Product Description

An unparalleled and long-overdue volume of poetry by "the most important Spanish writer since Cervantes"(Mario Vargas Llosa).

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.

"A surfeit of riches. . . . Jorge Luis Borges' poetry alone would be enough to underwrite his immense reputation."-- San Francisco Chronicle

Exquisitely packaged edition with French flaps and rough front, quality paper stock.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55983 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04-01
• Released on: 2000-04-03
• Original language: Spanish
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140587210
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
During his life, Jorge Luis Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. Born in Argentina in 1899, he lived for several years in Europe before eventually returning home to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. It was here that Borges started his career as a writer. At the age of 24, he published his first volume of poetry, and though he would go on to garner considerable acclaim as an essayist and crafter of fiction, he always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This bilingual edition of Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, gathers together 200 poems from different periods of Borges's life, including some that will be appearing in English for the first time.

Whether he was writing fiction, essays, or poetry, there were certain themes and subjects that Borges returned to time and again. His home town became a favorite topic--in his first collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, he wrote: "My soul is in the streets / of Buenos Aires," a sentiment that remained constant throughout his life. This collection reveals other preoccupations as well--with history in all its permutations, Borges's own ancestry, and his fascination with metaphysics, mazes, mirror images, and the blurry line between parallel realities:

The celibate white cat surveys himself
in the mirror's clear-eyed glass,
not suspecting that the whiteness facing him
and those gold eyes that he's not seen before
in ramblings through the house are his own likeness.
Who is to tell him the cat observing him
is only the mirror's way of dreaming?

This companion volume to Andrew Hurley's new translation of Collected Fictions boasts a stellar cast of translators, including W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and John Updike among others. Admirers of Borges will find Selected Poems a fitting memorial to the great man; and for those have never had the pleasure of reading him before, this book is a wonderful introduction. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
After a few decades devoted to the luminously precise prose for which he is known in the States, Borges (1899-1986), who began his career writing poetry, returned to it with fervor. This edition makes available for the first time in English an overview of every phase of his poetic oeuvre. Although his earliest book (1923's Fervor de Buenos Aires) represents a youthful Borges more directly concerned with the specific, local and vernacular, he develops his mature themesAtime, imagination, and identityAthroughout. Taken together, the poems distill those concerns, which famously preoccupy him in the brief ficciones. And, like the fictions, they are almost disturbingly comprehensible. One peak of the collection is 1960's The Maker, showing Borges at his most defined and refined, presenting sophisticated riffs on Arisosto, Luke and "The Other Tiger" with elegance and gusto. The poems of 1969's In Praise of Darkness confront encroaching blindness, old age and the possibility of ethics, reaching beyond the expectations created by Borges's mastery of the fantastic and the metaphysical. The result is poems at times as moving as Stevens's "The Rock." The translations, edited by New York Univ. professor emeritus Coleman, and realized by varying hands as accomplished as W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand and Charles Tomlinson, are for the most part fluid, although the occasional infelicity, revealed by the original en face, does rankle. Still, gratitude is the only proper response to this invaluable volume, the second of three planned releases. First serial to Harper's and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Poetry is the heart of Borges' metaphysical, mythical, and cosmopolitan oeuvre, and this bilingual collection of nearly 200 poems aptly forms the centerpiece of a triptych of new volumes that began with Borges' fiction and will conclude with nonfiction. Borges' first published works were poems, and it was poetry he returned to in his later years once his eyesight began to fail. Borges acknowledged the persistence and significance of poetry in his 1960 poem "Ars Poetica": "To see in death sleep, and in the sunset/a sad gold--such is poetry,/Which is immortal and poor. Poetry/Returns like the dawn and the sunset." Over the decades, Borges pondered time, conjured the many moods of his beloved Buenos Aires, and wrote of tigers, rivers, mirrors, and the moon, often in response to the musings of great poets and novelists of the past. Editor Coleman commissioned a wealth of new translations for this unprecedented and invaluable collection, and the roster of translators includes such luminaries as Robert S. Fitzgerald, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and John Updike. Donna Seaman

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Customer Reviews

Borges shines, translations are uneven
Borges was fascinated by English. As a kid, he grew up speaking it with his English grandmother and he spent the rest of his life ransacking the treasure-chest of English and American literature. In a famous prose-poem published in 1960, "Borges and I", he could cite Robert Louis Stevenson's prose as one his favorite things (alongside the taste of coffee and the strumming of a guitar). And even after he lost his eyesight in mid-age, most of the books he went on reading in his mind were in English.

