Jorge Luis Borges has been a great influence on my work. He is best known for his extraordinary stories, but he was also a fine poet. One of my compositions is titled "The Unending Rose", inspired by this poem, which was written late in his life, when his increasing blindness affected him greatly. Listen to the “music, rivers, firmaments, palaces and angels”.
Lawrence Casserley.
Jorge Luis Borges - The Unending Rose - excerpt (translated by Alastair Read)
Your fragile globe is in my hand; and time
is bending both of us, both unaware,
this afternoon, in a forgotten garden.
Your brittle shape is humid in the air.
The steady, tidal fullness of your fragrance
rises up to my old, declining face.
But I know you far longer than that child
who glimpsed you in the layers of a dream
or here, in this garden, once upon a morning.
The whiteness of the sun may well be yours
or the moon’s gold, or else the crimson stain
on the hard sword-edge in the victory.
I am blind and I know nothing, but I see
there are more ways to go; and everything
is an infinity of things. You, you are music,
rivers, firmaments, palaces and angels,
O endless rose, intimate, without limit,
which the Lord will finally show to my dead eyes.
From Liz Chisnall.
ReplyDeleteA beautiful choice on a cold Monday when softening snow is yielding to the cadence and colour of spring. Thank you Lawrence.