LITERATURE

Slow nightfall

Jorge Luis Borges began as a Buenos Aires Baudelaire, but became the master of epic subjects in compressed forms

MARTIN SCHIFINO

Jorge Luis Borges ON ARGENTINA

Edited by Alfred MacAdam et al

192pp.Paperback,$15.

9780143105732

ON WRITING

Edited by Suzanne Jill Levine et al

192pp.Paperback,$15.

978 0 14310572 5

POEMS OF THE NIGHT

A dual-language edition with parallel text

Edited by Efrain Kristal 224pp. Paperback, $17.

978014310600 5

ON MYSTICISM

Edited by Marfa Kodama 128pp. Paperback, $14.

9780143105695

THE SONNETS

Edited by Stephen Kessler

336pp.Paperback,$18.

9780143106012
Penguin  

Jorge Luis Borges was an eminently portable writer. He favored various forms, but everything he produced was brief. He once claimed that his reluctance to publish novels was due to laziness, and that his works of short fiction were summaries of imagined longer works. Either he was teasing or being too modest, for his writing is deliberately compressed, and his style an instrument with an arrestingly rich sound. It takes only one reading to remember phrases as vibrant as "la unanime noche" (the unanimous night), from the story "Las ruinas circulares" ("The Circular Ruins"). And his ideas - an infinite library, a tongue-in-cheek defence of plagiarism, the claim that writers create their own precursors, rather than vice versa - have equal resonance.

Readers find it easy to carry Borges in their heads. It has proved rather difficult, however, to carry his work in a reasonable number of books. Both in the original Spanish and in English translation, the history of his publications is labyrinthine, and there is an abundance of miscellanies, selections and collections. (A Complete Works exists in Spanish. Even this is incomplete.) In English, Labyrinths and A Personal Anthology, which had the imprimaturs of the master himself, became benchmarks in the early 1960s, and have stayed in print ever since. Several volumes of poetry and fiction supplemented them. But publication was haphazard, and complicated by legal disputes which may have worked not only against readers, but also the author's wishes for a platform in English - his second language. Thus, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni's versions, undertaken in collaboration with Borges in the 1970s, were allowed to go out of print by the Borges estate. It took roughly three decades to work out the issues of translation, and only in the 90s, with the centenary of Borges's birth in view, did an organized effort finally get under way to produce comprehensive editions. In 1999, Andrew Hurley produced a fluent, if often flat, rendering of the stories and other works in Complete Fiction. Alexander Coleman gathered more poetry than any previous anthologist in a judiciously edited Selected Poems. And Eliot Weinberger took care of the non-fiction in The Total Library, a cornucopia of critical writing, and an unobtrusive editorial triumph, with dozens of previously translated texts beautifully juxtaposed. At last, in three 500-page volumes English-sneaking readers had a reasonably complete Borges.

After the centenary of Borges's birth in 1999, the exegesis proceeded apace, culminating in Edwin Williamson's magisterial biography of 2004, which put Borges's Argentine origins and themes in perspective for Anglophone readers. This Borges appeared as less universal, more deeply rooted in the traditions of his native culture than had previously been noted. It was a necessary realignment, already suggested by the Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo in her Cambridge lectures of 1992, which were edited as Borges: A writer on the edge (1993, reissued in 2007). Jason Wilson's Borges: A critical Life (2006) stressed the same point, and further implied that the international Borges - the globetrotting lecturer, the Homer-like poet-prophet - was the lesser writer. Hispanic readers found combination of this in Adolfo Bioy Casares's Boswellian journal Borges (2007), in which all the sparkle, wit and wisdom of his friend are at the beginning, while the final

The five new anthologies under review reflect a kind of reaction to all this. They add unknown material and also rearrange known texts into more user-friendly clusters. Readers will have much to engage them, but they will also encounter considerable obstacles. Weinberger had already noted in his introduction to The Total Library that he had not included a number of early pieces, because they would require "a rich subsoil of notes to produce a meager interest", and this is a problem with On Argentina, a volume which concentrates on Borges's (mostly early) writings on national literature and customs. Its editor, Alfred MacAdam, has created a coherent collage of known and unknown pieces, and written a thought-provoking, informative introduction. He aims to "create a vision of Borges that corresponds more closely to reality" against “theories of Borges as a cosmopolitan mind without a country", and is absolutely right to stress that "no Argentine subject is alien to [Borges)".

