Enjoying the view from Limbo
Sitting in my office this Wednesday morning in Korea, which means Tuesday evening in the U.S., I have been vaguely attending to Fox News’ election coverage on my second monitor while I work. At 8:45EST, as I write this, I note that for all the numbers talk, the economy talk, and the demographics talk, there are three words I have yet to hear...
I have not written much on this website recently. As I scan the internet these days, and come to terms with the extent to which everything that is ever written, has ever been written, will ever be written, and can ever be stolen and regurgitated in plagiarized form by a property-obliterating computer technology that short-sighted people today are all imagining will be both...
I humbly offer here my own new translation of “Mirrors,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges. The poem has existed in English translation for decades, and in more than one version, perhaps most popularly the translation of Alistair Reid, which is the one through which I first discovered this wonderful work. However, for reasons I will discuss below, I believe this new attempt...
Robert Musil wrote that Kafka’s writing displayed the gentle friendliness of a suicide in the hours between decision and deed. I have previously corrected this lovely sentiment, as it is a false romanticizing (a redundancy, since all romanticism is false) of the suicidal man. Kafka’s gentleness derives not from a decision to die, but rather from a decision not to die, or not...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 5, 2019 · Last modified October 8, 2019
Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite modern writers, published two distinct but similar poems called “Limits,” dealing with roughly the same philosophical theme, namely the gradual narrowing of our remaining experience as we grow older. I wish to discuss the shorter of the two poems, which, although less well-known, is the one I prefer. I begin with Borges’ work itself, which I...
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