The Ethos of Tango in the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges and Alejandra Pizarnik

 

I was going through my files when I found a writing pad where I took notes during a work meeting in Buenos Aires.

As an epidemiologist, I had many trips to Argentina in the 1990s. Reforming the healthcare system was the goal but a good part of my visits was with friends talking literature and arts. Especially poetry. And I discovered cultural aspects in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Alejandra Pizarnik that I had not appreciated before.

… In a corner of writing pad I had scribbled “Patience is existential – it is not a waste of time to wait.”

I smiled and recalled how often I was told to be patient, that things would eventually happen, and that I first need to learn all the things the healthcare policy makers took for granted, as Argentinians, regarding how and went to implement reforms.

“We have the ethos of Tango,” I was once told “it is more than a dance and song; it is the essence of the wait.”

As I continued to look at that yellow page and the line I had written, I recalled lines from Borges and Pizarnik and searched the original poems.

 

Argentina’s most famous poet often wrote about time and waiting. Not time as an absolute concept but about the suspension of time. Not waiting as a delay or wasted opportunity, but a cherished space where memories and longing for future moments find their wisdom.

Waiting for love, or being loved, is a common theme in Borges’ poems, and his most famous lines are found in "Amorosa Anticipación" (Loving Anticipation). In this poem Borges watches his lover sleep, and he imagines her on a timeless beach where love exists untouched by life’s pace.

The ending lines of the poem are:

Arrojado a quietud,

divisare esa playa ultima de tu ser

y te vere por vez primera, quiza,

como Dios a de verte,

desbaratada la ficcion del Tiempo,

sin el amor, sin mi.

 

(Flung to quietness,

I shall see that last beach of your being

and I will see you for the first time, maybe,

as God must see you,

Time fiction spoiled,

without love, without me)

 

Another famous poem by Borges had the final lines on the wall of a bar in Buenos Aires where I often met with colleagues after work hours. It is again about time, patience but also about the optimism of the poet that love will arrive, that it was undeniably so, and that he has to decide if he would survive being under the siege of that moment.

The lines are:

"Es el amor. Tendré que ocultarme o huir...

Estar contigo o no estar contigo es la medida de mi tiempo."

(It is love. I will have to hide or run...

To be with you or not to be with you is the measure of my time.)

 

Alejandra Pizarnik approaches the issue of time, the wait and expectations as a femme fatale. When I first read her 1956 última inocencia, I thought of Circe in Homer's Odyssey - alluring in her pain, destructive in her survival. Not only her life and melancholic poetry have inspired me over the past decades, but I have also found her imagery most translatable to other forms of expression such as painting. More about this later in this post.

Melancholy and longing are central to Pizarnik’s life and writing. For me, she is a Fado singer, a Spanish poet who metamorphoses into a Portuguese artist singing the blues. Love is a painful reminder to her of times passed and of returns in await.

In “La Enamorada” (The woman in love), Pizarnik explores the pain and punishing of love as she awaits the return of her lover. Yet, in all the melancholy of her exploration she still holds on to hope, perhaps as Borges defined the inevitability of love. During that wait, she finds an internal patience in that waiting for her lover would “close the doors to her face” to isolate her away from the outside world where time is not suspended like Borges suggested.

She writes:

y te fue triste
estabas sola
la luz rugía
el aire cantaba
pero tu amado no volvió
enviarás mensajes
sonreirás
tremolarás tus manos
así volverá tu amado tan amado
oyes la demente sirena que lo robó
el barco con barbas de espuma
donde murieron las risas
recuerdas el último abrazo

 

(…sad you were alone

the light roared

the air sang

but your beloved did not return

you will send messages

you will smile

you will wave your hands

this is how your beloved so beloved will return

you hear the demented siren that stole him

the ship with beards of foam

where laughter died

you remember the last embrace)

 

 

… So, one line on a forgotten yellow writing pad page took me back to the 1990s to remind me that patient waiting is not a loss of time. Rather that it is stopping time to allow the inevitable to prepare itself for arrival. Suspend time to remember. Create that space where longing becomes a Fado song as I have heard numerous times in Oporto and Lisboa.

And when it comes to the poems and lives of Borges and Pizarnik, being patient is the ethos of Tango, a dance to accept the longing while awaiting your dreams to happen. Or to return.

And I thought that the essence of the wait is like sitting on a rock at the edge of time – uncomfortable and lonesome, yet protected and full of hope.

 

About the photo:

I took this photo from my car window, in Buenos Aires.  It was not published before as it is a photo with little story until I wrote about Pizarnik and her lover “closing the doors to her face” as a way to isolate herself from the daily reality of the outside world. Interestingly, all the windows are shut in this photo, something unusual for the daily life in many of the Latin American countries.

