La Recoleta
Saturday, September 10, 2016
As the dark and wet days for nights that are November it is easy to lie in bed and in melancholy reflect on death. I do this a lot perhaps after having lived so many years of my formative years in Mexico. One of my favourite places in Buenos Aires is the cemetery of La Recoleta. This past April I visited it with my friend Nora Patrich and our favourite model/subject Yuki. Yuki is a frequent visitor of La Recoleta. She has a friend. Her friend is the particular cat in the photograph. There are many cats in La Recoleta but this is one that she feeds with regularity.
Borges wrote several poems about La Recoleta and he mentioned how he would end his living days there. Alas this was not to be. He is buried in Geneva not far from Charlie Chaplin.
Borges wrote several poems about La Recoleta and he mentioned how he would end his living days there. Alas this was not to be. He is buried in Geneva not far from Charlie Chaplin.
La
recoleta - Jorge Luís Borges
Convencidos
de caducidad
por
tantas nobles certidumbres del polvo,
nos
demoramos y bajamos la voz
entre
las lentas filas de panteones,
cuya
retórica de sombra y de mármol
promete
o prefigura la deseable
dignidad
de haber muerto.
Bellos
son los sepulcros,
el
desnudo latín y las trabadas fechas fatales,
la
conjunción del mármol y de la flor
y las
plazuelas con frescura de patio
y los
muchos ayeres de a historia
hoy
detenida y única.
Equivocamos
esa paz con la muerte
y
creemos anhelar nuestro fin
y
anhelamos el sueño y la indiferencia.
Vibrante
en las espadas y en la pasión
y
dormida en la hiedra,
sólo la
vida existe.
El
espacio y el tiempo son normas suyas,
son
instrumentos mágicos del alma,
y cuando
ésta se apague,
se
apagarán con ella el espacio, el tiempo y la muerte,
como al
cesar la luz
caduca
el simulacro de los espejos
que ya
la tarde fue apagando.
Sombra
benigna de los árboles,
viento
con pájaros que sobre las ramas ondea,
alma que
se dispersa entre otras almas,
fuera un
milagro que alguna vez dejaran de ser,
milagro
incomprensible,
aunque
su imaginaria repetición
infame
con horror nuestros días.
Estas
cosas pensé en la Recoleta,
en el
lugar de mi ceniza.
Recoleta Cemetery
By Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Stephen Kessler
Convinced of decrepitude
by so many certainties of dust,
we linger and lower our voices
among the long rows of mausoleums,
whose rhetoric of shadow and marble
promises or prefigures the desirable
dignity of having died.
The tombs are beautiful,
the naked Latin and the engraved fatal dates,
the coming together of marble and flowers
and the little plazas cool as courtyards
and the many yesterdays of history
today stilled and unique.
We mistake that peace for death
And we believe we long for our end
when what long for is sleep and indifference.
Vibrant in swords and in passion,
and asleep in the ivy,
only life exists.
Its forms are space and time,
they are magical instruments of the soul,
and when it is extinguished,
space, time, and death will be extinguished with it,
as the mirrors’ images wither
when evening covers them over
and the light dims.
Begnign shade of trees,
wind full of birds and undulating limbs,
souls dispersed into other souls,
it might be a miracle that they once stopped being,
an incomprehensible miracle,
although its imaginary repetition
slanders our days with horror.
I thought these things in the Recoleta,
in the place of my ashes.