Consequently, he sounds good in translation. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. Lorca, for example, wrote in a distinctively Andalusian idiom, and nobody who has never read his poetry in the original can understand how stilted he sounds in English. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. His reading in many different literatures left a deep imprint on him linguistically and helps explain why his work translates so well into other languages. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well. Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.

Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert...). His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. ¡Qué lastima!

Alistair Reid did most of the work here. Reid is a perfect example of a fine translator who did some really great stuff back in the '60s, then apparently revised it to make stuffy literalists like Barnstone happy. For example, he took an excellent translation of "Limits" (which appeared in a 1967 book called "A Personal Anthology", which basically launched Borges's reputation in the United States) and altered it to make the words stick more closely to the original Spanish word order. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one.

dreamtigers on catnip
i got this wonderful book as a very unexpected christmas gift. i don't speak spanish, so can't address the claims that the translations are inadequate.

what is here in english, taken on those terms alone, is till great. recurring themes of tigers, mirrors, his beloved hometown, the history of literature, the bible, memory, distortions in time & space, heaven and hell weave themselves through over six decades of dazzling images and heartbreaking tenderness.

it's also playful- filled with bits from imagined histories and books which i almost find myself wanting to locate, as these little bits are too beautiful to be unreal.

A capital poet
A strange and unaccountable gift to translators. If "habitación" means "room" and "departamento" apartment, "sentenciosas calles" are streets as sententious as night is unanimous. As if in response to his world fame, Borges rests his intricate and detailed labyrinths on a legerdemain that extends from "Invocation to Joyce" (a poem whose jest relies on a simple allusion: "I am the other ones"-the lesser moderns who sing this ode) to "The weft" ("La trama", not "La telaraña", "The web"); the delicacy of construction hinges on the isolation of "weft" as the middle term between a tacit principal and a stated ultima, which is the grandest example of Nabokov's critique:

A poet's death is, after all,
a question of technique, a neat
enjambment, a melodic fall.

The later poems also admit an unheard-of rage in "The accomplice", which begins, "They crucify me. I have to be the cross, the nails", ending with "My fortune or misfortune does not matter./I am the poet."

Borges, for whom Stravinsky meant a sort of senseless hilarity, records a musical impression in "Music box" and writes a poem "To Johannes Brahms", of all people. A characteristic drollery is made into "Nostalgia for the present":

At that precise moment to himself the man said:
What would I not give
to be with you in Iceland
under the grand immobile daytime
and share this now
like sharing music
or the taste of fruit.
At that precise moment
the man was together with her in Iceland.

The reader will note that "La cifra" ("The cipher") is given an entirely suppositional translation as "The limit", that a general melancholy prevails on the English side that masks a vagary rivaling Fowlie's Rimbaud, which is the only Rimbaud we have. This is not an improvement on the 1972 edition; its advantage is an extended selection. Florid paraphrase, inaccuracy and a few howlers punctuate it. It is overpriced and not particularly well-manufactured. Sixty years of poetic labor are represented. The last poem here, "The weft" (translated as "The web") is his finest. The mirrors and labyrinths of "The cypress leaves" are real and functional. He visits Spain without "myths and masks", and in Japan sees the face of Buddha in a dream. Mexico is a delicate nightmare:

...The yard filled
With slow slight moonlight no-one sees, the sere
Violet in forgotten Nájera's pages...

Whatever conclusion one may draw from Rimbaud in English to Jim Morrison, Poet, one is likely to miss a certain crucial subtlety here. There is something new in Borges' poetry after "El oro de los tigres", which I think is announced in the last lines of "Susana Bombal":

Behind myth and mask
her soul alone.

The Spanish originals allow the reader to judge for himself the peformance of this capital poet. Noted names have given us a translation for reworking.