Selected Poems

Jorge Luis Borges began as a poet — it was only later, in his fifties, that the extraordinary short stories made him world-famous. But the poetry was always there, underneath everything: in the precision of the imagery, in the density of each sentence, in the way his prose carried more philosophical weight per word than almost any other writer in the world. This bilingual Penguin Modern Classics edition collects the best of his poems across a fifty-year career.

The subjects are quintessentially Borges: the streets of Buenos Aires at night, the gauchos of the Argentine pampas, mirrors and labyrinths and the unreliability of time, the Norse mythology he loved from childhood, the act of reading and writing and imagining. But what makes these poems so remarkable is not their subjects but their quality: a precision of image combined with a musicality that survives even translation, in versions by W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.

Essential for any reader of Borges — and a revelation for anyone who thinks of him only as a prose writer. Edited by Alexander Coleman. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.