Borges and me

Lyrics#

To the other, to Borges, things happen.
I walk through Buenos Aires and linger, perhaps mechanically already,
to look at the arch of a vestibule and the grated gate;

I get news of Borges by mail
and see his name on a triple list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.

I like hourglasses, maps, the typography of the eighteenth century, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and Stevenson's prose;
the other shares these preferences,
but in a vain way that turns them into attributes of an actor.

It would be excessive to state that our relationship is hostile;
I live,
I let myself live,
so that Borges may plot his literature,
and that literature justifies me.

It costs me nothing to confess that he has achieved certain valid pages,
but these pages cannot save me,
perhaps because the good no longer belongs to anyone,
not even to the other,
but to language or tradition.

Furthermore,
I am destined to be lost,
definitively,
and only some instant of me may survive in the other.

Little by little I am yielding everything to him,
although I know his perverse habit of falsifying and magnifying.

Spinoza understood that all things desire to persevere in their being;
the stone eternally wishes to be stone and the tiger a tiger.
I shall remain in Borges, not in myself
(if I am someone),
but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others
or than in the laborious strumming of a guitar.

Some years ago I tried to rid myself of him
and passed from the mythologies of the suburb to games with time and with the infinite,
but those games now belong to Borges
and I will have to imagine other things.

Thus my life is an escape
and everything I lose and everything belongs to oblivion,
or to the other.

I do not know which of the two writes this page.

Composer Notes#

This is the English version of “Borges and I” — the original text, not an adaptation. Borges wrote it in Spanish; this version uses the English translation that has circulated for decades, with that strange fidelity that translations of Borges have, as though the original text already knew it would be translated and kept room for it. I asked for glitch rap, stuttered drum machine, jagged synths — the opposite of the essay’s serenity. I wanted dissociation sonified.

Glitch as form makes sense here because “Borges and I” is a text about sync failure — about the self that lives and the name that publishes operating in parallel, never synchronized. The stutter of glitch rap is literally that: a signal that doesn’t resolve, that repeats without arriving, that displays its own breakage. “I do not know which of the two writes this page” over that fragmented beat stops being a literary paradox and becomes technical description.

There is a register difference between this and the > be me greentext version of the same text. The greentext version has humor, distance, meme irony. This English version on glitch rap came out harder — less amused by the situation, more exposed. Maybe it’s the English, which in this context is less mine than Portuguese and so carries less protection. Or maybe the beat doesn’t permit irony in the same way. Either way, the two versions complete each other without repeating, which was the goal.