Book Review: Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

Written by Tim Jones

Sunday, 01 March 2009 00:00

Tim Jones

Jorge Luis Borges is best known in the English-speaking world as a writer of stories and essays, but it was as a poet that he first became known in his native Argentina. His Selected Poems gathers together translations of his poetry by a number of different highly talented hands. I opened it with some trepidation, wondering whether the poetry could possibly be as good as the fiction: I’m delighted to report that it is every bit as good.

The Selected Poems prints the Spanish original of each poem on the left and the English translation on the right. The translators have done a fine job of transporting Borges’ characteristic concerns and his clarity of expression from Spanish to English. Borges’ great interests – time, the infinite, doppelgangers, the mortal hazard posed by mirrors – are as omnipresent in the poetry as in the prose, but are expressed with even greater economy in the poetry, which swoops between the private and the universal with almost dizzying facility.
Borges’ work is at once funny and profound, tragic and comic, mired in dread and rife with beauty. In my opinion, Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest writer of the twentieth century.

BIOGRAPHY

Tim Jones

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com

Tim Jones is a poet and author of both literary fiction and science fiction. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand. His fiction and poetry has been published in New Zealand, the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, Vietnam and Germany.
His most recent books are short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), which was long-listed for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, poetry collection All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens (HeadworX, 2007), and fantasy novel Anarya's Secret (RedBrick, 2007). The latest news about Tim and his writing is on his blog at http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com

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