Juan Lopez and John Ward

I was sent the following Borges poem in translation, and, being a little dissatisfied with the translation, knocked out a slightly different one. Here for Google -- or for you -- to find it:


Juan Lopez and John Ward

They were fated into a strange time.

The planet was parcelled into different lands
each with its provision of loyalties, of
fond remembrances, of a past without a
doubt heroic, of rights, of insults, of a
special mythology, and eminences in bronze,
of anniversaries, demagogues, and emblems.
This division, beloved of mapmakers,
bred war.

López had been born in the city by the still river;
Ward, on the outskirts of the city on the path
of Father Brown. He had studied Castilian
so as to read Quixote.

The other professed a love for Conrad, a revelation
from a lecture hall on Viamonte Avenue.

Possible friends, they were only face to face
a single time, on an island overly exposed,
and each of them was Cain, and each was Abel.

Buried together, they are known now to the snow,
and to dissolution.

What I tell here occurred in a time beyond our ken.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Sept. 1982