Borges, Poems
Tuesdays, 3:00-4:30 pm ET | April 21-July 7
Borges' poems bridged modernism and postmodernism, and revolutionized world literature. Borges started as a poet, and is best known in the Hispanophone world as poet and essayist. To our advantage his first language was English, and his first great influence, whom he translated, was Whitman. As he said in his Harvard Lectures in the 1960s "life is made of poetry, not the other way 'round." Explore with us what this might mean, as we follow him in treating of time, reality, identity, dreams, philosophy, imagination, and fantasy. Our translators include Robert Fitzgerald, WS Merwin, John Updike and many others.
Text: Borges, Selected Poems, facing translation ed. Alexander Coleman, New York: Penguin Classics Random House LLC, 2000, 496 pp., paperback ISBN 9780140587210
Reading Load: 3-4 pp./week
Leaders: Miryam Bujanda and Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga. Miryam is a poet and teaches at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio TX, and is a Macondo Writer’s Workshop alumna. (see Reynaldo's bio above)