

El oro de los tigres
By Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1972
Online at: Internet Archive

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The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Alastair Reid
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977
Online at: Internet Archive

Borges was in his early seventies when he published his seventh book of poetry, “The Gold of the Tigers,” its name a reference to the only color he could still dimly perceive. A collection of poems influenced by Robert Browning, William Blake, Leopoldo Lugones, and the “enormous liberation” of modernism, the works in this collection follow in the footsteps of Elogio de la sombra, and include a mixture of poetry, prose, and parables, including six Japanese tankas.

The original edition of El oro de los tigres includes the thirty-four poems listed below, with the poems included Dutton’s The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems marked by a plus sign (+) and those found in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Prólogo
• Tamerlán (1336-1405)
• El pasado
• Tankas+*
• Susana Bombal+*
• A John Keats (1795-1821)
• On His Blindness
• La busca (“The Search”)*
• Lo perdido
• H.O.
• Religio medici, 1643
• 1971*
• Cosas (“Things”)+*
• El amenazado (“The Threatened One”)+
• El gaucho
• Tú (“You”)+
• Poema de la cantidad (“Poem of Quantity”)+*
• El centinela (“The Watcher”)+*
• Al idioma alemán (“To the German Language”)+*
• Al triste
• El mar
• Al primer poeta de Hungría
• El advenimiento
• La tentación
• 1891+*
• 1929
• Milonga de Manuel Flores+
• La promesa
• El stupor
• Los cuatro ciclos
• El sueño de Pedro Henríquez Ureña (“The Dream of Pedro Henriquez Ureña”)+*
• El palacio (“The Palace”)+*
• Hengist quiere hombres (449 A.D.) (“Hengist Wants Men”)+*
• A Islandia
• A un gato (“To a Cat”)+*
• East Lansing
• Al coyote
• El oro de los tigres. (“The Gold of the Tigers”)+*

The revised version of El oro de los tigres appearing in Obras completas shifted the milonga to Para las seis cuerdas, and included ten new poems: “Trece monedas,” “Sueña Alonso Quijano,” “A un César,” “El ciego,” “Proteo,” “Otra version de Proteo,” “Habla un busto de Jano,” “La pantera,” “Al espejo” and “Un mañana.” Many of these would appear in the first edition of La rosa profunda. Of these, two appear in Viking’s Selected Poems: “El ciego,” or “A Blind Man,” and “Habla un busto de Jano,” or “A Bust of Janus Speaks.”

El oro de los tigres contains one of Borges’ most striking love poems, “El amenazado,” or “The Threatened One.” Shockingly left out of Selected Poems, it is worth reprinting in full:

It is love. I will have to hide or flee.

Its prison walls grow larger, as in a fearful dream. The alluring mask has changed, but as usual, it is the only one. What use now are my talismans, my touchstones: the practice of literature, vague learning, an apprenticeship to the language used by the flinty Northland to sing of its seas and its swords, the serenity of friendship, the galleries of the Library, ordinary things, habits, the young love of my mother, the soldierly shadow cast by my dead ancestors, the timeless night, the flavor of dream?

Being with you or without you is how I measure time.

Now the water jug shatters above the spring, now the man rises to the sound of birds, now those who look through the windows are indistinguishable, but the darkness has brought no peace.

It is love, I know it; the anxiety and relief at hearing your voice, the hope and the memory, the horror at living in succession.

It is love with its own mythology, its small and pointless magic.
There is a street corner I do not dare to pass.
Now the armies surround me, the rabble.
(This room is unreal. She has not seen it.)
A woman’s name has me in thrall.
A woman’s being wracks my whole body.

The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems.
For the English translation of El oro de los tigres, E.P. Dutton tapped Alastair Reid, who combined poems from El oro de los tigres with poems from the subsequent La rosa profunda to produce The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems. Some of the prose pieces from El oro de los tigres also appeared in the Dutton and U.K. Penguin editions of The Book of Sand. Viking’s Selected Poems contains sixteen poems from El toro de los tigres, many of them edits of the original Alastair Reid translations. Strangely, it omits some that appear in the Dutton collection, and includes some that do not!

Additional Information
The translation of “El amenazado” is a modification of the Alastair Reid translation, and was copied by hand from a long-forgotten anthology.

