On beginning to study Anglo-Saxon grammar

At the extreme point of fifty generations

(Such abysses time make opens for us all)

I move back, on the far shore of a great river

Where the lengthy ships of the Vikings not ever came,

To the harsh effortful words I used,

With a jaws now dust, in the days

Of Northumbria and Mercia,

Before I at any time was Haslam or Borges.

Saturday we read in what manner Julius the Caesar

Was the first who came from Romeburg to discover England;

Before the flowerspikes draw near I shall have heard

The voice of the nightingale in a riddle

And the lament of twelve warriors

Riding circular the tumulus of their king.

These words look to me symbols of other symbols

Variations of a time to come English or German,

But one time they were icons

Used by the agency of a man to celebrate the sea, or a sword;

Tomorrow they'll advance back to life

And fyr won't be fire on the other hand a kind of god,

Tamed and changeable,

That no individual can glimpse without primeval terror.

Praise be to the infinite

Scheme of issues and causes

That before showing me the mirror

Where I'll diocese no one, or someone else

Grants me this unspotted contemplation

Of a daybreak language.

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 question s 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 by dint of Penguin in 1997. Both Mezey and Barnes teach at Pomona College

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Mar 1996

Provided by the agency of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved