Shinto by Jorge Luis Borges
Shinto
by Jorge Luis Borges
When misfortune confounds us
in an instant we are saved
by the humblest actions
of memory or attention:
the taste of fruit, the taste of water,
that face returned to us in dream,
the first jasmine flowers of November,
the infinite yearning of the compass,
a book we thought forever lost,
the pulsing of a hexameter,
the little key that opens a house,
the smell of sandalwood or library,
the ancient name of a street,
the colourations of a map,
an unforeseen etymology,
the smoothness of a filed fingernail,
the date that we were searching for,
counting the twelve dark bell-strokes,
a sudden physical pain.
Eight million the deities of Shinto
who travel the earth, secretly.
Those modest divinities touch us,
touch us, and pass on by.
The humblest actions of memory or attention and how they save us — this beautiful and varied litany of surprise and objects and scents and contours, these modest divinities makes this one of my favorite pieces.
Borges, Shinto. From La cifra (The Limit or The Cipher, 1981), one of Borges's late poetry collections, published when he was eighty-two and nearly completely blind. The translation in widest circulation is Alastair Reid's, who was Borges's primary English translator and personal friend for decades, though several other translators have rendered this poem as well. Shinto — with its kami, the eight million deities the poem references, who inhabit natural phenomena and ordinary objects — gave him a frame for articulating what he had perhaps always believed: that the sacred is distributed through the humblest actions of memory or attention rather than concentrated in temples or doctrines.
