“I inscribe this book to I. J..: English, innumerable and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities”

Jorge Luis Borges has been called the “most British of Latin American writers.” Perhaps we shouldn’t wonder at this, as Borges’s connection to England, its land and language, ran incredibly deep. His paternal grandmother was English and he learnt English before his native Spanish. Much of his literary lineage was also English. At the age of 9 he translated Oscar Wilde’s fairytale ‘The Happy Prince’ into Spanish and it became his first published work.

He also made many literary pilgrimages to England, to the homes of his heroes.

But today I want to pull at the thread (to borrow a line from today’s video) of two poems, titled simply ‘Two English Poems’ written in English by Borges and originally dedicated to I.J. thought to be Pipina Diehl de Moreno Hueyo (whose real middle name was Isabel Josefina). She was Argentine, but calling her ‘English’ here suggests what he saw as her Anglo-Saxon traits – notably elegance. For Borges, who romanticised ‘Englishness’, she represented the height of aesthetic beauty, while marrying her to the literary world he most loved.

Borges once pictured paradise as ‘a kind of library’. My heaven would certainly have ‘Two English Poems’ on the first shelf. I have reprinted them at the end of this ‘Letter’…

I introduce them with this excellent clip from the Lex Fridman podcast – how genuinely the power of the poem moves its reader – lines so beautiful that they stop him in his tracks and he cannot help but marvel.

Two english poems

I

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow; I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile -that lonely, mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

II

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather -just twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow -the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
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.