TO THE READER... If the pages of this book contain any successful verse, let whoever reads it forgive my rudeness for having appropriated it. Our insignificances differ little. It is random and coincidental that you are the one reading these exercises and I am the one who wrote them. H.L. B.

The three youthful poetry collections of H.L. Borges mark the first phase of his creative journey in literature. Fifty-eight poems, most translated into our language for the first time. The first steps of a young poet who was destined to conquer the world with his writing.

In 1923, his first poetry collection, "The Fever of Buenos Aires," was published, and certain motifs (mirrors, swords, gardens, stars, roses) are already clearly present, which will follow him throughout his poetic and prose labyrinth. Two years later, his second collection, "Facing Moon," was released, and in 1929, the third, entitled "San Martín Notebook."

"San Martín" was a brand of cheap school notebooks widely available in Argentina since the late 19th century, characterized by their deep red cover, named after the country's national hero, General San Martín. In this collection, Borges may have wanted to pay tribute to his teachers in some way.

"These poems," notes Dimitris Kalokiris in his introduction, "if they had been written in Greek in the 1920s, might have had some echoes of Palamas (to the extent that Palamas is distantly related to Whitman) or a Seferian tone in the atmosphere of the Strophe. They were written a hundred years ago, yet they still retain their pioneering characteristics and their cultured freshness even today."