Selected Poems

Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. A decade before writing his earliest stories, Borges published his first book of poems. And even in that precocious debut, the twenty-four-year-old poet claimed for himself the principal themes that would preoccupy him for the next half century: the cult of his ancestors and his "mysterious habit called Buenos Aires"; the enigma of time and the many yesterdays of history; the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Berkeley; the now-familiar mirrors, mazes, and swords.<P>This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems -- the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime's work -- from Borges's first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators: Willis Barnstone, Alexander Coleman, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, Kenneth Krabbenhoft, Eric McHenry, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Hoyt Rogers, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Alan S. Trueblood, and John Updike.<P>When Penguin published Andrew Hurley's new translation of Borges' Collected Fictions last year, the book was hailed in The New York Times as "an event, a cause for celebration". Now, the celebration continues with Selected Poems, the second installment in Penguin's three-volume edition of Borges' collectedworks in English.