A collection of essays by poet Shen Wei
Poetry Thinker｜Guangxi Normal University Press
Borges: The Great Reader
In the preface to the English translation of Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, published in 1971, Borges claimed:
First of all, I see myself as a reader, and secondly, as a poet, Georges Seferis Introduction before being a writer of prose.
Is a reader Borges more important than a literary Borges? In a way, yes. When the young Borges accepted the family library of thousands of books given to him by his father, he also accepted the character traits given to him by his parents: introversion, shyness, timidity, sensitivity.
Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges in Spanish and English
Allen Lane Penguin Books, 1972 First Edition
Until adulthood, he had not yet had contact with a girl, and his father, blaming him for remaining a boy for too long, brought him in one day and ordered him to sleep with a woman who had slept with his father an unknown number of times before. This memory caused Borges great pain and discomfort, and throughout his life he had trouble getting rid of his fear of sex. In his essay "The Poet," he wrote implicitly about this forced initiation:
A woman, the first one God had given him, waited for him in a dark basement, and he went to her, through stone cobwebbed alleyways and slopes leading to an abyss . ...In the carnal darkness into which he plunges, love and danger await him as well.
It is a Kafkaesque fate that the world sends a brutal command through the mouth of his father. The difference is that where Kafka depicted it as a nightmare and a metamorphosis, Borges turned it into a labyrinth-a magical space filled with tigers, mirrors, daggers, masks, libraries and books.
He suffered from aphasia, and once went to the radio to give a broadcast speech without being able to say a word. It was only with the help of his mother and a psychiatrist that he was able to get rid of his fear of facing listeners and audiences, and later became a successful speaker.
After losing his sight at the age of 56, he was even more inseparable from the help of others, and in his eighties pro became his secretary and nurse, his eyes and hands.
Emilo Rodríguez Monegal wrote in Living in a Labyrinth - A Biography of Borges:
It was as if he had not yet left his mother's womb. Or, more precisely, blindness had sent him back to his mother's womb forever.
During his lifetime, Borges was always tight-lipped and secretive about his private life.
To say that Borges was indirect is to say that real life never seemed to enter his vision, and that he never looked for creative themes in his own life. He was a man who explored metaphysics and literature, a sorcerer who summoned the imagination, and a fresh poet who was bookish but not pedantic.
The unique feature of Borges's world is that there, existence, history, sexuality, psychology, emotions, instincts, etc., are all dissolved, all compressed into a world that belongs only to the spirit. Life, this seething and chaotic commotion, comes to the reader after being filtered through Borges into a myth and sublimated into a concept.
Llosa
Through his thoughts and creations, what keeps coming back are dreams, eternity, and the memory of an endless poem... Writing, for him, is to capture the "third tiger" with the magic of language -
We are looking for the third tiger. > We are looking for the third tiger. This one
like the others will be a form of my fantasy
a combination of human words.
It won't be a flesh-and-blood tiger
stomping across the earth in a world beyond myth.
Another tiger
Everything is a word in a language
Someone or something writes an endless delirium of ravings night after night
That is the history of the world.
Compass
Evidence of his admiration, fascination and even fear of books can also be found in his novels. A number of Borges' novels feature books, and the book is the hero of the story.
The Book of Sand is a book as infinite as sand. "I became a prisoner of this book, suffering from chronic insomnia, and occasionally falling asleep and dreaming about it. This book is like a monster that makes the one who owns it a monster. "I wanted to burn it to the ground, but I was afraid that an infinite book would burn to infinity and make the whole earth a mess, so I finally had to hide it in the basement of a huge library, like a leaf returning to the woods, so that it would disappear and be forgotten.
The Secret Miracle writes of a dream in which a librarian searches for God in the Clementinon Library, who is said to be in a certain volume, on a certain page, in a certain word, in one of the 400,000 volumes of books, and for which he has been blinded by his parents, by his parents' parents, and by himself.
In another essay, "The Library of Babel," Borges compares the universe to a library consisting of innumerable hexagonal showrooms. Arranged on each wall of each hexahedron are five bookshelves, each containing 32 books, each with 400 pages, 40 lines per page, and about 80 black letters in the first line, which in turn are chaotically disorganized. People wrote these books, but then canceled themselves out and became ghosts. Borges wrote:
Humanity-this only race-is annihilating itself, and this library will continue to exist-light, alone, infinite, motionless. Filled with precious books, both useless and immortal, keeping secrets.
The books form the library, a breathing, sleeping flesh, waiting to be touched, to be opened.
Leaving behind the cacophony of the square, I entered the library. Immediately, in an almost corporeal way, I felt the gravity of the books, the serene atmosphere of ordered things, the saved, magically preserved past.
To Leopoldo Lugones
Borges entered the Biblioteca Municipal de Buenos Aires in 1937, and has remained in the library for almost his entire life ever since.
He had begun to lose his eyesight by the time he was appointed director of the Biblioteca Nacional de Argentina in 1955. He wrote:It is a wonderful mockery that God gave me 800,000 books and at the same time made me lose my sight.
The ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico
He thought of Homer and Milton. He said:
Homer was as if he honored me personally, his blindness was as if it were mine, his acceptance of darkness was as if it were mine. Blindness came to me like a slowly approaching dusk...
Perhaps the encyclopedias, the atlases, the East and the West, the centuries, the dynasties, the symbols, the universe and its origins in the libraries had nothing to do with him anymore, but he accepted this slowly approaching dusk, and the long night that lay behind it, with equanimity. In the face of the night, he searches for a "language of the dawn"
to transform the insults of the years into
a music, a whisper, a symbol.
Poetry
In a quiet, dusty, endless library, I always felt that Borges was a gourmand of reading, but an elegant, slow-gulping gourmand, with a good appetite and indestructible digestion - eating books and digesting the world.
At times, he sighed with anguish at not being able to read the entire library. He meditated, roamed, and wandered in the library until he became a ghost, a "nobody", as he called himself
Whitman's causal law that "the production of great works is possible only through the existence of great readers" was broken by Borges. If the world has lost all its readers, you cannot say that there are no readers, there is still this one - Borges, a great reader, an infinite individual.
Poet Shen Wei's Essays
Poetry Thinker｜Guangxi Normal University Press
This book is one of the first three excellent essays in the series "Poetry Thinker - Reading Classics".
Forty important foreign poets were chosen to sort out the Western poetic tradition from Homer in ancient Greece to the modern poet Heaney, with the aim of "sketching the spiritual portrait of genius and conveying the voice of the world". As a poet and writer of national repute, he has become a popularizer and evangelist of poetry in this book-carrying the torch of poetry to the possible readers.
The precise combination of poem, person, and context, the holistic approach to the George Seferis profile, and the penetration into the depths of the work and the soul with infinite understanding, are the most striking features of this book.
Introduction:
Shen Wei was born in 1965 in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province. He is the author of nearly 20 poetry collections, including Selected Poems of Shen Wei, My Dust, My Straight Path, Staying in the Moment, a collection of prose essays, Xinjiang Dictionary, Legends of Plants, and Kashgar, a collection of commentaries, and many other edited works and stage art works. His poems and prose have been translated into more than ten languages, including English, French, Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. He has been awarded the Lu Xun Literature Prize, Liu Lian Poetry Prize, Rougang Poetry Prize, October Literature Prize, Flowerland Literature List Annual Poetry Gold Medal, and Chinese Literature Media Award, etc. He is also a member of the Chinese Literature Association.
Table of Contents:
002 Homer: Works of the Gods
010 Sappho: The Tenth Muse
017 Hayyam: Ancient Songs of the Persian Gulf of Happiness and Sorrow
024 Alighieri Dante: Whose Inferno
031 Dunn: Half Lover, Half God
039 Jowar. -Goethe: the king of the pen
046 Friedrich Schiller: the raging prima donna
052 William Blake: innocence and experience
059 H?lderlin: poetic dwelling
066 Byron: Don Juan's love affair and
073 John Keats: the nightingale still sings
080 Pushkin: The Autumn of Bolkino
087 Charles Baudelaire: the Star without an Atmosphere
095 Stéphane Mallarmé: the Fierce Thought of Silence
102 Artille Rimbaud: the Psychic Prodigal Son
109 Walt Whitman: the High Song of Man
116 Emily Dickinson: the Crossed Lightning
124 William Butler Yeats: rejected love
131 Paul Valéry: the festival of the intellect
138 René Maria Rilke: where to dwell
145 Ezra Pound: the pyramid of poetry
152 T.S. Eliot: the wilderness pioneer
159 Wallace Stevens: The Poet's Poet
166 Pasternak: The Smoldering and Burning Conscience
174 Mandelstam: Gold Dancing in the Sky
181 Tsvetaeva: Chewing Up the Bitter Artemisia
188 Weston Hugh Auden: The Fire of Affirmation
195 Jorge Luis Borges: The Great Reader
202 Juan Ramón Jiménez: Little Silver and Him
209 St. Joan Pace: The Epic of the Heart
216 George Seferis: The Endurance of the Stone
223 Pablo Neruda: God's Breadwinner
230 Euije?o Montale: The Leadership of the Thorns
238 Elytis: For Light and Clarity Speaking
245 Mi?osz: gazing at the flowers of hell
252 Seyfert: the wariness of the tongue
259 Joseph Brodsky: the new Dante
268 Pace: towards the beginning, forever departing
276 Walcott: the child of the divided
284 Seamus Heaney: the time of the Mining
290 Postscript
This article is related to the word concept analysis:
Library
Library (library), the collection, organization and preservation of documents and materials and provide readers with the use of scientific, cultural and educational institutions. English library word originated in Latin librarium, the original meaning of the book collection. Ancient China's various book depository, commonly known as the book depository, the end of the 19th century before the emergence of the word library. Library is the development of human society to a certain stage of civilization, it is a certain society's political, economic and cultural services, and subject to their constraints. The word "library" first appeared in the Japanese literature in 1877; and the earliest appearance in the literature in China, when pushed to "Education World" published in the 62nd issue of a "to set up a simple library said", when in 1894. China's earliest provincial libraries for the Hubei Provincial Library founded in 1904.