Jorge Luis Borges: exploring the fact and fantasy of Magical Realism

• Remorse For Any Death
• Free of memory and of hope, 
• limitless, abstract, almost future, 
• the dead man is not a dead man: he is death. 
• Like the God of the mystics, 
• of Whom anything that could be said must be denied, 
• the dead one, alien everywhere, 
• is but the ruin and absence of the world. 
• We rob him of everything, 
• we leave him not so much as a color or syllable: 
• here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see, 
• there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait. 
• Even what we are thinking, 
• he could be thinking; 

• we have divvied up like thieves 
• the booty of nights and days.

• The Art of Poetry
• To gaze at a river made of time and water
• And remember Time is another river.
• To know we stray like a river
• and our faces vanish like water.

• To feel that waking is another dream
• that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
• we fear in our bones is the death
• that every night we call a dream.

• To see in every day and year a symbol
• of all the days of man and his years,
• and convert the outrage of the years
• into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

• To see in death a dream, in the sunset
• a golden sadness—such is poetry,
• humble and immortal, poetry,
• returning, like dawn and the sunset.

• Sometimes at evening there’s a face
• that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
• Art must be that sort of mirror,
• disclosing to each of us his face.

• They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
• wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
• humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
• a green eternity, not wonders.

• Art is endless like a river flowing,
• passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
• inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
• and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1968) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist and poet who, along with Gabriel Marquez and Elizabeth Allende, is considered one of the founders of Magical Realism, a mode of fiction writing popular especially in South America which integrates fantasy with otherwise traditional styles of storytelling. As with his fiction, Borges’ poetry included much of the same interest in the nature and peculiarity of language, and the interplay of fact and fantasy. Several times he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, but never won it, which some critics believe was a result of his conservative political views — even though he was an outspoken critic of fascism (and communism), anti-Semitism, and his own country’s history of injustice.