Jorge Luis Borges considered himself primarily a poet, yet his renown comes mostly from his fictions. I’m reading his selected poems now and I’m not as startled. Granted, he has some magnificent poems, but I don’t feel like I’m being tossed by waves, as his fictions did to me last summer. I can’t help feeling that it may be because they’re not as well translated, at least going by what I can see on each left-hand page. That’s why I only buy bilingual editions of poetry.