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La rosa profunda
The Unending Rose

La rosa profunda
By Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1975

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The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Alastair Reid
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977
Online at: Internet Archive

In the prologue to his eighth book of poems, “The Unending Rose,” Borges cheerfully continues the discussion about poetry he’s stitched through his last few prefaces. After discussing his own creative process—“I begin with the glimpse of a form, a kind of remote island, which will eventually be a story or a poem”—he defines the central goal of poetry: “The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet is to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.” Although the collection is named La rosa profunda, the title poem possesses an English title, “The Unending Rose.” The collection also features the ten new poems added to the Obras Completas edition of El oro de los tigres, with “Trece monedas” expanded to “Quince monedas.”

The original edition of La rosa profunda includes the thirty-six poems listed below, with the poems included Dutton’s The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems marked by a plus sign (+) and those found in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Prólogo
• Yo (“I”)+*
• Cosmogonía
• El sueño (“The Dream”)+*
• Browning resuelve ser poeta (“Browning Resolves to Be a Poet”)+*
• Inventario (“Inventory”)+
• La pantera
• El bisonte
• El suicida (“The Suicide”)+*
• Espadas
• Al ruiseñor (“To the Nightingale”)+*
• Soy (“I Am”)+*
• Quince monedas (“Fifteen Coins”)+
• Simón Carbajal
• Sueña Alonso Quijano
• A un César
• Proteo (“Proteus”)+
• Otra versión de Proteo
• Una mañana
• Habla un busto de Jano (“A Bust of Janus Speaks.” Attributed to El oro de los tigres.)*
• De que nada se sabe
• Brunaburh, 937 A.D.+
• El ciego (“The Blind Man.” Attributed to El oro de los tigres.)+*
• Un ciego (“A Blind Man”)+*
• 1972+*
• Elegía (“Elegy”)+*
• All Our Yesterdays
• El desterrado (1977) (“The Exile”)+*
• En memoria de Angélica (“In Memory of Angelica”)+
• Al espejo
• Mis libros (“My Books”)+
• Talismanes (“Talismans”)+*
• El testigo
• Efialtes
• El Oriente
• La cierva blanca (“The White Deer”)+
• The Unending Rose+*

In his preface, Borges remarks, “Going over the proofs of this book, I notice with some distaste that blindness plays a mournful role, which it does not play in my life. Blindness is a confinement, but it is also a liberation, a solitude propitious to invention, a key and an algebra.”

Many of the poems of La rosa profunda are indeed mournful, frequently ending in darkness, death, or oblivion, from the list of forgotten objects that composes “Inventory” to an ode for Angélica, Borges’ niece who drowned in a swimming pool at age six. Among the saddest is “The Suicide,” a short poem that starkly illuminates the ultimate solipsism of its bleak subject:

Not a single star will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.

The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems
For the English translation of La rosa profunda, E.P. Dutton tapped Alastair Reid, who combined poems from La rosa profunda with poems from the previous El oro de los tigres to produce The Gold of the Tigers: Selected Later Poems. Viking’s Selected Poems contains twelve poems from La rosa profunda, many of them edits of the original Alastair Reid translations.

Additional Information
The translation of “El suicida” quoted above is by Alastair Reid. The entire Spanish text of La rosa profunda may be found in Obras completas 1975-1985, available online as an 520-page PDF.

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La moneda de hierro
The Iron Coin

La moneda de hierro
By Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1976
Online at: Internet Archive

Borges’ ninth book of poems, “The Iron Coin,” was composed during his stay in the “academic wasteland” of East Lansing, Michigan and completed after his happy return to Buenos Aires. As he states in his preface, “prologues allow confidences,” and it is indeed his most confessional prologue. Declaring this collection “will not be of greater or lesser value” than his previous books, Borges demonstrates a puckish self-awareness regarding his reputation: “I can let myself go with a few caprices since I will no longer be judged by the text itself but rather by the vague but still sufficiently precise image that people have of me. I can transcribe the indistinct words I heard in a dream and can call it Ein Traum. I can redo and perhaps ruin a sonnet on Spinoza. I can attempt to lighten, by changing the prosaic accent, the Spanish eleven-syllable line. And finally, I allow myself to engage in the cult of my ancestors and that other cult which illuminates my decline: the study of Old English and Icelandic.”

