An initial offering from a new series of thematically edited collections of Borges' poems & prose that is certain to bring English readers much deeper into the universe of the Head Librarian. The poems of this volume span Borges' lifetime and focus on his terrain par excellence: the liminal regions of dream and nightmare, shadow and blindness, of death's threshold and its aftermaths. The strong translations are best overlooked in favor of Borges' evocative Spanish, which will, in the manner of dream language, make itself understood across the divide. --Recommended by Matthew, City Lights Books
Revered for his magnificent works of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet. Poems of the Night is a moving collection of the great literary visionary's poetic meditations on nighttime, darkness, and the crepuscular world of visions and dreams, themes that speak implicitly to the blindness that overtook Borges late in life-and yet the poems here are drawn from the full span of Borges's career. Featuring such poems as "History of the Night" and "In Praise of Darkness" and more than fifty others in luminous translations by an array of distinguished translators-among them W.S. Merwin, Christopher Maurer, Alan Trueblood, and Alastair Reid-this volume brings to light many poems that have never appeared in English, presenting them en face with their Spanish originals.