Yet many will be alien to foreign readers, and Borges, writing for a contemporary local audience, took a great deal for granted. The first hurdles are contextual. If one needs a note explaining what kind of book Martin Fierro is, Borges's views on it will be of little interest. But no amount of annotation will account for the web of allusions and ironic references that was his signature style. As unfashionable as it may sound to say so, one can go only so far without Spanish. Even the editor has been forced to leave specific words in the original and gloss them. The lecture "El idioma de los argentinos" (The Language of the Argentines) is a case in point. It is instructive to learn that, from very early on, Borges intended to create a literature in the idiom of the city of his birth, as opposed to the conventional language inherited from Spain; but unless one has a good idea of the linguistic differences, and the political stakes, this remains merely anecdotal. Or take allusions to a variety of dance moves called "ocho", "asentada", "media luna", "paso atras" and "cuerpeadas", collectively glossed as "tango steps". This clarification will only do if the reader has a tango instructor to hand.

But obscure terms and all, perhaps we need that piece, as it is interesting in other ways. Borges, MacAdam notes, "feels he can set the record straight about the origins of the tango". And, surprisingly, his view is quite narrow: African influences and Uruguayan variations do not count; tango is porteno (a product of Buenos Aires), and that is that. In other words, the supreme cosmopolitan appears as a nationalistic essentialist. Revisionists will love it. Nor is this the only piece in which Borges speaks against type. "El tamano de mi esperanza" (The Full Extent of My Hope), from one of the books he later suppressed, contains this gem: "Buenos Aires is a country, and we must find for it the poetry, the music, the painting, the religion, and the metaphysics, appropriate to its grandeur. This is the full extent of my hope". The translation loses some of the original's turgidity, but the register remains both pompous and twee, not to mention politically dubious. One might wince at Borges's zeal (he did so himself), but should keep an eye on the dates: the author was twenty-six at the time, and the big event is not that he once wrote such stuff, but that he later changed his mind. MacAdam's anthology is alert to this development. It culminates with Borges's most significant essay, "El escritor argentino y la tradicion" (The Argentinian Writer and Tradition, written in 1952), a playful riposte to Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual talent" by the Borges who matters - a writer "from the periphery" who serenely claimed "that the universe is our birthright" and that Argentinians should "tryout every subject".

Borges tried out a relatively small number of subjects in his fictions, but he was panoptical curious in his essays and reviews, especially at the beginning of his career. On Writing, which offers ten new translations and represents twenty-eight pieces from Weinberger’s selection, concentrates on Borges the critic. The volume was put together by Suzanne Jill Levine, the series editor, and is one of the meatiest. Organized both chronologically and thematically ("Becoming a Man of Letters", "On Translation", etc), it captures Borges at work. The copyediting is not as good as one should hope: the first sentence of Don Quijote is misquoted in an essay that starts with a word-by-word analysis of that sentence. But there is a well-balanced assortment of Borgesian considerations on general problems ('The Detective Story") and individual writers ("On Wilkie Collins") aptly set against each other, with clever juxtapositions of pieces written sometimes decades apart. We are also given the publication history of every piece in the original. On balance, this anthology delivers on its promise of providing an opportunity to "experience the thinking of ... Borges on what writers do and what writers are", though it is not, as it hastily claims, a "unique opportunity", or the best.

