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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Sunday, November 22, 2009

jorge luis borges, "to a cat"

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
. .

I often think Borges loved cats for their sheer surrealist otherness - beautiful, with a perfect law known only to themselves.

. . . You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand. . .

Think those bits are lyrical? I wish I could read the original Spanish, in which the first four lines run:

No son más silenciosos los espejos
ni más furtiva el alba aventurera;
eres, bajo la luna,
esa pantera que nos es dado divisar de lejos.
. .

Entire poem here. Original Spanish and another quite nice turn at translation here. The poem was first published in El oro de los tigres (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972) and in a 1977 translation by Alastair Reid in The Gold of the Tigers.

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