Borges, Sonnets

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*Borges. The Sonnets. New York: Penguin, 2010. 301 pp.

Borges is a great practitioner of the sonnet form. This is a bilingual edition edited by Stephen Kessler. I tried to avoid the translations as much as I could. When I saw Alistair Reid translate "palabras" as "such words as these," or Kessler bury an allusion to Góngora by translating "polvo y nada" as "nothing but dust," I got rather disgusted.

In so many sonnets, you start to notice repeated rhymes. Borges was fond of the "verso" "universo" rhyme, for example.