There is longing here and aspiration and despair; the last springing from self-knowledge of one's limitations and how unreal one's aspirations can be. Borges's despair, of course, stems out of his ruminations on the human condition - dream, memory, the nature of the past and of life itself. While he often writes snapshot poems that encapsulate a mood or an event, his poetry is one long rumination on life itself. Take this piece from "La Recoleta": Vibrant in swords and in passion,/ asleep in ivy,/ only life is real./ Space and time are its shapes,/ the mind's magical modes;/ and when life burns out,/ space, time and death go out with it/ as when light fails/ the image in the mirror fails.

There are no references to afterlife in his poems. Life could be a dream or a fever. Afterlife is not even that. But he spars with death as most poets do. At times Borges is obsessed with it. For instance, in his third volume San Martin Copybook (Cuaderno San Martin), 1929, the titles of the poems are a giveaway - "Deathwatch on the Southside", "Deaths of Buenos Aires". "La Recoleta" starts with the lines "Death is scrupulous here; here in this city of ports,/ death is circumspect." In the same poem he goes on to talk about "birds prattling of death without ever suspecting it." And the poem ends on a dying note as well, with death going hand in hand with flowers and beauty.

Borges seems to meditate on death as a sort of a profundity that gets lost - "frail wisdoms lost in everyman's death". Death frees us from "the daily round of the real". In one poem, he says "Death is life lived away,/ Life is death coming on." He plays around with affinities - sleep and death, dream and life, oblivion and death, dream and death - "Death like a dream that brings forgetfulness of the world." Death for Borges is a sort of a philosophic magnet that attracts and focuses much of life and thought to itself.

Borges started his literary career through languages other than his own. His first poems were in French and English. (This would surprise our Indian "critics"). He learnt English in his childhood from his English grandmother. His Spanish poems came later. In 1919 he published his first poetry volume himself, a fate which befalls many young poets. Imagism was in fashion then and he joined an "imagist sect" called the "Ultraists", much in the same way as Mandelstam joined the "Acmeists" in Russia in the same decade.

His imagination and his language sometimes were both baroque. He would zero-in on the most unlikely subject. Some obscure 13th Century poet, Charles I on the morning of his execution, South American generals ruminating, often on the day of their death - it was such moments he picked up like a boy picks up shells from a beach. In fiction, his essays into the exotic and the baroque would be too tedious to recall, but the masked leper chieftain striving to become a Caliph, comes readily to mind. In his fiction he let himself go, playing about with reality (and thereby creating his own) like a dog playing with a bone. The discipline which the very form of poetry imparts, perhaps prevented him from letting his imagination run completely wild.

He changed the past when it suited his purpose. The past does not mean history alone, but myth which is an earlier past, a past of the collective unconscious. Fascinated by myth, by the complex and the convoluted, the labyrinth as a symbol held him in thrall. His poem "Matthew XXV: 30" starts with the lines: The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet/ The shunting trains trace iron labyrinths./ Steam hisses up and up into the night,/Which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgement.

Now the verse in the Bible (Matthew XXV: 30) states "And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: then there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Keeping that in mind, one understands the reference to steam hissing into the night. It is after all Hell that Borges is discussing.

The labyrinth is the most recurring symbol in his oeuvre. The labyrinth in which the human condition is tied up in knots is too tangled for even the gods to straighten out: "Zeus, Zeus himself could not undo these nets/ Of stone encircling me.../ The galleries seem straight/ But curve furtively, forming secret circles/ At the terminus of years."

Borges had a strong rational streak. Having become blind fairly early, the reality/ illusion metaphors held a special interest for him. But he negated assumptions that associated the dark with dark forces. In his poem "Daybreak" he says, "The spent night/ lives on in the eyes of the blind." In this splendid poem on blindness, he calls darkness "refreshing" and the dawn "hideous", the dark being more familiar to the unseeing blind. Was it his rationality which made him dislike Tagore? He called Tagore a "well-meaning trickster" (tramposo de buena fe). As regards the Nobel Prize, he called Tagore a "Swedish invention" (una invencion sveca). I am sure Radice's translations would have made him change his mind.

A question that could worry

posterity is whether Borges was a greater poet than a writer of exquisite fiction that at times bordered on metaphysics. A writer, after all, is one whole person. If you write both fiction and poetry, you cannot pigeon-hole your imagination each time. In his forward to his Selected Poems, Borges says "First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader, then as a poet, then as a prose writer... I suspect that poetry differs from prose not, as many have claimed, through their dissimilar word patterns, but by the fact that each is read in another way. A passage addressed as though to the reason is prose, read as though addressed to the imagination is poetry. I cannot say whether my work is poetry or not, I can only say that my appeal is to the imagination. I am not a thinker. I am merely a man who has tried to explore the possibilities of metaphysics and of religion." He ends the passage by saying "In the long run, perhaps, I shall stand or fall by my poems."

But poetry-lovers are few and the Philistines many. And so Borges will be remembered for his fiction!

Kelki Daruwalla is a well known poet and literary critic.