JORGE LUIS BORGES: LIFE AS AN ACCESSORY TO LITERATURE.
„Let others boast of the pages they have written
I am proud of the ones I have read."
Elogio de la sombra (Eulogy of the shadow), 1969.
The great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (* 1899- † 1986), one of the most relevant and admired writers of the Spanish language in the 20th century, could not have imagined the circumstances, at least unusual, which initiated the literary relationship with his work. In 1969 we had to find “refuge” several times, to escape the avalanches of political repression that, in that year, became very intense in a small South American country. The first wave could not be avoided, it broke in around June 19 and we had to spend about five days in the cells of a police station, including a "visit" (not exactly a courtesy one) to the "Chief" of the political police. On his desk, at that time on the ground-floor, there was a small replica of a rocket from the US space-agency. Perhaps an early tribute to the first landing of a man on the moon which occurred a few weeks later. We would meet again in the same building (it wasn't out of courtesy either) in 1972.
Cover of the book bought by the author in Madrid, in 1988.
The second wave (sort of mid-August of the same year) was better managed. The parents insisted on us disappearing for a few days from the capital, finding accommodation in the place of birth, a small town near a river. We took shelter in the house of a British-German branch of the family, about a hundred kilometres from the capital. The days were cold and grey, and we wandered around, by bicycle, or on foot, through the sandy roads, between eucalyptus trees and sugar-cane plantations. On one occasion we met the daughter of one of the families that owned the sugar-mill, of Dutch descent, who lost his temper when she learned the reason why we were “exiled”: “And what is all this political turmoil for? "
We were surprised. We would be even more surprised, decades later, when one of the best connoisseurs of Borges's work and life, in addition to being his French translator, to whom in Paris we had recounted our years of political activism, would simply dismiss the whole experience with: “Ça serve à rien tout ça, à rien... "
A subtle “Borgesian” thread was thus traced between the young wealthy-lady of the sugar-mill in South America and the intellectual in Paris, leading to Borges’s alleged contempt for the political praxis itself, for its supposed uselessness, an attitude that, in part, would be confirmed by Mario Vargas Llosa, to whom Borges once affirmed that “politics is one of the forms of boredom”1. One ought to specify what “politics” is being talked about, clarifying at the same time that our experiences, then, were far from being boring. Rather: dangerous, perhaps useless, but to some extent unavoidable. Borges described himself as a “Spenserian anarchist”.
It should be noted, however, that, despite his controversial gestures with some South-American military leaders in the 1970s, and his sincere abomination of the "political logorrhoea", Borges did make explicit his rejection of the most abject forms of totalitarianism and ethnic persecution. To be read hence his story "Deutsches Requiem"2, or “El milagro secreto” (The secret miracle), which takes place in Prague, in 1939. Also his poems in clear defence of Israel in the 1960s.
The third wave, having already returned to the capital, sort of mid-October of the same year, was artistically avoided, thanks to the friendship and generosity of a friend, five years older. He was on his way to become one of the most prominent poets of that country. A refuge for a few days in a family residence was offered to us, a villa built at the beginning of the 20th century, with large and tall rooms, populated by exquisite furniture. And on the bedside table he placed two books, as “fellow-travellers” in the hide-out: “Antología de la literatura fantástica"(Anthology of Fantastic Literature), edited by Borges in collaboration with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, first edition 1940, and "Ficciones” (Fictions), first edition 1944, the set of short-stories by Borges that would bolster his world-wide fame.
“And en forthtedon na” is a quote from the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon” (between Saxons and Vikings (Norwegians) in 991, translatable as “and there will never be fear.” “Hann tekr sverđit Gram ok leggr i međal þeira bert” comes from chapter twenty-seven of the Völsunga Saga (Icelandic saga of the thirteenth century, written in Old-Icelandic, or “Old-Norse”), and could be translated as “He took the sword Gram and placed it naked between them (or in the middle of their beds)”. Both phrases are inscribed on Borges's tombstone in Geneva, Switzerland.
