To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river
To know we are lost, like the river,
And that our faces will pass away, like water.To be aware that waking is another kind of sleep
That dreams it does not sleep, and that the death
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind’s days and years,
To transform the outrage of the years,
Into a music, a rumor, and a symbol,To see in death a sleep, and in sunset
A golden sadness, such is poetry,
Both immortal and poor. For poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.Sometimes, some afternoons, there’s a face
That looks up at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror,
Revealing to us our own face.They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Shed tears of joy upon seeing again his Ithaca.
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca,
Of green eternity, not of marvels.It is also like that a river, endless, flowing
Passing yet staying, and a mirror to that same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And yet another, like the river flowing.– Jorge Luis Borges
(and me, trying my hand at translation, from this version …)