Right around the end of each school year I piece together a reading list for the summer, then I go to my school and public libraries and start clearing the shelves. COVID forced me to amass a summer reading list out of the books on my shelf at home. As a result, I managed to read several books that I have owned for months or decades. Some were better left on the shelf, but some have been a delight.
Even though schools and libraries are now open, I’m continuing the trend and recently picked up “The Buried Mirror” by Carlos Fuentes. Part history book, part Latin American polemic, I first read the book in its native Spanish (“El espejo enterrado”) in 1998. Some time later I bought the English version, put it on a shelf, and never looked at it again. Until now.
Fuentes opens the book with reflections on the relationship between Spain and the New World. Above all else, he characterizes the relationship as “a debate with ourselves.” In the process he evokes a W.B. Yeats quote:
And if out of our arguments with others we make politics, advised W.B. Yeats, out of our arguments with ourselves we make poetry.
Fuentes, p. 15
The original Yeats quotes is as follows:
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Let’s not let slip the opportunity to quarrel with ourselves. Let’s, in every occasion possible, make poetry.
¡Inglés fatal! 