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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The poet Borges less
This book is a treasure.
Worth the time, very translatable poet
Borges shines, translations are uneven
Translated?

Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Jorge Luis Borges
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Spanish | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Borges: Selected Non-Fictions
Borges: Collected Fictions
This Craft of Verse (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New Directions Paperbook)
Ficciones (English Translation)

ASIN: 0141181117

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During his life, Jorge Luis Borges wore many hats. He was, variously, a poet, an essayist, a short-story writer, a librarian, and, for a short time, a poultry inspector. Born in Argentina in 1899, he lived for several years in Europe before eventually returning home to Buenos Aires in the early 1920s. It was here that Borges started his career as a writer. At the age of 24, he published his first volume of poetry, and though he would go on to garner considerable acclaim as an essayist and crafter of fiction, he always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This bilingual edition of Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, gathers together 200 poems from different periods of Borges's life, including some that will be appearing in English for the first time.

Whether he was writing fiction, essays, or poetry, there were certain themes and subjects that Borges returned to time and again. His home town became a favorite topic--in his first collection, Fervor de Buenos Aires, he wrote: "My soul is in the streets / of Buenos Aires," a sentiment that remained constant throughout his life. This collection reveals other preoccupations as well--with history in all its permutations, Borges's own ancestry, and his fascination with metaphysics, mazes, mirror images, and the blurry line between parallel realities:

The celibate white cat surveys himself
in the mirror's clear-eyed glass,
not suspecting that the whiteness facing him
and those gold eyes that he's not seen before
in ramblings through the house are his own likeness.
Who is to tell him the cat observing him
is only the mirror's way of dreaming?

This companion volume to Andrew Hurley's new translation of Collected Fictions boasts a stellar cast of translators, including W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and John Updike among others. Admirers of Borges will find Selected Poems a fitting memorial to the great man; and for those have never had the pleasure of reading him before, this book is a wonderful introduction. --Alix Wilber

Book Description

An unparalleled and long-overdue volume of poetry by "the most important Spanish writer since Cervantes"(Mario Vargas Llosa).

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems--the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work--from Borges' first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions by a remarkable cast of translators, including Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, and John Updike.

"A surfeit of riches. . . . Jorge Luis Borges' poetry alone would be enough to underwrite his immense reputation."-- San Francisco Chronicle

Exquisitely packaged edition with French flaps and rough front, quality paper stock.

Customer Reviews:

The poet Borges less.......2004-12-13

This review is about a single question. Why if Borges considered himself a poet above all, and if this book contains as it does contain most of his major themes are his real readers and his real fame the readers of his stories essays and short prose-pieces ? Why is the most loved Borges not found in the poems when the poems too do at times like the stories tell stories?
Perhaps it is because the language of poetry is more dense and ambigious and breaks the flow of the story. Perhaps it is because on the nonetheless more extended palette of the story a more extensive picture can be painted. Perhaps it is because too the element of mystery so great in Borges work comes to us in a stronger way in a narrative telling? Or perhaps too Borges whether he likes it or not is in his lists and his recollections really more a figure of prose than of poetry. And perhaps and this the real paradox Borges poetry is too more prose- like than poetic in many ways. Perhaps his way of going on in such intellectual questioning fashion renders his poetry more mind- like and less in deep lyric feeling than the deepest poetry means?
I ask this as prelude to saying a few words about these poems most of which I have read, and few of which I remember.And this too is part of it. The Borges name is connected with those tales from The Aleph to Funes to Borges and I . It is less connected with any of the poems
And all of this review seems now to me somehow unfair. Borges is a great writer and his words mean more than anything written about them. Reading these poems will give so much pleasure , so much material for reflection, so many characters, stories, moods, ideas, dreams, passages of life, labyrinths, ships, coffee cups, imitations, duels in the sun and duels in the darkness, light as a metaphor and light as light, darkness as darkness and darkness as sight, worlds within and more worlds within and more worlds within and without and words as literature true literature literature of the tradition that the maker Borges makes and remakes and makes and remakes a poem.

This book is a treasure. .......2004-11-02

It is strange reviewing it. It's like reviewing some sacred book...
The whole World is here. And more... Here is Argentina with its familiar (to Borges) streets; here is a poem about chess, the Moon, tigers. Men. Here is Iceland in all its beauty and past; in a way no one else can ever portray it. Beautiful poems about art, God, history, mirrors, death, life, war, Shinto, Love, time, eternity, blindness, mortality, emotion, thoughts... everything and nothing...
Through this precious book we may perceive all of this through Borges' blind, ever watching, tired eyes.
I love to be lost in all those words...

