The universe waits… Jorge Luis Borges / Cao Guimaraes

Blow, 2000 (film still) by Cao Guimarães and Rivane Neuenschwander

At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.

Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.

Then I tell myself: It must be taht the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.

beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

POEM WRITTEN IN A COPY OF BEOWULF
Book: “A personal Anthology ”
Jorge Luis Borges

(translated by Alastair Reid)

“[for]Borges reality is illusion and illusion is reality… His most characteristic mode is a kind of tale that partakes of the myth, the parable, the essay, and the prose poem, and whose forebears are Kafka and Mallarmé.”

~John Simon, Book Week

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Photo: Sopro ( Blow) 2000 by Cao Guimarães 

“Blow” expresses the relationship between what is inside and what is outside. The multi-formed translucence of a bubble exhibits the world that contains it and is contained by it. The bubble that never bursts is a metaphor of the continuity of things.

Jorge Luis Borges by Willis Barnstone

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires and educated in Europe. He was considered “the prime mover in that impressive series of novels wich include Cortazar’s Hopscoth, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Cabrera Infante‘s Three Trapped Tigers (The Nation). One of the most important and inventice writers of the twentieth century, Borges is also the author of Labyrinths and Ficciones. In 1961 he shared with Samuel Beckett the first International Publishers Prize, and in 1966 the Ingram Merrilll Foundation awarded him its Annual Literary Award.