- Monday, February 13th SWBA (Swarthmore Buenos Aires), Idaes, Paraná 145, 1st. floor: Arrival/Reception
- Tuesday, February 14th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Wednesday, February 15th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Thursday, February 16th Orientation/Spanish level exam
- Monday, February 20 st SWBA: classes begin
- April 2th – 6th Spanish mid-term exams
:: ISRAEL 1969
Poem of the argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges translated by the student Nathaniel Sufrin (Spring Semester 2010), in the context of the class "The translator´s kitchen", dictated by Prof. Ezequiel Zaidenberg. This work was published in nachtmagazine.org
I feared in Israel would be lurking,
with insidious sweetness,
the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated like a sad treasure
in the infidel cities, in the ghettoes,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams,
the nostalgia of those who longed for you,
Jerusalem, beside the waters of Babylon.
What else were you, Israel, than that nostalgia,
that will to save,
among the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgies,
your loneliness with God?
Not so. The oldest nation
is also the youngest.
You have not tempted men with gardens,
with gold and its tedium
but with rigor, the final land.
Israel has told them without words:
you shall forget who you are.
You shall forget the other you left.
You shall forget who you were in the lands
that gave you their afternoons and their mornings
and to which you shall not feel nostalgia.
You will forget your parents’ tongue and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You will be an Israeli, a soldier.
You will build a homeland of swamps, raising it from desert.
Your brother will work with you, he whose face you’ve never seen.
One thing only we promise you: your place in the battle.
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