Centre for Romanian Studies

Poetry in Translation (CCX): Jorge Luis BORGES, (24 August 1899, Buenos Aires – 14 June 1986, Geneva), ARGENTINA, “Simplicity ”, “Simplitate”,

Simplicity
Jorge Luis Borges

It opens, the gate to the garden
with the docility of a page
that frequent devotion questions
and inside, my gaze
has no need to fix on objects
that already exist, exact, in memory.
I know the customs and souls
and that dialect of allusions
that every human gathering goes weaving.
I’ve no need to speak
nor claim false privilege;
they know me well who surround me here,
know well my afflictions and weakness.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.

Translated by A. S. Kline © 2008

Simplitate
Jorge Luis Borges
(1899, Buenos Aires –1986, Geneva)

Îmi deschide poarta dinspre grădină
cu îngăduinţa unui servitor
al cărui devotament este nesigur
dar odată înăuntru privirea mea
nu are nevoie să fixeze obiectele
care au rămas, precis, în memorie.
Recunosc obiceiurile și spiritul –
acel dialect al aluziilor,
acea pânză ţesută de fiecare grup.
Eu nu am nevoie să vorbesc
nici să–mi asum vre-un fals privilegiu;
cei care mă înconjoară aici, mă știu prea bine,
știu bine suferințele și slăbiciunea mea.
Aceasta este poate treapta cea mai înaltă
care Cerul poate ne va acorda:
nu să fim admirați în victorie
ci pur și simplu să fim îngăduiţi
ca parte a unei realități inconturnabile,
ca și pietrele și arborii.

Versiune în limba Română
Constantin ROMAN, Londra,
© 2013, Copyright Constantin ROMAN

SHORT BIO:
(from Wikipedia)

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), known as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈborxes] About this sound audio (help·info)), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the “character of unreality in all literature”. His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (El Aleph in Spanish) (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, philosophy, religion and God.

Borges’ works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to both the fantasy and magical realism genres. The genre of magical realism reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century.] Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia in Spanish) (1935). Scholars have also suggested that Borges’s progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.

In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of fifty five, and was unable to read from this point on, never learning braille. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first ever Prix International, sharing the award with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. Borges dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland.

His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the “Latin American Boom” and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist 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.”