Seite 14 [14]
OCR
ARCHERS, HUMANISTS AND STORKS: THREADING ARGENTINE IDENTITY ISSUES pierced by his universal vision. This issue is not worthless. Indeed, Argentina and Hungary have traditionally had to deal with tensions between global and local forces in constant restlessness. In this unique piece that links poetry and philosophy, localism and universalism, Argentine and Hungarian identity concerns as well, Borges tries an impossible identification with a remote but admired “first poet of Hungary”. In a part of this unbeatable poem — perhaps the most beautiful poetic text dedicated by a foreigner to Hungarian literature —, we can read in the splendid translation made by my friend Szabolcs Szekeres, and I quote: The nights and the seas keep us apart, the changes brought by the centuries, the climates, the empires and the bloods, but indecipherably we are united by the mysterious love of words, that habit of sounds and symbols. (Las noches y los mares nos apartan, las modificaciones seculares, los climas, los imperios y las sangres, pero nos une indescifrablemente el misterioso amor de las palabras, este habito de sones y de simbolos.) The daring means chosen by Borges in this poem to span the big temporal and special ellipse which separates both poets was through the well-known Archer of Elea Aporia, the most classical philosophic paradox ever, between the unique being and the multiple existence: Like the archer of Elea a lonely man in an empty afternoon endlessly spouts this impossible nostalgia that seeks a shadow. (Andlogo al arquero del eleata un hombre solo en una tarde hueca deja correr sin fin esta imposible nostalgia, cuya meta es una sombra.) The image of a flying arrow was an ancient symbol for reconciling the possibilities of being one and many at the same time, resolving in that way the inaugural debate of western philosophy between Heraclitus and Parmenides. +13 +
