what a pity

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."

―Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Harvard Univ. Press, 2000)

modest and secret complexity

The fate of a writer is strange. He begins his career by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might attain if the stars are favorable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but rather a modest and secret complexity.

—Jorge Luis Borges, prologue to "The Self and The Other" (1964).

physical object

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

—Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Borges’ Norton Lectures at Harvard, HUP, 2000)

translation

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Tagore

Thirteen years ago, I had the slightly terrifying honor of talking with the venerated and mellifluous Rabindranath Tagore. We were speaking of the poetry of Baudelaire. Someone recited "La Mort des amants," that sonnet so appointed with beds, couches, flowers, chimneys, mantelpieces, mirrors, and angels. Tagore listened intently, but at the end he exclaimed, "I don't like your furniture poet!"

—Jorge Luis Borges, from a review of Tagore's Collected Poems and Plays