I came to poetry by way of Pablo Neruda, seeking the poets of my continent for guidance when the Europeans and Americans—the Plaths and Rimbauds and Dantes of the world—encouraged dark thoughts in me. Across the cordillera, off the southernmost tip of America, Neruda’s countryman had been going blind and making waves of his own, away from the odes to the body and the waves that drew me in.
Borges had always come across to me as pretentious and inaccessible, like he was writing in some place where he didn’t belong. It took living in Buenos Aires—as I got the great privilege of doing a few years ago—to really understand the cadence of his verse, how it so perfectly describes the sprawling Rioplatense city and the psychology of its denizens. As the team looked though our archives on the journal’s 60th anniversary, I was moved by this sweet sonnet Borges published in the journal’s fifth issue way back in fall/winter of 1980. His short stories do more for me than his poetry, but there is something spectacular that happens here with the sound. It’s a little portal to every kind of place and pleasure. The translator of this poem is Willis Barnstone; Borges’s sonnets were also translated by the formidable squad of Edith Grossman, John Updike, Mark Strand, Robert Fitzgerald, Alastair Reid, Charles Tomlinson, and Stephen Kessler in 2010—but, whoever they were, they captured the esotericism that makes Borges such a pleasure to read and re-read. Open the music box. Be not afraid. Smack your tongue on the golden honey.—E.R. Pulgar, Online Poetry Editor
Music Box
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Willis Barnstone
Music of Japan. Drops of slow honey
Or of invisible gold are dispersed
In a miserly way from the water clock,
And repeat in time a weaving that is
Eternal, fragile, mysterious and clear.
I fear each one may be the last.
It's a past coming back. From what temple,
From what light garden in the mountain,
From what vigil before an unknown sea,
From what shyness of melancholy,
From what lost and ransomed afternoon
Does its remote future come to me?
I cannot know. No matter. I am
In that music. I want to be. I bleed.
