Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths (1962)

from ESSAYS: ‘The Fearful Sphere of Pascal’

……….It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

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from FICTIONS: ‘Death and the Compass’

………..Lönnrot avoided Scharlach’s eyes. He looked at the trees and the sky subdivided into diamonds of turbid yellow, green and red. He felt faintly cold, and he felt, too, an impersonal — almost anonymous — sadness. It was already night; from the dusty garden came the futile cry of a bird. For the last time, Lönnrot considered the problem of the symmetrical and periodic deaths.

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from FICTIONS: ‘The Secret Miracle’

………..The squad formed and stood at attention. Hladik, standing against the barracks wall, waited for the volley. Someone pointed out that the wall was going to be stained with blood; the victim was ordered to step forward a few paces. Incongruously, this reminded Hladik of the fumbling preparations of photographers.

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from ESSAYS: ‘Partial Magic in the Quixote’

……….Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousands and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found a reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.

translated from the Spanish (in order) by Anthony Kerrigan, Donald A Yates, Harriet de Onís and James E Irby

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Don Paterson: ‘Guadarrama’ and ‘To Emiliano Barral’

Guadarrama

Is this you, Guadarrama, the old friend
I’d look for in the blue indifferent eye
of all those lonely evenings in Madrid?
Through your gorges, corries, ragged peaks,
a thousand suns, a thousand Guadarramas
are riding with me to the heart of you.

To Emiliano Barral

Plane by plane,
corner by corner,
your chisel struck upon me
holding my breath
in the frozen dawn
of this porphyry block,
or at least the man I now
want in my mirror:
the Spanish Buddha, in all
his idle grandeur!
The dumb, slaked mouth,
the ears set to the wall
of silence, and under
the bare slope of the brow,
eyes scooped from the rock –
from rock, that I might not see.

from The Eyes: a version of Antonio Machado (1999)

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Some thoughts on the poems

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Bust of Antonio Machado, Emiliano Barral, 1920, pink sandstone, 54 x 33 cm