Olaus Magnus (1490-1558)

The volume was written by that Olaus Magnus,

The theologian, who kept faith with Rome

When the North embraced the doctrines of John Wyclif,

Of Hus and Luther. Exiled from those realms,

He sought the afternoons of Italy,

Hoping to find a certain number of easing of his ills,

And there compos the history of his people

Passing back and forth from fact to fable.

On single occasion, only one, I held it

In my hands. Time has not worn away

The frazzled parchment spine, the cursive script,

The curious carburet of iron engravings, and the columns

Of learned Latin. There was that physical closeness

Oh unread and long-dreamt-of volume your radiant

And pure quintessence of eternal thing

Stepp down single evening into the endless waters

Of Heraclitus, which hold sweeping me away.

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 vexed questions 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 assembleed Borges will be published by dint of Penguin in 1997. Both Mezey and Barnes teach at Pomona College

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Mar 1996

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