The original edition of La moneda de hierro includes the thirty-five poems listed below, with the poems included in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Prólogo
• Elegía del recuerdo imposible
• Coronel Suárez
• La pesadilla (“Nightmare”)*
• La víspera
• Una llave de East Lansing
• Elegía de la patria
• Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875)
• México*
• El Perú
• A Manuel Mujica Láinez (“To Manuel Mujica Láinez”)*
• El inquisidor
• El conquistador
• Herman Melville*
• El ingenuo
• La luna (“The Moon”)*
• A Johannes Brahms (“To Johannes Brahms”)*
• A mi padre (“To My Father”)*
• La suerte de la espada
• El remordimiento (“Remorse”)*
• 991 A.D.
• Einar Tambarskelver
• En Islandia el alba
• Olaus Magnus (1490-1558)
• Los ecos
• Unas monedas: Génesis, 9, 13, Mateo, 27, 9, Un soldado de Uribe
• Baruch Spinoza*
• Episodio del enemigo
• Para una versión del I King (“For a Version of I Ching”)*
• Ein Traum
• Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur (1797-1824)
• Heráclito
• La clepsidra
• No eres los otros (“You Are Not the Others”)*
• Signos
• La moneda de hierro (“The Iron Coin”)*

The version of La moneda de hierro appearing in Obras completas 1975-1985 added one new poem, “El fin.”

The poems found in this collection are generally less mournful than their immediate predecessors. While themes of old age and blindness are still present, Borges allows a few beams of light to penetrate the gloom; the poem “Remorse” even begins with, “I have committed the worst sin of all. / That a man can commit. I have not been / Happy.” Many of the poems in La moneda are dedicated to others, from historical figures such as Brahms, Melville, and Spinoza to his own father and María Kodama, his future wife. Indeed, the most delicate poem in the book is dedicated to her. Called “La luna,” it is also one of Borges’ shortest poems:

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Whom the first Adam saw. The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.

The poem’s concluding sentence reflects the collection’s titular poem, “The Iron Coin.” One of Borges’ more difficult and abstract poems, a coin is used as a metaphor to convey the impossibility of unity between a prelapsarian paradise and the material world of time and space. The poem is also a mediation on love, asking the question, “Why does a man require a woman to desire him?” and answering it with the closing couplet, “Within the other’s shadow, we pursue our shadow. / Within the other’s mirror, our reciprocal mirror.”

Before us is the iron coin. Now let us ask
The two opposing faces what the answer will be
To the intractable demand no one has made:
Why does a man require a woman to desire him?
Let us look. In the higher orb are interwoven
The firmament’s four strata that uphold the flood
And the unalterable planetary stars.
Adam, the youthful father, and young Paradise.
The afternoon and morning. God in every creature.
In that pure labyrinth you’ll find your own reflection.
Once again let us toss the iron coin,
Which is a magic mirror also. Its reverse
Is no one, nothing, shadow, blindness. You are that.
The pair of iron faces fashions a single echo.
Your hands and tongue are unreliable witnesses.
God is the unapproachable center of the ring.
He does more than exalt or sentence: he forgets.
Slandered with infamy, why shouldn’t they desire you?
Within the other’s shadow, we pursue our shadow.
Within the other’s mirror, our reciprocal mirror.

In a fallen universe where God “does more than exalt or sentence: he forgets,” the best we can do is seek meaning in each other, even if we are ultimately “no one, nothing, shadow, blindness.”

Additional Information
The translations of “El remordimiento” and “La luna” quoted above are by Willis Barnstone. The translation of “La moneda de hierro” is by Eric McHenry; although I am not sure why he translates arrojemos as “discard” instead of “toss.” I took the liberty of adjusting his otherwise excellent translation. The entire Spanish text of La moneda de heirro may be found in Obras completas 1975-1985, available online as an 520-page PDF.

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Historia de la noche
History of the Night

Historia de la noche
By Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1977

Borges’ tenth book of poems, “History of the Night,” opens with a marvelous “Inscripción” that dedicates its stanzas to a diverse range of subjects including “a curious island of swans,” “a cat in Manhattan,” and “a chord we have not found.” It is a wonderful example of the classic Borgesian list, a series of images arranged in increasing order of astonishment; miniature poems of delighted contrasts and hidden correspondences. Only at the end does the true subject come into focus: “I dedicate this book to you, María Kodama.” From this point on, all of Borges’ poetry was dedicated to his future wife. Curiously, the collection was published without a prologue.

