El Sueño poetic review by Sadaf Munshi

El Sueno ‘the dream’ is the first of the series in the Voices and Bridges project. The primary theme of this composition is built around immigration — from one place to another, from within to without, from one person to another one. The bilingual composition uses a Spanish poem El Sueño ‘The dream’ by Borges and a Farsi poem which begins with Shab, hame shab ‘Night, all night’. The two poems flow into and communicate with each other depicting the internal conflict of the protagonist struggling between a state of truce (the dream) and that of restlessness (sleeplessness) in a journey from his home country to a strange new world, the new abode which seems worthless and empty. The composition berings the conflict between two very strong feelings around the journey using texts from Borges’s El Sueño ‘the dream’ and Youshij’s poem. On the one hand, the night brings the “dream”, a “repose of the mind”, and on the other it makes one restless. Borges compares the sun rise with a sadness that brings lethargy that “wakefulness gilds”, while Youshij deplores the night associating it with a separation from the “caravan”.