In Praise of Darkness

“In Praise of Darkness” is a poem, and book, by Jorge Luis Borges. It was originally published in Spanish in 1969, late in Borges’s career—his first book of poetry, Fervor de Buenos Aires, was published in 1923. “In Praise of Darkness,” a free verse poem about Aging and Blindness, The Presence of the Past, and the speaker’s Relationship to Literature, also lists some of Borges’s literary influences, including 19th-century American Transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Shakespeare.

In addition to poetry, Borges wrote short stories, essays, and screenplays. He was also well-known for his translations. The first English translation of Borges’s book, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, was published in 1974 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for translation in 1975.

This guide cites the translation by Hoyt Rogers that was published in the 1999 edition of Borges’s Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman.

Poet Biography

Jorge Luis Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. He grew up speaking both English and Spanish: His English-speaking grandmother, who lived with the family, taught him to read and speak English, and his father had a large library with English and Spanish books. This library was a source of inspiration for Borges, who became a fan of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Oscar Wilde, and famed works of classical Spanish literature such as Don Quixote.

In 1914, the Borges family traveled to Europe. In Geneva, Jorge Luis Borges studied French and German, earning his bachelor’s degree from the Collège de Genève. In 1919, his family moved to Spain, where Borges became involved with poets who called themselves Ultraists. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1921, and his first book, a collection of poems titled Fervor de Buenos Aires, was published in 1923. In Buenos Aires, he worked in a library, but was temporarily ousted from this position while the dictator Juan Perón was in power. After Perón was exiled in 1955, Borges became a professor at the University of Buenos Aires. In his fifties, Borges, like his father, went blind.

Borges gained popularity outside of his Argentine community of writers when he won the Prix Formentor, the International Publishers Prize, along with Samuel Beckett in 1961. This recognition led to Borges holding international lecture tours. He became so well known that critics created the term Borgesian to describe his specific literary style, which often features complex and nuanced magical realism and labyrinthine imagery. In addition to composing his own work, Borges was also a prolific translator of works by various authors, such as Walt Whitman and James Joyce. Borges died of liver cancer in 1986. Since his death, Borges’s short stories and essays have become more famous than his poetry.

Poem text

Borges, Jorge Luis. “In Praise of Darkness.” Trans. Robert Mezey. 1969. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

In the first line, the speaker asserts that “old age” is a phrase used by other people, not him; however, the second line inclusively suggests that “our” old age can still contain happiness.

The speaker divides human beings into their bodily material, which he calls “the animal” (Line 3), the human, and the spirit, reassuring the readers that in old age, only the animal is near death.

The fifth and sixth lines describe the speaker’s old age existence as an obscure place, containing shapes that are indistinct (because of the speaker’s failing eyesight). They give off light, instead of darkness.

In Lines 7-13, the speaker describes Buenos Aires, which has in his mind’s eye reconstituted itself into the neighborhoods he is familiar with because he can no longer see the modern city as it actually is, sprawling out into suburbs that extend into the countryside. The speaker remembers some of these well-known areas of the city being derelict: The Once neighborhood has dirty streets, while the houses in Southside have fallen into disrepair.

In Line 14, the speaker asserts that once his life was too busy. He considers his blindness, in an extended metaphor: Once, the Greek philosopher Democritus extracted his own eyes in order to gain mental clarity. Now, old age, which has taken the speaker’s vision, is his Democritus-like destroyer of eyes. The speaker’s eyesight is fading in a slow and painless way; Lines 17-19 compare the growing darkness’s downward, sloping path with eternity. In Lines 20-23, the speaker describes things that are becoming unclear. He is not able to see the current details of faces, so his mental images of people are outdated; his sexual desire for women has also changed as he can no longer see them clearly. Street corners appear to be other street corners. The print in books is unreadable.

Lines 24 and 25 are the speaker’s emotional reaction to his loss of vision. He feels like he is supposed to be afraid, but losing his vision instead carries the sweet sensation of returning home.

In Lines 26-29, the speaker considers how all the books he has read are just a small portion of the books that have been written throughout history. He still has the memories of the stories he’s read, and these can be transformed through repeated consideration.

Lines 30-32 describe how paths from all four directions come together in the speaker’s hidden center. In Lines 33-42, the speaker explains that these paths comprise all the details of lived experience: roads traveled by himself and others, people, deaths and the dead, resurrections, nights, dreams, waking time, yesterdays, snow, words, and love. The paths also include literary references to the Dane (Hamlet), the Persian (Omar Khayyam), and Emerson.

In Lines 43-45, the speaker asserts that he can forget the listed items as he reaches his center, at the heart of which is a key, a mirror, and algebra.

In the final line of the poem, the speaker says he will understand his core identity in the near future.