A Poem for a Thursday #140

Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Argentina. He was a journalist, author, and poet, and now his writings are considered to be classics of the 20th century. J. M. Coetzee said of him “He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists.” Borges is better known for his prose but he began his writing career with poetry. He wrote his own original poetry and translated poets for an Argentinian audience. Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and essayist, said of him, “He cultivated three genres: the essay, the poem, and the short story. The division is arbitrary. His essays read like stories, his stories are poems; and his poems make us think, as though they were essays.”

Let others boast of pages they have written,
I take pride in those I've read. 
I may not have been a philologist,
or gone deeply into declensions or moods or those
         slow shifts of letter sounds--
the d that hardens into t,
the kinship of the g and k--
but through the years I have professed
a passion for language.
My nights are filled with Virgil.
Having known Latin and forgotten it
remains a possession; forgetting 
remains a possession; forgetting 
is memory's dim cellar, one of its forms,
the other secret face of coin.
While vain and loved appearances,
faces and pages
were fading in my eyes,
I lost myself studying the iron tongue
once used by my forebears to set down
loneliness and swords; 
and now, after seven hundred years,
from Ultima Thule,
your voice comes to me, Snorri Sturluson.
A young man, sitting down to read, takes on
          himself an exact discipline,
bookworming his way to exact knowledge;
at my age, whatever I take on is an adventure
bordering on the night.
I'll never muster the North's old tongues,
never sink greedy hands into Sigurd's gold.
The task I undertake is endless
and throughout my days will be a companion,
mysterious as the universe,
mysterious as myself, the learner.

A Reader
Jorge Luis Borges
Translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni