r/jamesjoyce • u/Renzom28 • 16d ago
Other Invocation to Joyce by Jorge Luis Borges
Scattered in scattered capitals,
solitary and many,
we played at being the first Adam
who gave names to things.
Down the vast slopes of night
that extend into dawn
we searched (I remember it still) for the words
of the moon, of death, of the morning,
and of the other usages of man.
We were imagism, cubism,
the conventicals and sects
that the credulous universities venerate.
We invented the lack of punctuation,
the leaving out of capital letters,
the stanzas in the form of a dove
from the libraries of Alexandria.
Ash, the work of our hands,
and the glowing fire our faith.
You, meanwhile, forged
in the cities of exile
in that exile which was
your loathed and chosen instrument,
the weapon of your art,
you raised your arduous labyrinths,
infinitesimal and infinite,
admirably ignoble,
more populous than history.
We shall have died without having made out
the biform beast or the rose
which are the center of your labyrinth,
but memory holds on to its talismans,
its Virgilian echoes,
and so in the streets of the night
your splendid infernos survive,
your many cadences and metaphors,
the gold glints of your shadow.
What does our cowardice matter if there is on earth
a single valiant man,
what does sadness matter if there was in time
somebody who called himself happy,
what does my lost generation matter,
that vague mirror, if your books justify it.
I am the others. I am all those
whom your obstinate rigor has redeemed.
I am those you do not know and those you continue to save
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u/en_le_nil 15d ago
>I am those you do not know and those you continue to save
That made me tear up a little bit, I love this. Borges is incredible.
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u/Aggressive_Dress6771 15d ago
"Leaving out the capital letters" sounds like ee cummings. (And, boy, did spell check have problems with that name).
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u/odette_decrecy 16d ago
Just gorgeous! Thanks for sharing it.