Mentally vitiated by the discussions and political actions of those years, I confess that I had to struggle to be accepted by narratives that seemed to take place in another world, in epochs that I could only glimpse through the cold, intangible clouds of chronology. But the seed had been planted—it did not take long to germinate. Of the stories in “Fictions", it would be necessary to wait for more than a decade, to begin to feel the texts as related, as relevant soul-embracing cogitations, and not as distant abstractions that appeared to leave no sensation. To some extent, I always had the impression that most of Borges's narrative left me with a suave taste of dried sand. Only later would I realize that it is indeed sand, but that it flows like an hourglass, thus approaching water. And unlike water, one can stand—and walk—on it
Quite the reverse his poetry, which from the end of the 1960s reached me and remained a companion. From then on I would have, whenever possible, an improvised or photocopied copy of my favourite poems. The first copy of his entire poetical work was bought in London, in 1978, the second, still around despite…, in Madrid, in 1988. Even now, Borges continues to be for me, above all, the poet. And his poem that always accompanies me is:
Elegía del recuerdo imposible
“Qué no daría yo por la memoria
De una calle de tierra con tapias bajas
Y de un alto jinete llenando el alba
(…)
Qué no daría yo por la memoria
De las barcas de Hengist,
Zarpando de la arena de Dinamarca
Para debelar una isla
Que aún no era Inglaterra.
Qué no daría yo por la memoria
(La tuve y la he perdido)
De una tela de oro de Turner
Vasta como la música.
(…)
Qué no daría yo por la memoria
De que me hubieras dicho que me querías
Y de no haber dormido hasta la aurora,
Desgarrado y feliz.”
La moneda de hierro (1976)
Already on the verge of eighty-years of age, the poet continues to believe in the possibility of love. But it was only in the late 1980s that we were able to fully decant the almost miraculous mirrors underneath the words. Whoever has not seen those “golden canvasses of Turner” (Joseph Mallord William Turner, *1775- 1851)", “vast as music”, in the “Clore Gallery”, annex of the “Tate Gallery” (now Tate I), in London, will never be able to enter the garden outlined by those lines. Between 1988 and 1991 the “Clore Gallery” became our “voluntary-hide-nest”, a place to rest and to gather new energies. At times I imagined Borges stumbling through the gallery, leaning on his walking-stick, trying to recognize the tableaux with only a third of the only eye still available.
Much better: to navigate by ferryboat from a Danish port, or even from Hamburg, to the English port of Harwich, on a day of sunny, crispy waves spreading icy needles around, to intuit what "Hengist"3 might have felt, on that occasion “...sailing from the sands of Denmark, to unveil an island which was not yet England”. A journey that we undertook very frequently between 1985 and 1991.
A translation of the bulk of the poetical work of Borges was published in Germany in 1999, and the title of the book-review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is probably one of the best synthesis of the lyrics of the Argentine:
“Für eine Minute einen Sitzplatz im Paradies“ (“ A place in paradise, for a minute...)4
In 1975, already residing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, until June 1977, I was lucky enough to see Borges once, by chance, entering his house in Maipú street, Barrio Norte. Shortly afterwards, I received "first-hand tidings", through a French journalist, and his partner, who managed to interview him, preparing an article for the newspaper Le Monde. It was only in the 1990s that I learned that in those Buenos Aires years, Jean-Pierre Bernés (*1940-†2020)was also there, as cultural attaché to the French embassy. We were worlds apart, despite living in the same city. The one subscribing these lines under intense pressure to survive, and walking on the edge of the precipice, involuntarily.
The third reunion with Borges took place in Kiel, Germany, in a week in June 1986, the day the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper announced his death, with a photo of him of considerable size. I was sitting in a chair that allowed me to see through the window the bay the Baltic Sea had shaped in Kiel, in the modest study of the university-residence. I remained silent for a long time, with the newspaper on my lap. At that moment the ship that made a daily service between some Danish islands and the capital of the state of Schleswig-Holstein arrived. Shortly after, I imagined him, Borges, rowing in a Viking boat, together with other Icelandic comrades, reciting the verses of the Völsunga Saga: “Hann tekr sverđit Gram ok leggr i međal þeira bert.”
I felt as if I was taking leave from someone like a far-away, older friend, with whom the dialogue always went from "Vous" to "Vous". He kept warning, “...do not waste your time on useless books, indeed less so in hopeless ventures...”
We would have to wait until the mid-1990s, in Paris, for another meaningful re-encounter with the Argentine writer. At that time, we had re-visited some short-stories, especially “El Sur” (The South), which I always thought was one his best. Decades later, the revelation: He also thought it was the best5. I was no longer landing on his literary chess-board—which is, in fact, the substratum of much of his narrative work—as an extemporaneous, or as an inhabitant of another planet.