The original edition of Historia de la noche includes the thirty poems listed below, with the poems included in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Inscripción
• Alejandría, 641 A.D (“Alexandria, A.D. 641”)*
• Alhambra*
• Metáforas de las Mil y Una Noches
• Alguien
• Caja de música (“Music Box”)*
• El tigre
• Leones
• Endimión en Latmos
• Un escolio
• Ni siquiera soy polvo (“I Am Not Even Dust”)*
• Islandia (“Iceland”)*
• Gunnar Thorgilsson (1816-1879)
• Un libro
• El juego
• Milonga del forastero
• El condenado
• Buenos Aires, 1899
• El caballo
• El grabado
• Things That Might Have Been*
• El enamorado
• G.A. Bürger
• La espera
• A Francia
• Manuel Peyrou
• The Thing I Am
• Un sábado (“A Saturday”)*
• Las causas (“The Causes”)*
• Adán es tu ceniza (“Adam Is Your Ashes”)*
• Historia de la noche (“History of the Night”)*
• Epílogo

The version of Historia de la noche appearing in Obras completas 1975-1985 includes an additional poem, “El Espejo,” translated as “The Mirror” in Viking’s Selected Poems.

Historia de la noche encompasses a wide range of subjects, many inspired by Borges’ travels with María Kodama. The collection is somewhat darker that La moneda de heirro, and many of its poems look to a vanished past, their stanzas populated by slain kings and fallen warriors. A sense of impending loss pervades Historia, perhaps best demonstrated by “Adam Is Your Ashes,” a haunting meditation about the ravages of time:

The sword will die just like the ripening cluster.
The glass is no more fragile than the rock.
All things are their own prophecy of dust.
Iron is rust. The voice, already an echo.
Adam, the youthful father, is your ashes.
The final garden will also be the first.
The nightingale and Pindar both are voices.
The dawn is a reflection of the sunset.
The Mycenaean, his burial mask of gold.
The highest wall, the humiliated ruin.
Urquiza, he whom daggers left behind.
The face that looks upon itself in the mirror
Is not the face of yesterday. The night
Has spent it. Delicate time has molded us.
What joy to be the invulnerable water
That ran assuredly through the parable
Of Heraclitus, or the intricate fire,
But now, on this long day that doesn’t end,
I feel irrevocable and alone.

Poetry collections are often named after their most significant work, and Historia de la noche is no exception. Its title poem is one of Borges’ best. An ode to the night, “Historia de la noche” builds momentum through a sonorous recitation of mysteries, delivering the reader to a blank line ringing with silence. The poem then concludes with a startling couplet that unexpectedly reframes the entire piece:

Down through the generations
men built the night.
In the beginning was blindness and sleep
and thorns that tear the naked foot
and fear of wolves.
We shall never know who forged the word
for the interval of shadow
which divides the two twilights;
we shall never know in what century it stood as a cipher
for the space between the stars.
Other men engendered the myth.
The made it mother of tranquil Fates
who weave destiny,
and sacrificed black sheep to it
and the cock which presages its end.
The Chaldeans gave it twelve houses;
infinite worlds, the Gateway.
Latin hexameters gave it form
and the terror of Pascal.
Luis de León saw it in the fatherland
of his shuddering soul.
Now we feel it to be inexhaustible
like ancient wine
and no one can contemplate it without vertigo
and time has charged it with eternity.

And to think it would not exist
but for those tenuous instruments, the eyes.

The fact that Borges wrote this poem within his well of blindness makes its ending even more poignant.

Still, not all of Historia is sorrowful. One of its narrative pieces, “El tigre,” is actually quite charming, and depicts Borges’ childhood visits to the zoo in the company of his younger sister:

He came and went, delicate and fatal, charged with infinite energy, on the other side of the sturdy bars and we all gazed at him. It was the tiger of that morning, in Palermo, and the tiger of the Orient and the tiger of Blake and Hugo and Shere Khan, and all the tigers that were and will ever be, and also the Ideal tiger; since the individual, if any, is the whole species. We thought he was bloodthirsty and beautiful. Norah, a girl, said: It is made for love.

