Composición escrita en un ejemplar de la gesta de Beowulf
A veces me pregunto qué razones me mueven a estudiar sin esperanza de precisión, mientras mi noche avanza la lengua de los ásperos sajones. Gastada por los años la memoria deja caer la en vano repetida palabra y es así como mi vida teje y desteje su cansada historia. Será (me digo entonces) que de un modo secreto y suficiente el alma sabe que es inmortal y que su vasto y grave círculo abarca todo y puede todo. Más allá de este afán y de este verso me aguarda inagotable el universo.
Verses Written in a Copy of Beowulf
Sometimes I ask myself the reasons why I'm driven, with no hope of satisfaction as my night pushes onward now, to try and learn the language of the roughneck Saxon. Used up by years, my memory begins to lose its grip upon the uselessly repeated word, the way my own life spins and soon unspins its weary history. The soul (or so I tell myself) must have some secret, some sufficent wherewithall to know it does not end, that its vast, grave circle can take all in and take on all. Beyond this yearning and beyond this verse it waits endless for me: the universe.
Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. In 1914, he moved with his family to Switzerland and later lived for a few years in Spain, where he began publishing in various literary magazines. In 1921, back in Buenos Aires, he participated in the founding of several literary and philosophical publications, such as Prisma, Proa, and Martín Fierro. During this period, he published poetry collections, including Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), Luna de enfrente (1925), and Cuaderno San Martín (1929), as well as works of literary and philosophical criticism, such as Inquisiciones (1925), El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926), El idioma de los argentinos (1928), and Evaristo Carriego (1930).In the 1930s, he began to lose his vision, eventually becoming completely blind. During this time, he shifted his focus from poetry (though he would return to it in 1960 with El Hacedor) to short stories, particularly those in Ficciones and El Aleph, which would become his most celebrated works. Borges is widely regarded as one of the great innovators of the Spanish language and one of the most original and significant writers of the 20th century. He died in Geneva on June 14, 1986.
A. Z. Foreman is a poet and translator pursuing a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. His work (both original compositions as well as translations from Arabic, French, Persian, Chinese, Latin, Occitan, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Welsh, Irish and Yiddish) has been (or is scheduled to be) featured in the Los Angeles Review, ANMLY, Asymptote, Lunch Ticket, Metamorphoses, the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and elsewhere. But really he's most proud of having had his work featured in two people's tattoos, and if you have a dog he'd love to pet it.
