Dear Members of this forum:
tomorrow will be our Independence day.
I have translated a beautiful, sober and non sentimental poem written from Jorge Luis Borges (by the way with some British blood). I hope you will appreciate it.
| ODE WRITTEN IN 1966 |
| No one is the Fatherland. Not even the rider, which tall in the dawn of a desert plaza, Rules a bronze steed through the times, Nor the others ones who glance from the marble, Nor those which lavished their warrior ashes, Through the fields of America Or they left a verse or a feat Or the memory of a thorough life In the righteous exercise of the days. No one is the Fatherland. Not even the symbols. No one is the Fatherland. Not even time Laden with battles, of swords and exodus And of the slow population of regions That touches the morn and the twilight And of faces which are aging In the mirrors that are blurred And of sustained anonymous agonies That last until dawn And from the web of rain Upon the dark gardens The Fatherland, my friends, is a perpetual deed As the perpetual world (If the Eternal Spectator would stop dreaming, as a white and abrupt lightning His forgetfulness Would fulminate us) No one is the Fatherland, But we all must be Worthy of the old oath That lent out those gentlemen To be what they ignored, argentineans, To be what they will be for the fact To have pledged in that old house We are the future of those men, The substantiation of those who died Our duty is the glorious burden That to our shadow bequeath those shadows That we must save. No one is the Fatherland, But we all are the Fatherland. May flame, ceaseless, in my chest and in yours That limpid, mysterious fire. Jorge Luis Borges (born Buenos Aires 1898, died in Geneva 1987) Written in occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Argentine declaration of Independence |