Additional Information
The translation of “Adán es tu ceniza” quoted above is by Willis Barnstone. The translation of “Historia de la noche” is by Charles Tomlinson. The translation of “The Tiger” is my own. The entire Spanish text of Historia de la noche may be found in Obras completas 1975-1985, available online as an 520-page PDF.

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La cifra
The Limit

La cifra
By Jorge Luis Borges
Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1981
Online at: Internet Archive

Borges’ eleventh book of poems, “The Limit,” opens with another dedication to María Kodama: “Like all acts of the universe, the dedication of a book is a magical act. It could also be defined as the most pleasant and sensitive way of pronouncing a name. I now pronounce your name, María Kodama.” The inscription is followed by a prologue in which Borges continues his discussion of poetry, attempting to define the terms of “intellectual poetry” and citing Francis Bacon, Emerson, Browning, Valéry, and Luis de Léon as his aesthetic forebears.

The original edition of La cifra includes the forty-seven poems listed below, with the poems included in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Inscripción
• Prólogo
• Ronda
• El acto del libro
• Descartes*
• Las dos catedrales (“The Two Cathedrals”)*
• Beppo*
• Al adquirir una encyclopedia (“On Acquiring an Encyclopedia”)*
• Aquél (“That Man”)*
• Eclesiastés, I, 9
• Dos formas del insomnia (“Two Forms of Insomnia”)*
• The Cloisters*
• Nota para un cuento fantástico (“Notes on a Fantastic Story”)*
• Epílogo (“Epilogue”)*
• Buenos Aires
• La prueba
• Himno
• La dicha (“Happiness”)*
• Elegía
• Blake
• El hacedor (“The Maker”)*
• Yesterdays*
• La trama
• Milonga de Juan Muraña
• Andrés Armoa
• El tercer hombre
• Nostalgia del presente (“Nostalgia for the Present”)*
• El ápice
• El sueño
• Poema (“Poem”)*
• El ángel
• El sueño
• Un sueño
• Inferno,V, 129*
• Correr o ser
• La fama
• Los justos (“The Just”)*
• El jubilo
• El espía
• El desierto
• El bastón de laca
• A cierta isla
• El go
• Shinto*
• El forastero
• Diecisiete haiku
• Nihon
• La cifra (“The Limit”)*

The version of La cifra appearing in Obras completas 1975-1985 includes an additional poem, “El cómplice,” translated as “The Accomplice” in Viking’s Selected Poems.

La cifra continues in the vein of Historia de la noche, with many of its poems inspired by Borges’ travels with María Kodama and his reflections about the poets and philosophers of the past. However, spaced among poems like “The Cloisters” and “Blake” are pieces that refer directly to Borges’ previous works, particularly his 1960 masterpiece El hacedor, translated in English as Dreamtigers. In that collection, “The Maker” was a narrative about Homer; now Borges reclaims the title for a poem about himself. After a doleful recitation of his lifelong obsessions—mirrors, blades, labyrinths—Borges declares:

Echoes, undertows, sand, lichen, dreams.
I am nothing but those images
Shuffled by chance and named by tedium.
From them, even though I am blind and broken,
I must craft the incorruptible lines
And (this is my duty) save myself.

Compare this to the ending of the 1960’s “El hacedor”:

Why did those memories come back to him, and why did they come without bitterness, as a mere foreshadowing of the present? In grave amazement he understood. In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into this he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting. Ares and Aphrodite, for already he divined (already it encircled him) a murmur of glory and hexameters, a murmur of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle, the murmur of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man. These things we know, but not those that he felt when he descended into the last shade of all.

If the pieces of El hacedor revealed a middle-aged man reflecting on the rapacity of time and the approach of oblivion, La cifra offers a grim companion, revisiting these same themes decades later and finding them decidedly less abstract. This sense of immediacy is evident in the title poem, another iteration of a work from El hacedor. “La cifra” is usually translated as “The Limit,” but the Spanish word also implies an amount of something, or a statistic. Like the two versions of “Límites” that preceded it, “La cifra” finds Borges’ contemplating his dwindling store of moments, now reduced to a single beloved image:

The silent friendship of the moon
(I misquote Virgil) has kept you company
since that one night or evening
now lost in time, when your restless
eyes first made her out for always
in a patio or garden since gone to dust.
For always? I know that someday someone
will find a way of telling you this truth:
“You’ll never see the moon aglow again.
You’ve now attained the limit set for you
by destiny. No use opening every window
throughout the world. Too late. You’ll never find her.”
Our life is spent discovering and forgetting
that gentle habit of the night.
Take a good look. It could be the last.

