“A Compass”
All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge
Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don’t grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel’s gibberish stream by.
Behind the name is that which has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow gravitate
In this blue needle, in its trembling sweep
Casting its influence toward the farthest strait,
With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream
And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.
Translated from the Spanish by Robert Mezey
“Music Box”
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
Translated by Tony Barnstone
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) “A Compass” and “Music Box” appeared in Poetry magazine in June 1993 and March 2012, respectively.
a bright, unequivocal eye 