Everness- Jorge Luis Borges

Sólo una cosa no hay. Es el ovido. Dios, que salva el metal, salva scoria Y cifra en Su profética memoria Las lunas que serán y las que han sido. Ya todo está. Los miles de reflejos Que entre los dos crepúsculos del dia Tu rostro fue dejando en los espejos Y los que irá dejando todavía. Y todo es una parte del diverso Cristal de esa memoria, el universe; No tienen fin sus arduos correedores Y las puertas cierran a to paso; Sólo del otro lado ocaso Verás los Arquetipos y Esplendores.

And my Translation: Only one thing is not there: oblivion. God, who saves the metal, saves the waste, and codes in his prophetic memory the moons that will be and the moons that have been. Everything already is. The thousands of reflections that, between the twilights of dusk and dawn, your face has left in mirrors, as well as those it will leave. Everything is part Of the manifold crystal of memory, the universe; there is no end to its terrible corridors or the doors that it shuts along your path; only on the other side of the sunset will you see the Archetypes and the Splendors.

It's a difficult poem, to be sure. I chose to abandon the rhyme in the original on or to maintain fidelity with the sense. Even if Spanish is not your language I recommend sounding out the original as best you can to get a feel for its sounds and rhythms.

What is Borges attempting to say here? The opening line make that pretty explicit, I think. That the only thing that does not exist is non-existence. A paradox, rather than a redundancy. There rest of the poem attempt to balance the states of being, i.e. what is, what was, what will be, as coexisting in the "manifold crystal of memory", which is the universe its self. But there are archetypes from which the trinity of being generates but in order to witness them one must reach "the other side of the sunset", a vague locale, and, in my opinion, the weakest moment in the poem.