It is nowhere near as varied, or as well selected, as The Total Library. And compared to the earlier volume, it is deficient in two key respects. It lacks an index, which is unforgivable for a writer who quotes constantly and constantly recycles quotations; and it is not buttressed by an insightful introduction, which means that an ideal opportunity to appraise Borges the critic has been missed. This would naturally have required an eminent critic - a Frank Kermode, say, or someone like Efrain Kristal, whose superb introduction to Poems of the Night is vast in learning and light in delivery. Levine's, unfortunately, is marred by academic clichés about ' Borges's presumed "breakthrough poetics of reading as writing" or his "dethroning [of] the author", and callow generalities declaring that he was "ahead of his time" and probed r "the human mind ... with greater lucidity 2 than any writer before or since". Any writer? Levine continues: "the range of what Borges read defies belief'. Whether or not one believes it, it is important to be clear that, vast as Borges's reading may have been, his erudition is "not profound: he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas" (Andre Maurois). Much of his culture was literally encyclopedic, that is, gleaned from encyclopedias, so he should not be mistaken for a Gianfranco Contini or an E. R. Curtius. And unqualified paeans to his learning miss precisely what is most interesting about it: its boundaries, the fact that it defines a self-contained aesthetic system. Borges's range of reference as a reader marks out a recognizable territory as a writer.

This brings us to a key aesthetic problem: how to reproduce that territory in translation. Here we may be in the realm of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, much loved by Borges. The closer we get to the goal, the harder it seems to achieve it. True, we are at a point where new translations are "highly readable" and "tremendously enjoyable". But we still need great versions that manage to resemble their model, not only in flow, but also in tone and texture. Di Giovanni once took a drubbing for rendering "the unanimous night" with a tame "encompassing night". By and large, translators of Borges are still Borges-tamers. Take the first sentence of the essay "La metafora" ("On Metaphor", rendered by Peter Roberston), one of the new pieces in On Writing: "The Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, who accomplished many things in his highly eventful life, compiled a glossary of the traditional rhetorical metaphors of Icelandic poetry at the beginning of the thirteenth century". This tries to overcome several difficulties by ironing them out, and ends up producing as many new creases. Never mind the oddly placed phrase "at the beginning of the thirteenth century". Borges does not say "highly eventful life" (a cliché) but "intrincada vida" - "intricate life", which may sound odd, but so it does in Spanish. Then, where the translation has "traditional rhetorical metaphors", Borges has "figuras tradicionales". "Figuras" is shorthand for "rhetorical figures", which would have sufficed; "rhetorical metaphors" is meaningless. The original carries on for another three lines, shading into one of those mock-medieval lists that Borges was so fond of, while the translator splits the sentence in two, adds a redundant "in this compendium' (wasn't it a glossary?), and links the terms oj the list with verbs of his own invention. The result is a labored eighty-four-word passage instead of the original seventy-two-word one.

Levine, who has translated so much Latin American literature, is far better than that, but she, too, is a tamer. Her version of "El arte narrativo y la magia" ("Narrative Art and Magic") starts: "The techniques of the novel have not, I believe, been analyzed exhaustively" - an interpretative, though not indefensible, rendering of the original. Yet Borges does not say "I believe". His sentence is free of pause-for-breath qualifiers, so the translation kills what makes it so unexpected an opening gambit: its cocksureness. Levine does not observe Borges's repetitions either; in a short prose poem where the verb "sonara" occurs eight times, she renders it half the time as "dreaming" and half as "a dream". These are details. More generally, the problem has to do with something that Borges himself pointed out in "Las versiones homericas" ("The Homeric Versions", included in On Writing): judging correctly "what pertains to the poet and what pertains to the language". Translators of Borges slip up in both directions. While his idiosyncrasies of style are routinely toned down, certain features of Spanish are insufficiently reworked. Even the humble definite article makes trouble. Martin Amis once wrote in a review: '''The Quixote', in Borges's glamorous phrase". But the phrase is neither glamorous nor Borges's. Every Spanish speaker says el Quijote, as they say el Ulises and so on. Surely Hispanists know this, so why persist with "the Marti Fierro" or "the Facundo" (MacAdam)? These are book titles; book titles do not take the definite article in English. Nor do boroughs, so "the Retiro", and "the Recoleta" (Hoyt Rogers) go against standard usage. Are these translators trying for local color? Borges considered it a superstition.

