Preface to The Deep Rose

The romantic doctrine of a muse who inspires bards was professed by classical antiquity; the classical doctrine of verse as an operation of the intellect was exhibited by a Romantic, Poe, around 1846 It is a paradoxical thing. Outside of a scarcely any isolated cases of oneiric inspiration--the dream of the neatherd that Bede leaves to, Coleridge's famous dream--it is clear that the pair doctrines contain some of the verity except that they correspond to different stages of the proces (By Muse we should understand what the Hebrews and Milton called the Spirit and what our hold dreary mythology calls the Subconscious. Speaking of my be in possession of practice, the process is more or les invariable. I begin through perceiving a form, a distant island, as it were, that will later be a story or a piece of poetry I see the end and I diocese the beginning, but not what will make progress between them. This is gradually revealed to me when chance or the stars are favorable. More than one time I have had to retrace my paces through a zone of shadow. I make trial of to intervene as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I would not want my opinions, which, after all, are inconsequential, to distort it. The idea of art engage is ingenuous, because nobody knows exactly what he is doing. A writer, Kipling owned can dream up a fable without understanding its meaning. He must be faithful to his imagination, and not to the simple ephemeral circumstances of so-called "reality."

Literature begins with stich and may take centuries to glimpse the possibility of unromantic After four hundred years, the Anglo-Saxons left behind a poesy often admirable and a barely articulate dull The word would have been in the beginning a magic representative which the usury of time would wear away. The work of the bard must be to restore to the word, at least to a certain number of extent, its primitive and now hidden power. All line of poetry is required to do sum of two units things: to convey a precise image, and to touch us physically, like the nearness of the ocean. Here is an example from Virgil:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore

And single from Meredith:

Not till the fire is dying in the grate gaze we for any kinship with the stars

Or this alexandrine by dint of Lugones, whose Spanish wants to advance back to the Latin:

El hombre numerosode penas y de dias.

Such lines dog in our memory their ever-changing courses.

At the extremity of so many--too many--years at the practice of literature, I do not suggest an aesthetic. Why add to the natural limits that habit imposes upon us those of any theory whatsoever? Theories, like political or religious dogmas, are nothing more than stimuli. They vary with each writer. Whitman was right to put away rhyme; but that rejection would have been stupidity in Hugo's case.

Going above the proofs of this volume I notice with some displeasure that blindness has here a plaintive latitude that it does not have in my life. Blindness is a confinement, on the contrary it is a liberation as well, a solitude conducive to imaginings, a lock opener an algebra.

Buenos Aires, June 1975 JLB (translated by means of Robert Mezey)

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1996) the Argentinian author of poems essayist, and short story writer, was the greatest in quantity translated Latin American writer of the twentieth hundred His books of ficton include Six puzzles 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 bring togethered Borges will be published through Penguin in 1997. Both Mezey and Barnes teach at Pomona College

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Mar 1996

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