Sobre os livros

Algo fascinante nos livros é que eles conservam, apesar de nossos vãos esforços por fixar uma interpretação, o infinito. É dizer que os livros, quietos nas estantes das casas, nos fundos de livrarias, nas bibliotecas, conservam um poder e um mistério: o poder de sempre luzir sob uma luz diferente, que é a consciência de seu novo leitor; o mistério de replicar seus sentidos a uma potência de base infinita, porque nenhum leitor é como outro. São esse mistério e esse poder que definem os livros como algo fora da tirania, um objeto incompatível com a tirania do intérprete.

Two English Poems

                          I

   

   The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-

      corner; I have outlived the night.

   Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves

      laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with

      things unlikely and desirable.

   Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,

      of things half given away, half withheld,

      of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act

      that way, I tell you.

   The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds

      and odd ends: some hated friends to chat

      with, music for dreams, and the smoking of

      bitter ashes.  The things my hungry heart

      has no use for.

   The big wave brought you.

   Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily

      and incessantly beautiful.  We talked and you

      have forgotten the words.

   The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street

      of my city.

   Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to

      make your name, the lilt of your laughter:

      these are the illustrious toys you have left me.

   I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find

      them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and

      to the few stray stars of the dawn.

   Your dark rich life ... 

   I must get at you, somehow; I put away those 

      illustrious toys you have left me, I want your

      hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely,

      mocking smile your cool mirror knows.

   

                       II

   

   What can I hold you with?

   I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the

      moon of the jagged suburbs.

   I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked

      long and long at the lonely moon.

   I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts

      that living men have honoured in bronze:

      my father's father killed in the frontier of

      Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,

      bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in

      the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather

      --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of

      three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on

      vanished horses.

   I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, 

      whatever manliness or humour my life.

   I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never

      been loyal.

   I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,

      somehow --the central heart that deals not

      in words, traffics not with dreams, and is

      untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

   I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at

      sunset, years before you were born.

   I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about

      yourself, authentic and surprising news of 

      yourself.

   I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the

      hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you 

      with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

   

   

                     - Jorge Luis Borges (1934)