Borges reads "Texas"

My Borges feature has gotten some nice responses—the New Yorker's Book Bench blog tweeted it, the principals were by and large happy with the final result—but my favorite follow-up came via Twitter, where a Montreal-based reader named Natalie Bouchard asked if I still had the recording of Borges reading "Texas." I told Natalie that I did and sent her the MP3 last night. Natalie replied by asking if she could post it around the web, a spread-the-gospel impulse which struck me as such a great (if lightly copyright-infringing) idea that I decided I needed to do it myself. Here is Borges reading "Texas." Even non-Spanish speakers should be able to get something out of his voice—clear, wispy and wise:

Borges reads "Texas"

Mark Strand's elegant, and quite liberal, English translation is below:

Here too. Here as at the other
Edge of the hemisphere, an endless plain
Where a man’s cry dies a lonely death.
Here too the Indian, the lasso, the wild horse.
Here too the bird that never shows itself,
That sings for the memory of one evening
Over the rumblings of history
Here too the mystic alphabet of stars
Leading my pen over the page to names
Not swept aside in the continual
Labyrinth of Days: San Jacinto
And that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.
Here too, the never understood
Anxious, and brief affair that is life.

Comments

[LA Bureau Chief]

Lovely.

[Xiaosage Yang]

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