 

PS/ I have written about how Jose Luis Borges’ poems have influenced my own writings here:

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2026/01/from-edgar-allan-poe-to-garden-of.html

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/12/love-time-quantum-mechanics.html

 

And about Alejandra Pizarnik’s life as a muse for some of my literary outlooks as well as for my paintings:

https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/11/la-de-los-ojos-abiertos-revisiting.html

https://vaheark.blogspot.com/2024/11/inpired-by-poems-of-blanca-varela-and.html

 

September 24, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

Deaf like Odysseus

 

I was reading words by the contemporary American lyrist poet Gregory Orr from his 2013 poetry collection “River Inside the River”. A passage about rivers made me stop and look from the deck of my house to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They look different with their barren peaks. The snow that melts from these mountain ranges becomes rivers, becomes the expected. Not this year.

Orr wrote

“I want to go back

To the beginning

We all do.

I think:

Hurt will not be there.

But I’m wrong.”

 

They say rivers cannot go back. I wonder if they do not want to go back. To the source, to the high mountains where the snow wait to be melted. To the meadows where deer and quail welcome sunsets as a promise for new, warmer rays. Perhaps rivers do not go back as wrote K. Gibran, and they might tremble before entering the ocean fearing it will disappear. But they know they have to become the ocean, because rivers do. Or perhaps because they have been there already, and their return cannot efface the pain they had left behind.

 

They say the oak tree lives in the acorn. I wonder if that tree drops acorns where part of itself will live again. In respect to where it came from. As a responsibility protected in the shell of time.

James Allen wrote in his 1903 masterpiece “As a Man Thinketh” about life’s flow:

“The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

 

They say the song of sirens falls on deaf ears. I wonder if unwaxed ears fear the sirenas’ songs before they hear them. And after.

Sirens destroy our ships on the rivers leading to the seas. Odysseus wanted to hear those songs, but asked his sailors to tie him to the mast and for all to plug their ears with beeswax.

No siren song encountered during our journey on our inner river should allure or pierce our emotional boundaries. Especially if we are sailing up-river, against the current. Some inner rivers can and do go back.

 

They say he who deals in honey licks his fingers. I wonder if on the Spice Road merchants selling pepper licked their fingers. When our days are mellifluous and flowing with honey, we may be tempted to lick our fingers. But few of us embark upon that journey without the Spice Road merchants’ peppers.

Did Shakespeare in Sonnet 128 dreamed of kissing the hands of a woman playing music while his deaf ears heard the melody, as he wrote:

“Nimble leap

To kiss the inward of thy hand”?

 

Yet, not all rivers are for a journey. Some need to be just crossed; others to walk their banks. We are often curious about what hides on the other side of the river. That crossing is for those who have never seen an ocean before. The flux and flow they know is about the moment, what befalls upon our eyes and ears.

An African proverb reminds us of the humility necessary while we are safely on the banks of rivers going to sea, or inner rivers going upstream, against the current. 

  “Those who have not crossed the river should not laugh at those who are drowning”

... Rivers may or cannot go back. But it feels like they do when sailors turn the bow and push upstream.

September 19, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

Photo taken with a Soviet Salyut-C medium format camera and Zodiak 8B 30mm f3.5 lens made in Ukraine.

When the Clay Complies

 

 

Turn

And let the hands

Shape your way

To looking

Around

At their

Own

Pace

 

Pass

By the past

Seas and streams

Where old waves

Returned

 

 

Hear

The promises

You wanted to make

But made them

Only

To yourself

 

Shy

Remain curious

When your turn

Becomes

An unpretentious

 Line

A point

In the present

 

Then

 

Wet

The hands

A finger

At a time

With your forgotten

Last tear

And wipe them

With scar

Tissue

 

And

 

Turn again

That wonderful turn

This time

To shape

The hands you

Hold

With the colours

Of promises

That since

Found their

Seas and streams

Before

Sunrise

 

September 15, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

Photo I took In Baltimore Harbor with 1955 Fed-2 camera and Industar-22 lens

Beauty is Kind and Gentle, Like a Young Mother Half-shy of Her Own Glory, She Walks Among Us (Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

 

 

 

Up the stairs

The young mother

Climbed in her old shoes

Leaving wet prints

Of her walks

In streets

Cleaned by the August

Rain

 

It was elemental

Ordinary

Yet all I saw

Was her glory

 

And the comfort

Of her beauty

Walked beside her

Up the stairs

Into the house

 

Leaving more than

Wet footprints

From the August

Rain

 

 

September 10, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

The Iwákteteya Web (Lakota Nation Dream Catcher)

 

 

I rang the bell

Then knocked at the door

No one came in

So I let

Myself

Into

My room

 

And there

I found

The vast space

Where I became

Echo

Where I stayed quiet

Having seen

What I wanted to see

Having done what

I had

Hoped

 

So I locked

The door

To Keep

Myself

In

 

September 5, 2026

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026

 

In the Native American Lakota legend, the circular web connotes the circle of life and catches only good dreams, visions, and ideas to enhance that circle for each person.  The Iwákteteya Web also catches bad dreams and evil forces and guides them away to pass through the center hole of the web and fade away.

Picture taken with an early 1960s Nikkor-Q Auto 20 cm telephoto lens on the same age Nikon F camera, using ASA 400 film.

As I looked through the viewfinder to frame the shot, the closeness of the balloons and the differences in size and shades made me think about the dream catcher, as the balloons quickly went to different altitudes, and the smaller one faded away.

The invisible web old lenses cannot catch.....