Alejandra Pizarnik
You write poemsbecause you needa placewhere what isn’t may be — Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Approximations Buenos Aires 1956 – 1958,” Selected Poems, trans. Cecilia Rossi (Waterloo Press, 2010)
Category: Argentine Culture
Jorge Luis Borges
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger / of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, / with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Two English Poems,” A Universal History of Infamy. Publishers Editorial Tor (1935) & Emecé (1954), Published in English (1972)
Alejandra Pizarnik
I. The powers of language are the solitary ladies who sing, desolate, with this voice of mine that I hear from a distance. And far away, in the black sand, lies a girl heavy with ancestral music. Where is death itself? I have wanted clarity in light of my lack of light. Branches die in… Continue reading Alejandra Pizarnik
Jorge Luis Borges
I am this groping intensity that is a soul. — Jorge Luis Borges, “My Whole Life,” Selected Poems 1923-1967 (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972)
Jorge Luis Borges
Where San Juan and Chacabuco intersect I saw the blues houses, the houses that wear the color of adventure. They were like banners and deep as the dawn that frees the outlying quarters. Some are daybreak color, and some are dawn color: their cool readiance is a passion before the oblique face of any drab,… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. — Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite? ― Jorge Luis Borges
Alejandra Pizarnik
[…] what was it I wanted? I wanted a perfect silence. — Alejandra Pizarnik, from “Paths Of The Mirror,” Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972, transl. Yvetter Siegert (New Directions, 2016) (via adrasteiax)
Jorge Luis Borges
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Two English Poems,” trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Selected Poems: 1923-1967 (Delta, 1972)
