To the nightingale

In what secret night of England old

or of the constant Rhine incalculable,

lost amidst the nights of all my nights,

to my ignorant hearing did it come

your voice laden with mythologies,

nightingale of Virgil and the Persians?

Perhaps I never heard you, but to my life

your life now is joined, inseparably.

A spirit wandering was made your symbol

in a book of mysteries. Marino

nicknamed you the siren of the woods

and you sing in Juliet’s great night

and upon the intricate Latin page

and from within the pinewoods of that other

nightingale of Judea and of Germany,

Heine the waggish, the enflamed, the sad.

Keats heard you for everyone, forever.

There is not even one among the bright names

that peoples have given you upon the earth

that does not wish to be worthy of your music,

nightingale of darkness. The Hagarene

dreamed you caught up in an ecstasy

your breast transpierced by the very thorn

of that sung rose you redden evermore

with your final blood. Assiduously

I plot in hollow evening this exercise,

nightingale of sand and of the seas,

that in memory, exaltation and fable,

you burn with love and die melodiously.

 

Jorge Luis Borges