Patrick – Remorse For Any Death by Jose Luis Borges

Libre de la memoria y de la esperanza,
ilimitado, abstracto, casi futuro,
el muerto no es un muerto:  es la muerte.
Como el Díos de los místicos
de Quien deben negarse todos los predicados,
el muerto ubicuamente ajeno
no es sino la perdición y ausencia del mundo.

Translation 1
Free from memory and hope
And an unlimited abstract future,
The dead man is not a dead man, he is death
Like the gods of the mystics
Of Whom cannot predict all,
The dead man is an alien everywhere
The dead is the is the loss and absence of the world.

Here, I tried literally translating the Spanish words to English, allowing for some slight changes to the poem’s phrasing. It was a bit tough because some of the words used are not common phrases in Spanish and are not able to be objectively translated from Spanish.

Translation 2
The dead man has no memory and no hope
For an unlimited future
The dead person is no longer a person, he is dead
Like the gods of the mystics
Of whom nobody knows anything about,
The dead man does not  belong anywhere,
He lost the presence of being in the world.

Here, I tried to bring out a bit more of what I think Borges meant when he wrote the poem, and tried to interpret its meaning, although it is still a bit abstract. However, the attempt at interpretation takes away from the poem’s structure, which is already diminished when the poem is translated from Spanish.