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Unread 02-17-2001, 06:56 PM
robert mezey robert mezey is offline
Master of Memory
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Claremont CA USA
Posts: 570
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G, the Spanish reads

Les entregaron a un tiempo
el rifle y el crucifijo.

"Selfsame" strikes me as too emphatic (and too
literary, especially for a ballad). And to my ear,
the line doesn't need an extra syllable---I think
I prefer the rhythm as it is.
But I haven't seen this poem for quite a long while
and found I was not satisfied by some of the lines;
I think I need to revise it. Though I'm very fond
of Borges' milongas (as some of my tenderhearted
friends are definitely not), there are several others
I like better than this one. The theme, needless to
say, is very frequent in Borges. As another milonga
ends,

Among the thousand things there are
And thousands of ways to behave,
There is one thing no one ever regrets,
And that is having been brave.

Yes, courage is always the finest thing,
And hope, in a man of honor;
Go on your way then, little milonga,
And praise Jacinto Chiclana.

And there's the end of a fine longish poem, in which
an old man goes out for a walk, comes on the scene
of a fight he had many years before and relives the
experience:

Here, once, a stranger with an air of malice
Beat him at cards, at truco, two hands straight,
And he suspected that the man had cheated.
He didn't care to argue, but he said:
Here, I hand over my very last centavo,
But afterwards let's head out to the street.
The other answered that he wouldn't do
Any better with cold steel than with cards.
There wasn't even a star out. Benavides
Lent him his knife. The fight was fierce and bloody.
In memory it lasted but a second,
A single still-frame brilliance, a vertigo.
He finished him with one slash of the blade,
Which was enough. Then one more, just in case.
He heard the knife dropped and the falling body.
It was then that he felt for the first time
The bad cut on his wrist and saw the blood.
And it was then there burst out of his throat
A vile word in which were mixed together
Exultation and fury and relief.
So many years and finally he has recaptured
The joy of being a man and being brave,
Or, at the least, the joy of having been so
On one occasion, some lost yesterday.


Borges probably valued this sort of courage so highly
because he regarded himself as a physical coward. (But
he was brave enough to publish an essay entitled "I, a
Jew" in Argentina in 1943, when the deeply antiSemitic
country was sympathetic to Germany and Italy, an essay
in which he speculated on the likelihood that he was
himself a Jew, Borges having been a common name among
Portuguese Jews, and hoped he was, said he would feel
honored to be so.)


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