I have been rereading bits of Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. Lots and lots of talent, but the Booker ? I find the character of the judge a little bit wooden and stereotyped, for instance. Anyway, I find the poem by Borges on the page after the dedication really beautiful. It’s called “Boast of Quietness” , and was translated in 1999 by Stephen Kessler, from Selected Poems of Borges, Viking Penguin:

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is as greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
The willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

In this poem, Borges the descendant of a distinguished but impoverished family ( alluded to in the line : My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword。 The portraits are family portraits, and the sword that of an ancestor who was a famous general during one of Argentina’s old civil wars) speaks without bitterness of the nouveaux riches in modern Argentina. He compares their greed, their feeling of self-importance with his own feeling of mortality and his habit of dwelling in the past.

The imagery is poignantly beautiful : the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls. Borges is able to put himself morally above the greedy and the ambitious by boldly stating that “we are all voices of the same poverty” and “My name is someone and anyone”. It is a bold act, in the sense that he was quite proud of his family lineage, and we can’t help wonder whether he really means it, while at the same time we feel amazed by this act of humility from such a proud man.

In the last lines starting from Time is living me, he lines up with great skill images of his identity being dissolved in a greater concept ( humanity, time). This poem starts with a startling, flashing line : writings of light assault the darkness and gradually gathers a ghostly, crepuscular beauty, especially starting from the line The willow grove’s visible prayer as the evening falls whose stunning beauty would be obvious to anyone who has observed how, at dusk, a darkening tree seems to radiate a mysterious presence.