While perhaps not as powerful as Borges’ original or final statement of this theme—the eight-line “Límites” from El hacedor, and the narrative “A Dream in Germany” from Atlas—“La cifra” is disarmingly personal and direct.

Another revisited title is “La trama,” variously translated as “The Plot” or ‘The Web.” In El hacedor, “La trama” is a two-paragraph narrative about the death of Caesar unknowingly replicated centuries later among gauchos, because “destiny takes pleasure in repletion, variants, symmetries.” Appearing in La cifra as a poem, the new “La trama” depicts the entire universe as a vast and prolific mechanism of cause and effect. Reminiscent of the Company in “The Lottery of Babylon,” la trama is omnipresent yet invisible:

In the second courtyard
a tap drips periodically,
fatal as the death of Caesar.
Both are pieces of the plot that encompasses the circle without beginning or end,
the anchor of the Phoenicians,
the first wolf and the first lamb,
the hour of my death
and the lost theorem of Fermat.
The Stoics thought
that plot of iron a fire,
that dies and is reborn as the Phoenix. It is the great tree of causes
and the branching of effects;
its leaves are Rome and Chaldea
and what is seen by the faces of Janus.
One of its names is the universe. No one has ever seen it.
And no man can see anything else.

Like all Borges’ collections since El hacedor, La cifra contains prose pieces scattered among the poems. The most striking of these is “Two Forms of Insomnia,” which begins with a rhetorical question, “What is insomnia?” Borges’ answer is a devastating account of insomnia by one intimately familiar with its unreal contours and harrowing lack of counsel: “It is the horror of being and going on being.” In nakedly personal lines that would make Beckett proud, Borges compares insomnia with old age:

It is the horror of existing in a human body whose faculties are in decline. It is insomnia measured by decades and not by metal hands. It is being well aware that I am bound to my flesh, to a voice I detest, to my name, to routinely remembering, to Castilian, over which I have no control, to feeling nostalgic for the Latin I do not know. It is trying to sink into death and being unable to sink into death. It is being and continuing to be.

Additional Information
The translation of “El hacedor” quoted above is by Stephen Kessler. The translations of “La cifra” and “Dos formas del insomnia” are by Alan S. Trueblood. The translation of “La trama” is my own. The entire Spanish text of La cifra may be found in Obras completas 1975-1985, available online as an 520-page PDF.

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Los conjurados

Los conjurados
By Jorge Luis Borges
Madrid: Alianza, 1985
Online at: Internet Archive

Los conjurados is Borges’ twelfth book of poetry, and has the distinction of being his final work. As with his previous two collections, Los conjurados is dedicated to his partner and constant traveling companion: “This book is yours, María Kodama. Must I say to you that this inscription includes twilights, the deer of Nara, night that is alone and populated mornings, shared islands, seas, deserts, and gardens, what forgetting loses and memory transforms, the high-pitched voice of the muezzin, the death of Hawkwood, some books and engravings?”

Los conjurados was finished in Geneva, a city Borges refers to as “one of my native lands.” Having been stranded in Switzerland by the First World War, Borges spent his adolescence in Geneva, attending Collège Calvin and first discovering Whitman, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Carlyle, and Schopenhauer. As Borges aged, his imagination invested the city with increasing mythic resonance, rivaled only by Buenos Aires itself. Geneva looms large in Los conjurados, from pieces dedicated to his vanished school friends to the title poem, which celebrates the formation of the Swiss Confederacy in 1291. Describing the promise of political harmony as “a tower of reason and unshakable faith,” the poem yearns for the day when the “entire planet” will be measured in peaceful “cantons.” It may be a naïve thought—particularly to anyone familiar with Swiss “neutrality” during the Nazi regime—but the sentiment is genuine. If one looks deeply enough, you can glimpse the young Argentine, falling in love with Europe as it tore itself apart around his tranquil haven.

