Arte poética [English translation]

To look at the river made of time and water

And remember that time is another river,

To know that we are lost like the river

And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep

While it is another dream, and that the death

That our flesh goes in fear of is that death

Which comes every night and is called sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol

Of the days of man and of his years,

To transmute the outrage of the years

Into a music, a murmur of voices, and a symbol,

To see in death sleep, and in the sunset

A sad gold—such is poetry,

Which is immortal and poor. Poetry

returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face

Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;

Art should be like that mirror

Which reveals to us our own face.

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,

Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,

Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca

Of green eternity, not of marvels.

It is also like the river with no end

That flows and remains and is the mirror of one same

Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same

And is another, like the river with no end.

(1960)

• Artist:Jorge Luis Borges