THE GIFTS

Let no one debase with pity or reprove
This declaration of God's mastery
Who with magnificent irony
Gave me at once books and the night.

Of this city of books he made two
Lightless eyes the owners, eyes that can
Read only in the library of dreams
Those senseless paragraphs that surrender

The dawns to their desire. In vain the day
Lavishes on them its infinite books,
Arduous as those arduous manuscripts
That were destroyed in Alexandria.

Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story has it)
A king dies amid fountains and gardens;
I drudge aimlessly about the limits
Of this enormous library of my blindness.

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East
And the West, centuries, dynasties,
Symbols, cosmos, and cosmogonies
Entice from the walls, but uselessly.

Within my darkness I slowly explore
The hollow half light with hesitant cane,
I who always imagined Paradise
To be a sort of library.

Something, which certainly is not named
By the word chance, governs these things;
Some other already received on other faded
Afternoons the many books and the dark.

Wandering through the heavy galleries,
I often feel with sacred vague horror
That I am that other, the dead one, who will
Have walked here too and on these very days.

Which of us is writing this poem
With plural I and a single darkness?
What difference the word that names me
If the curse is undivided and single?

Groussac or Borges, I look at this dear
World which collapses and goes out
In a pale indefinite ash
That resembles both the dream and oblivion.

—Translated by IRVING FELDMAN