'On a Certain Street There Is a Certain Door'

Borges titled a sonnet in The Gold of the Tigers, his 1972 collection, "J.M.": 

“On a certain street there is a certain door

shut with its bell and its exact address

and with a flavor of lost Paradise,

which in the early evening I can never

open to enter. The day’s work at its end,

a voice I waited for would wait for me

there in the dissolution of every day

and in the stillness of the beloved night.

Those things are no more. This is my fate:

the blurry hours, impure memories,

habitual abuse of literature

and at the edge my yet to be tasted death.

That stone is all I want. All I request

Are the two abstract dates and nothingness.”

 

The translator is Stephen Kessler (The Sonnets, Penguin Books, 2010). It’s an old man’s poem of wistful regret. Borges was seventy-three the year the collection was published. When thoughts turn to old loves, places and things in memory glow with emotion. In a note to the sonnet Kessler tells us:

 

“The initials may be those of Judith Machado . . . . The reference to a ‘lost Paradise’ suggests the initials can also be taken to stand for John Milton, whose sonnet ‘On His Blindness’ serves as a model for two Borges sonnets of the same title in English . . .”

 

The American poet Robert Mezey (1935-2020), with the assistance of his friend, the poet Dick Barnes (1932-2000), adapted a number of poems by Borges, always adding the tagline “After Borges.” As translations they are loose but stand on their own as English poems. Mezey calls them “imitations,” after Lowell, and he changed the title to “N.W.” (Small Song, 1979):

 

“On a certain street there is a certain door,

Unyielding, around which rockroses rise,

Charged with the scent of a lost paradise,

Which in the evening sunlight opens no more,

Or not to me. Once, in a better light,

Dearly awaited arms would wait for me

And in the impatient fading of the day

The joy and peace of the embracing night.

No more of that. Now, a day breaks and dies,

Releasing empty hours, and impure

Fantasies, and the abuse of literature,

The lawless images and artful lies,

And pointless tears, and envy of other men

And then the longing for oblivion.”