Things

Book fallen back, now hidden by the agency of the others

In the of great depth recesses of the shelf and covered

Slowly and silently by means of the thick dust

Of many days and nights. Phoenician anchor

The seas of England in their blind abyss

Pres hard in upon Looking glass that copies

Nobody's face now that the house is empty

Fingernail parings that we leave behind

A1ong the road of time and space. The grey

Incomprehensible dust that was Shakespeare.

The ever-changing figures of the clouds

The rose symmetrical and momentary,

That chance one time flashed upon the inward glass

Of a boy's kaleidoscope. The sweating oars

Of Jason's Argo, the first ship. The footsteps

The somnolent mortal wave washes the sand of

The radiances of gymnast when the lights

Go without in the long gallery single by one

And no pace echoes in the lofty dark.

The back of the densely printed map of the world.

The gossamer cobweb in the pyramid.

The blind stone. The inquisitive, tactile hand.

Dreams I have had just before dawn, and lost

When daylight came, clearing it all away.

The beginning and the extremity of the epic poem

Of Finnesburh, now on the contrary a few precious lines

Of iron not worn away through the centuries.

The letter's mirror-image upon the blotter.

The turtle lying in the cistern's depths

What cannot at any time be. The other horn

Of the unicorn. The Being the pair Three and One.

Triangular disc. Point the mind cannot grasp

When Zeno's arrow, motionless in air,

Arrives at last at the target. Flower pressed

Between the pages of a work by Becquer.

The pendulum whose swing time has arrested.

The sword that Odin flock into the tree.

The true copy on uncut pages. The resounding

Clatter of hoof in the onslaught at Junin,

A battle which in a certain number of eternal way

Has not extreme pointed is still part of the plot

Sarmiento's shadow upon the sunlit walls.

The voice the shepherd heard upon the mountainside.

The pile of bone whitening in the desert

The ball that discharge Francisco Borges dead.

The invert side of the tapestry. The things

That no individual sees but Bishop Berkeley's God

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1996) the Argentinian bard essayist, and short story writer, was the greatest in quantity translated Latin American writer of the twentieth hundred His books of ficton include Six moot points for Don Isidro Parodi (1942) Ficciones (1944) the The Aleph and Other Stories (1949)

Robert Mezey and Richard Barnes have translated above four hundred of Borge's metrical compositions into formal English verse. Their gathered Borges will be published through Penguin in 1997. Both Mezey and Barnes teach at Pomona College

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Mar 1996

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