Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges died on this day in 1986. The scene and quotation carved on his gravestone are based upon a favorite Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Battle of Maldon." The quotation translates as "let them not fear a thing," words spoken by the Anglo-Saxon leader to his warriors as they prepared to fight Viking invaders in Essex. In "Elegy," Borges pictures a man who has sailed the world and then returned "to the ancient lands of his forebears": ...to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they
mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil
labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias,
atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own.