1/5/07

Borges and colds

There are albums and books I've never been able to face again because I made the mistake of encountering them the first time when I had a cold. That irritated feeling comes back to me when I hear, for example, Ice-T's "New Jack Hustler", though not so much as it did in 1992.

Jorge Luis Borges considered himself primarily a poet, yet he is renowned more for his fictions. I'm reading his selected poems now and I find that his fictions are more startling overall. But I can't help thinking that maybe the fictions are better translated, at least going by what I see on each left-hand page. That's why I always get bilingual editions if I know the language in question.

Still, I'm plugging through the Borges. Maybe I'm just crabby.

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