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Unread 02-18-2001, 05:38 AM
Christopher Mulrooney Christopher Mulrooney is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 356
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For what it's worth, Borges himself famously pointed out that it's the literary men who, when they write ballads, try to sound as if they are not; the Gaucho poets, he says, always try to sound like literary men.

I can't resist posting another Seis Cuerdas poem here, above all because there is an irresistible howler in the Viking translation of it: yema ("fingertip") in the fifth stanza is there given its alternate meaning, "yolk" (of an egg).


A Northside knife

There along the Maldonado
That's hidden now and blind,
There in the grizzled slum
Poor Carriego sang,

Behind a door ajar
That gives on yard and vine,
Where night heard
The guitar's love,

Will be a box and at the bottom
Will be sleeping with hard shine
Among those things that time
Knows how to forget, a knife.

It was that Saverio Suárez's,
Better known as el Chileno,
Who in gambling halls and elections
Always proved himself the good one.

Boys, who are the devil
Will look for it with stealth
And try with a fingertip
To see if its edge is nicked.

How many times it entered
The flesh of a Christian
And now it's put away alone,
Waiting for a hand,

That's dust. Behind the glass
A yellow sun gilds,
Across years and houses,
I'm looking at you, knife.
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