The original edition of Los conjurados includes the forty poems listed below, with the poems included in Viking’s Selected Poems marked by an asterisk (*).

• Inscripción
• Prólogo
• Cristo en la cruz (“Crist on the Cross”)*
• Doomsday
• César
• Tríada
• La trama (“The Web”)*
• Reliquias
• Son los ríos
• La joven noche
• La tarde (“The Afternoon”)*
• Elegía
• Abramowicz
• Fragmentos de una tablilla de barro descifrada por Edmund Bishop en 1867
• Elegía de un parque (“Elegy for a Park”)*
• La suma
• Alguien sueña
• Alguien soñará
• Sherlock Holmes
• Un lobo
• Midgarthormr
• Nubes (I) (“Clouds I”)*
• Nubes (II) (“Clouds II”)*
• On His Blindness
• El hilo de la fábula
• Posesión del ayer
• Enrique Banchs
• Sueño soñado en Edimburgo
• Las hojas del ciprés (“The Leaves of the Cypress”)*
• Ceniza
• Haydée Lange
• Otro fragmento apócrifo
• La larga busca
• De la diversa Andalucía
• Góngora
• Todos los ayeres, un sueño
• Piedras y Chile
• Milonga del infiel
• Milonga del muerto
• 1982
• Juan López y Juan Ward
• Los conjurados

Paeans to Geneva aside, the poems of Los conjurados continue in the same vein as those written since Historia de la noche. As Borges remarks in his prologue, “It will surprise no one that the first of the elements, fire, does not abound in a book of a man of eighty years. I usually feel that I am earth, tired earth.” This gravity is expressed in the poems, many of which feature suffering, loss, and oblivion. Intransigence is also a common theme, as may be seen in this least weighty of subjects, “Clouds (I),” a frequently-translated sonnet:

There cannot be a single thing which is
Not cloud. Cathedrals have it in that tree
Of boulders and stained glass with Bible myths
That time will soon erase. The Odyssey
Contains it, changing like the sea, distinct
Each time we open it. Your mirrored face
Already is another face that blinked
In day, our dubious labyrinth of space.
We are the ones who leave. The multiple
Cloudbank dissolving in the dropping sun
Draws images of us. Ceaselessly will
The rose become another rose. You are
The cloud, the sea, you are oblivion,
And you are whom you’ve lost, now very far.

Another notable poem is “La trama,” or “The Web,” another iteration of a work that began in El hacedor and continued in La cifra. In this third and final version, Borges brushes away the Romans, Stoics, and gauchos to locate his own death within the “fatal web of cause and effect.” While not the strongest poem in the collection, its poignancy makes it irresistible, and Alexander Coleman plucks it from the middle of Los conjurados for the honor of closing Viking’s Selected Poems. “La trama” begins with lines that combine the two main themes of Los conjurados, nostalgia for Geneva and the approach of oblivion:

Which of my cities will I die in?
Geneva, where revelations came to me
through Virgil and Tacitus, certainly not from Calvin?

Soon after Los conjurados was published, Borges and María Kodama were married. On June 14, 1986, at the age of 86, Jorge Luis Borges died in Geneva, as he more or less expected.

Additional Information
While Los conjurados has been translated as “The Conjured,” “The Conjured Ones,” or even “The Conspirators,” like Fervor de Buenos Aires or Ficciones, the original Spanish title is generally retained. The translation of “Nubes (I)” quoted above is by Willis Barnstone. The translation of “La trama” is by Alastair Reid. The entire Spanish text of Los conjurados may be found in Obras completas 1975-1985, available online as an 520-page PDF.

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Borges Works

Main Page — Return to the Borges Works main page and index.

Fictions and Artifices — Short stories; the core Borges works.

Nonfiction — Collections of essays and criticism.

Collaborations with Bioy Casares — Fiction and anthologies written or edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Collaborations with Others — Fiction and anthologies written or edited with others.

Poetry Compilations — Selections of Borges’ verse translated into English and published as compilations.

Poetry I — Early post-ultraísmo poetry, 1923 to 1943.

Poetry II — Mid-career collections from 1944 to 1969.

Lectures, Conversations, and Interviews — Collections of Borges’ lectures, conversations, and interviews.

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Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 12 August 2024
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com