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Unread 10-08-2013, 06:43 AM
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Jennifer Reeser Jennifer Reeser is offline
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Spanish Operative Two, good day.

A Compass

To Esther Zemborain de Torres

All things are words in a vernacular
in which each day and night some One or Thing
writes that infinitude of squabbling

Resourceful, the use of “squabbling” here, to stand in for nonsense or gibberish. Not exactly the author’s original, but close enough the reader gets the gist and import. I commend the inventiveness.

that we call history. There, passing, are

Beware of clipping out too much, or of clipping the stronger, in favor of the unnecessary. Here, ““troop” is eliminated, which takes much of the punch out of the original. “…that we call” is filler – but so is Borges’s “del mundo” – “of the world.” The image of the troop, though, is crucial, and needs to be retained. Try:

“called ‘History.’ Passed in its bustle are…”

Or,

“called ‘History.’ Passed in its jumble are…,” “Passed in its chaos,” etc.


Carthage and Rome, and I, you, he, my life
I cannot understand, this agony
of being enigma, chance, cryptography,
all babbling with all of Babel's strife.

Exquisite stanza, the above, skillfully done, moving in those staccato utterances, “I, you, he my life…,” and with integrity to the original.

The unnamed lies behind the name. I seem
to feel its shadow gravitate today
in this clear keen blue needle, feel it sway,

pulled by an ocean's shoreline, by the deep,

I suggest “toward the deep,” which, though somewhat flipping around his exact image, would more closely convey Borges’s idea of the reach for meaning, as well as recovering that subliminal feeling of elongation and “stretch” in the original.

with something of a clock seen in a dream
and something of bird moving in sleep.

The concision in all of the above is admirable – no “tarting up” of the text, but such clean, precise and faithful rendering. Perhaps:

and something of a bird that moves in sleep ??

Mission accomplished. English thanks you.

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