A boys choir; a dance group and a poet - three versions of genius
Il Volo (The Flight) the Italian boys choir.. singing Il Mondo
About Il Volo:
Riverdance (Irish step-dancing troupe)
the final performance
To Beatrice Biblioni Webster de
Bullrich
by Jorge Luis Borges
I.
The useless dawn finds me in a
deserted street
corner : I have outlived the night
Nights are proud waves : dark blue
top heavy
waves laden with all hues of deep
spoil, laden with things unlikely and
desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious
gifts, and
refusals, of things half given away,
half withheld, of joys with a dark
hemisphere. Nights act that way,
I
tell you
The urge, that night, left me the
customary
shreds and odd ends : some hated
friends to chat with, music for
dreams,
and the smoking of bitter ashes. The
things my hungry heart has no use
for.
The big wave brought you.
Woods, any woods, your laughter : and you
so lazily and incessantly beautiful.
We talked and you have forgotten the
words
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted
street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds
that
go to make your names, the lilt of
your laughter : these are the
illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn I lose
them,
I find them; I tell them to the few
stray dogs and to the few stray
stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life...
I must get at you somehow : I put
away
these illustrious toys you have left
me, I want your hidden look, your
real smile - that lonely mocking
smile
your cool mirror knows.
II.
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
**********
Elegy
Oh destiny of Borges
to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world
or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,
to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,
of Colombia and of Texas,
to have returned at the end of changing generations
to the ancient lands of his forebears,
to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties
where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,
to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,
to have grown old in so many mirrors,
to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,
to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,
to have seen the things that men see,
death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,
and the delicate stars,
and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing
except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires
a face that does not want you to remember it.
Oh destiny of Borges,
perhaps no stranger than your own