Worth the time, very translatable poet.......2004-05-13

Borges possesses a very universal mind, as anyone who has read him knows. For this reason his poetry is also relatively translatable. It contains almost every important poem, with conjectures being his most famous. The translation provided is fairly good, although there are several instances of misjudgement, or that is my opinion anyway. For instance, one work title ¨El enemigo generoso¨ (the generous enemy) is translated into english as ¨The generous friend¨. While I certainly can appreciate the irony of this translation and its potential irony, i think borges, as an incredible mind, should be left to decide these matters for himself. Unless the cover first lists the translators'names. Nonetheless Borges'poetry is overshadowed by his shortstories (Ficciones and El Aleph), and I recommend all to read this book. Great diversity, and a very original mind

Borges shines, translations are uneven.......2004-02-16

Borges was fascinated by English. As a kid, he grew up speaking it with his English grandmother and he spent the rest of his life ransacking the treasure-chest of English and American literature. In a famous prose-poem published in 1960, "Borges and I", he could cite Robert Louis Stevenson's prose as one his favorite things (alongside the taste of coffee and the strumming of a guitar). And even after he lost his eyesight in mid-age, most of the books he went on reading in his mind were in English.

Consequently, he sounds good in translation. It's tough to make Neruda or Lorca or even a lot of novelists writing in Spanish sound clear and convincing in English. Lorca, for example, wrote in a distinctively Andalusian idiom, and nobody who has never read his poetry in the original can understand how stilted he sounds in English. Borges, by contrast, had a more universal intellect and the strands of his writing span many non-Hispanic cultures. His reading in many different literatures left a deep imprint on him linguistically and helps explain why his work translates so well into other languages. While it's true that much of his poetry has a distinctly Argentine "flavor", it has many other flavors, as well. Depending on the poem, Borges can evoke Quevedo, Leopoldo Lugones, "Beowulf", the Icelandic Prose Edda, Whitman, Omar Khayyam, or Ralph Waldo Emerson. And yet the English influence is present in virtually all of his work.

Thirteen translators are featured in this anthology and the quality varies. Barnstone and Merwin are, as usual, impeccably accurate and 1000% unadventurous. Robert Fitzgerald shows yet again that his last name must be some kind of cosmic byword for quality (F. Scott, Edward, Ella, now Robert...). His version of "Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three" is breathtakingly tight and sweeping, actually more of a rendition than a word-for-word translation. Unlike Barnstone's somewhat stilted versions of Borges' sonnets, Fitzgerald manages to stick to the original rhyme-scheme without sounding forced. Unfortunately, he only did five poems in this book. ¡Qué lastima!

Alistair Reid did most of the work here. Reid is a perfect example of a fine translator who did some really great stuff back in the '60s, then apparently revised it to make stuffy literalists like Barnstone happy. For example, he took an excellent translation of "Limits" (which appeared in a 1967 book called "A Personal Anthology", which basically launched Borges's reputation in the United States) and altered it to make the words stick more closely to the original Spanish word order. It's still a good translation and all, but not as good as the first one. Other than that, though, I don't have any bones to pick with Reid.

Translated?.......2001-06-07

Although in the beginning I ignored the Spanish, the English should serve as little more than a crutch for those who study Spanish. Heck, I'm a lowly second-year student and as I'm plugging away at the book, I'm amazed at how great the translations are on their own -- and how little they show Borges' style to an English audience. The poems are great in either language -- but if you have a knowledge of Spanish, you'd be best off buying a completely Spanish volume if you could find it for less.

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Federico Garcia Lorca
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
R.S. Thomas
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Patrick Kavanagh
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
W.B. Yeats
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Plays (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry: From Britain and Ireland
The House With The Green Shutters
Selected Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)
Selected Poetry (Oxford World's Classics)

ASIN: 0141181257

The Selected Poems of Cavafy (Penguin Modern Classics Poetry)

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The Selected Poems of Cavafy (Penguin Modern Classics Poetry)
Edited and Translated by Avi Sharon Cavafy
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Dylan Thomas
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Poems of Alexander Pope: A reduced version of the Twickenham Text
Writings of Jonathan Swift (Norton Critical Edition)
Shaftesbury: Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
The Beggar's Opera (Penguin Classics)
The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)

ASIN: 0140188894

Book Description

A leading English literary figure of the 17th century, John Dryden (1631-1700) wrote dramas and critical works, but his reputation stands on his mastery of verse. Included here are "Annus Mirabilis," "Absalom and Achitophel," "Mac Flecknoe," "Song from Marriage à la Mode," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," more.

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Four poets as one

Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
Fernando Pessoa
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Four poets as one.......2006-01-17

Pesssoa is unique as a poet in that he generously scatters himself into the identities of three other people. The four heteronyms dominate his character.He searches for objective truth.
Here is an excerpt.
have no ambitions and no desires.
To be a poet is not my ambition,
It's my way of being alone.

Selected Poems (Donne, John) (Penguin Classics)

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Selected Poems (Donne, John) (Penguin Classics)
Ilona Bell , and John Donne
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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A new selection spanning the breadth of Donne's verse

One of England's preeminent poets, John Donne's poems are among the most passionate, profound, and spiritual in the English language. This rich representation reflects the wide diversity of his poetry. From such witty items as “The Flea,” which transforms the image of a louse into something marvelous, to the intimate and intense Holy Sonnets, Donne breathed new vigor into poetry by drawing lucid and often startling metaphors from the world in which he lived.

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Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)
William Carlos Williams
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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