ZenSouçis: 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