MacAdam describes Borges's early style as "tortuous" and his vocabulary as "rarefied". Levine calls the writing of his essays "radical" and even "bizarre to those who read him in Spanish today". Both are right in general. But it is a matter of detail in which way Borges "replays the Latinate prose of the Baroque era", and perhaps the best way to convey this might not be to "improvise a rococo English" - an intention declared, but fortunately never carried out, by Levine. The baroque influence can be felt, sure enough, in Borges's inkhorn terms, but his rhetorical habits are much closer to home: plain Edwardian. He sounds a little like Kipling, and a lot like Chesterton. His essays are full of Chestertonian throat clearing and oratorical flourishes. Part of the challenge for translators may be to make new an existing manner that has fallen out of favor. In any case, more resources from the English tradition will need mining if Borges's big voice is to be fully energized. What feels futile, meanwhile, is further anthologizing.

The proof is a hobby-horsical reshuffle like On Mysticism, which gathers already available texts under the title theme. Its editor, Marfa Kodama, writes that Borges, after (having a "mystical experience", "knew that, his redemption would be to follow his des- J tiny and to convert the pain and joy of his earthly life into poetry". He did not put it quite in those terms. Borges's famous definition of the "aesthetic event" (including poetry) as "the imminence of a revelation

which does not occur" points to resignation rather than redemptive joy. Poetry hovered for him this side of mysticism, and as a poet he knew he was no visionary. He was able to portray visions yet not experience them; this "frustration", as the Argentine writer Carlos Gamerro has persuasively argued, may have been the making of Borges the poet. One can add that a note of unanswered longing pervades much of his verse. Borges can be a consummate poet of intellectual nostalgia, especially in his late work, but already as a young man he sings of separation. In "Calle con almacen Rosado" ("Street with Pink Comer Shop"), he writes: "My years have run down roads of earth and water / and you are all I feel, little street". He is twenty-five.

To distinguish between early and late work is for once apposite, as his poetry changed radically over time. Borges started out in his twenties as an avant-garde firebrand, who even signed an "Ultra manifesto" (see On Writing) vowing to "throw the past overboard". The sentiment died out by his second collection, Luna de enfrente (Moon Across the Way), though free verse and metaphor were still central to his poetics. In the 1930s and 40s, while producing the short fiction for which he later became famous, he set poetry aside, or at least stopped publishing it, only to return to it in the late 50s. Now the metaphorical extravagance was gone, free verse was used sparsely, and metrics and rhyme took centre stage. It was round about this time that his fiction dried out and his essays mutated into looser critical forms like the lecture, which he delivered in a high-pitched, stammering voice. He was almost blind, and blindness explains in part why he went back to short forms, as he recounts in his "Autobiographical essay". But his career had also been a slow progress towards classicism, an undoing of what he perceived to be "baroque excesses", and late in life, while his aesthetic sympathies extended to embrace some highly conventional poetry of the past (Old English and the Icelandic Sagas, for instance), he also seems to have felt more attuned to fixed forms.

Both The Sonnets and Poems of the Night register this shift in form and themes. The first anthology collects, for the first time in English or Spanish, the 137 sonnets Borges wrote, lovingly edited and introduced by Stephen Kessler, who has also translated several of the poems himself, in crisply rhythmical unrhymed verse. It will be a surprising collection for anglophone readers accustomed to Borges's radical experiments in fiction. The sonneteer, as Kessler argues, was nothing if not conservative. Borges's sonnets follow all the rules. Some of them even sound formulaic, with tired rhymes such as "reflejo/ espejo" (reflection/mirror) or hombre/nombre (man/name) which would have been better avoided. Yet most are wholly Borgesian in tone and impressively tight in diction. This alone would make them original. There is also the distinctive subject matter – Borges may be the only poet to have written a sonnet on Spinoza. Also striking is his avoidance of the erotic. He chiefly uses sonnets as Keats did when he wrote about Chapman's Homer or King Lear: to commemorate intellectual feeling. And commemoration extends to ancestors, the city of Buenos Aires, eminent men, symbolically charged objects such as a sword ("The strong man in its iron still lives on"), and what Kessler calls Borges's "paradoxical longings for oblivion and immortality".

