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Poem of the gifts

May none in tears or with reproach then slight          
God's statement of His mastery,  
Who, with majestic irony,                    
Gave me at once both these books and the night.      
 
Of these books, now a city, lightless eyes          
He made the owners; eyes, it seems,      
Which, in libraries of dreams,                      
Could only read some foolish tracts that tie        
 
The sun-ups to their zeal.  In vain the day        
Upon them foists its endless tomes;          
As toilsome as those ancient rolls        
In Alexandria decayed.                      
 
From hunger and from thirst (says a Greek tale)  
Near fonts and gardens dies a king;  
The confines I roam, tiring          
Of this tall, deep and blind library's pale.              
 
Encyclopedias, atlases, the East,              
The West, centuries, dynasties,            
Cosmos, symbols, cosmogonies              
Are fêted by these walls, if uselessly.              
 
Slow in my shade, this hollow darkness free  
With doubting cane I will entice;          
I, who imagined Paradise                      
As being but a kind of library.                
 
Some thing that certainly does not entail  
That broad word "chance" — it rules these things;      
Once, many blurry evenings        
Another lost to books and to our shade.
 
As through slow galleries I go astray,          
One sacred horror likes this plan:    
That I'm this other, the dead man,      
Perhaps with the same steps on those same days.
 
What matters then that word which forms my name,              
(Which of us two has this verse spun,
Of plural I and shadow one?)    
When our anathema is but the same?          
 
Groussac or Borges, I thus gaze upon    
Our world, unforming, fading fast    
To palest and uncertain ash,                            
Akin to sleep or mere oblivion.
 
Translated by Hadi Deeb
Other works by Jorge Luis Borges...



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