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