These topics are interwoven with Borges's usual obsessions, and we are given a good deal of his trademark labyrinths, libraries and mirrors. The result is a strong collection. Yet while perfect to dip into, it does not work equally well if read cover to cover. Unlike classical sonneteers, Borges does not write sequences, so there is not much development inside the volume. One also misses the relief that longer, more varied forms provide in the original books from which the sonnets have been taken. But the problem is easily solved by reading it side by side with Poems of the Night, which follows the thread of a theme rather than a form. It samples from Borges's first collection onwards, even dusting off a poem published in a Spanish magazine in 1920, but the bulk of the poems comes from post-1955 publications. There is a story here - the story of what Borges called "the slow nightfall" that culminated in 1955 on "the pathetic moment when I knew I had lost my sight, my reader's and writer's sight". Having a degenerative eye disease, he had always known what awaited him. So when he writes, in his twenties

Like the blind mind whose hands are

precursors

that push aside walls and glimpse heavens

slowly, flustered, I feel ...

The verses that are to come . . .

the simile is pregnant with apprehension. Similar moments of pathos occur in "Break of Day", where the poet notes that, after dawn, the "spent night / stays on in the eyes of the blind", or in "Afterglow", when he refers to "the unanimous fear of the dark". One notices that the young Borges does not concentrate on the night itself; he is at his best, in fact, when he reflects on the moments right before or after dark: "Dawn is our fear of doing different things" (From "Street with Pink Comer Shop"). Or, more visually: "With evening / the two or three colours of the patio grew weary" (From "Patio"). Night and darkness, as poetic subjects and metaphors, expand only with the arrival of blindness.

Borges wrote about it with gentlemanly acceptance. In "Poem a de los dones" (Poem of the Gifts), from El hacedor (The Maker), he pointedly rejects self-pity, and accepts blindness as a gift. A later book of poetry is called Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness); and in the title poem, the "slow nightfall" becomes sweetness, a return". Blindness seems to have encouraged recollection, and we find poems movingly written from memory, such as two on a Durer engraving he can no longer see. The exercise in remembrance implies a revisiting of old subjects, and these poems, like the sonnets, compress, reprise, rework, sometimes correct, intuitions and persuasions of an earlier time. Many of them are impressive, but one cannot but feel as well a measure of rarefaction. More and more, as John Updike once wrote with regard to the fiction, "discouragingly large areas of truth seem excluded from his vision". If in his youth he was the supreme poet of his city, a Buenos Aires Baudelaire minus the opiates, in his late work the world retreats from view. Epic battles, heroes, dreams, Dante, yes; but no directly observed realities. I won't rehearse the charges of abstraction frequently leveled at Borges, which can be trivial (though not always). The problem is, rather, in falling levels of curiosity and intellectual charge. The poet has made up his mind about most things; he knows where to go, and especially where not to go.

And so he starts revising the early work.

Borges was, of course, no ordinary rewriter. J. P. Bernes, the editor of the magnificent Pleiade edition newly reissued after a protracted legal battle (Oeuvres completes. Two volumes, 3,278pp. Gallimard. €67.50 and €62.50. 978 2 07 012815 0), barely exaggerates when he writes that "tout au long de sa vie, il a détruit et brulé, il a érigé l' inquisition en système d'écriture". This inquisition was implacably visited on his younger self. Essay collections, as noted, disappeared in their entirety, while the poems were subjected to excisions, alterations, and tonal moderation. These variants remain hidden in English, as the renderings of the early poems are based on corrected versions of the 1960s and 70s. "We still need", notes Efrain Kristal in Poems of the Night, "a critical edition of his verse, an edition that would trace Borges's creative process over the years as he edited and revised his poems." It is not likely that this will come out any time soon, but devoted English-speaking readers can do better than wait. Just as Borges learned German to read Heine and Italian to read Dante, it is possible to learn Spanish. Borges is worth the journey.