Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems

I have been working on this for years. I started by reading the English translations on the converse and looking for inaccuracies. Gradually, I would read the Spanish obverse in its entirety By the time I got to Dos Versiones De "Ritter, Tod und Teufel," I barely looked at the English. Now I move on to do the same with Lorca, Quevedo and Neruda.

Part of what made Borges such a provident beginning to this project was his apparent amnesia. He wrote only a handful of poems, as prolific as he was. Uns Rosa Amarilla is the same poem as El Golem, and Mi Ultimo Tigre, from his penultimate volume Atlas, is a prosaic version of El Otro Tigre from his early El Hacedor. I henceforth use the translated versions of the texts to spare myself the effort importing tildes.

Every poem seems to ask and answer the questions, "What am I? Am I nothing or everything?", the answer to which is a guarded yes. In his underrated short story, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, Borges makes it clear that all literature ceases to belong to the author as soon as it is read. This volume now belongs to and was authored by Brandon Payne, who spilled a casserole in the margins to notarize his ownership. In his poetry, Borges expands on the idea; not only literature, but all sensation and experience is owned by and composes myself. Borges never wanders far from the banks of Heraclitus' river, which wears labyrinthine arroyos into experience, and faces itself to reflect an endless succession of mirrors. Things and people float on the surface of this river, on which we bump into each other like driftwood, and often Borges poems are simple lists of the things he is:

The Colors of a Turner when the lights
Are turned out in the narrow gallery
And not a footstep sounds in the deep night.
The other side of the dreary map of the world.
The tenuous spiderweb in the pyramid.
The sightless stone and the inquiring hand. (Cosas)
My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,
The obedient lock, the belated notes,(Las Cosas)
The circular time of the stoics,
The coin in the mouth of the dead man,
The sword's weight on the scale, (Las Causas)
Death, the weight of dawn, the endless plain
And the intricacy of stars,
And to have seen nothing or almost nothing
But the face of a young girl in Buenos Aires. (Elegia)

I feel like cutting the titles out of all the poems and conflating them into a prose work of remarkable depth, insight, and repetitiveness. Perhaps Borges simply became senile and forgot what he had written (he suggests as much in the prologue to El Oto, El Mismo), but I suspect that he simply had succumbed to the knowledge that all thoughts, all poems are one:

Soon, I shall know what I am.