Back in 1994 we were lucky to attend an act of homage to Borges, held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Besides his widow, Maria Kodama, there was Jean-Pierre Bernés, a French translator from Borges and a great confidant of the Argentine writer, especially in his last months in Geneva, Switzerland. Encouraged by this celebration of the Argentine writer, the following day we bought a small copy of some of his stories, those contained in “Artificios”, at the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris.
A few months later, at the Bibliothéque Nationale de Paris (the old, “Richeliu”), whose reading room is still one of the most beautiful in the world), we saw Bernés sitting at one of the reader-desks, reading and working on some volumes of, and about, Borges volumes. A photo of the Argentine writer was leaning on one of the books.
He came with some frequency, and one day, gathering enough courage, I approached him in the hallway at the entrance of the library. A dialogue began. Discretion and courtesy at the beginning, and a certain reluctance on his part, which disappeared when he realized that my French was decent, and that I had some idea of Borges's mapa mundi. Bernés was teaching at the University of Paris at the time. A sporadic, but stimulating relationship began, which included a long lunch at Bernés's house in Paris, a tiny well-hidden palace, which inside seemed to have remained in the 18th century—as other journalists would say years later, about the house where he spent his last years, near Arcachon6. The dining room had no electricity, and in the main living room there was a piano, on which, on the occasion of our visit, were some photos signed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who just passed by. At the end of lunch there was music, some Bach and Monteverdi. Other encounters followed, and some postcards from South America, between 1995 and 1996. Then came professional commitments on our side in Eastern Europe and Morocco that took us away from literature, and partly from Paris. A last telephone conversation in the year 2000, in which "our" common experience in Morocco (Bernés had also taught in that country) was celebrated. Aware of the conflict that broke out suddenly between Bernés and Borges' widow, already in Spain, 2008, I sent a letter, expressing my concern, and hoping for a quick reconciliation. I am unaware of that letter ever arriving.
Bernés was to publish in 2010 an invaluable account of his relationship with Borges, in which we find some (but not all) of the confidences transmitted during the mid-1990s.
Many of the information and secrets that Bernés confided to us in those years cannot be reproduced herewith, if only because of the need to respect the principle of privacy, which was not invoked, but which we both imposed on ourselves ad initium, per se. Above all, everything related to Borges's last months in Geneva, ill, and highly dependent on others to carry out the most basic tasks of daily life.
There remains, yes, Borges's deep love for Germanic literatures, in the broadest sense of the word, from Icelandic, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, to the German of our time. A passion that excluded political and other aberrations that were to take place in the Germany of the 20th century. But as he made it explicit in his poem, there was something like a great "platonic courtship" there, beginning in his years as a student in Geneva. What may very well be the most beautiful poem ever dedicated to the German language, was published at a time (1972) when few, if any, would have dared
“Al idioma alemán
Mi destino es la lengua castellana
El bronce de Francisco de Quevedo
(…)
Pero a ti, dulce lengua de Alemania,
Te he elegido y buscado, solitario,
A través de vigilias y gramáticas
(…)
Mis noches están llenas de Virgilio,
Dije una vez; también pude haber dicho
De Hölderlin y de Angelus Silesius.
Heine me dio sus altos ruiseñores;
Goethe, la suerte de un amor tardío,
a la vez indulgente y mercenario;
Keller, la rosa que una mano deja
En la mano de un muerto que la amaba
Y que nunca sabrá si es blanca o roja.
Tú, lengua de Alemania, eres tu obra
Capital;
(…)
Te tuve alguna vez. Hoy, en la linde
De los años cansados, te diviso
Lejana, como el álgebra y la luna.”
El oro de los tigres (1972).
To the German language
My destiny is the Spanish language
The bronze of Francisco de Quevedo
(…)
But you, sweet tongue of Germany,
I have chosen and searched, lonely,
Through vigils and grammars.
(…)
It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that on October 27, 1982, Borges decided to visit the German writer Ernst Jünger, at his home in Wilfinglen, one of the most relevant encounters in the realm of 20th century literature. The reading of the translation into Spanish (1922) of “Stahlgewitter” (Storm of Steel) had constituted for the Argentine author “a volcanic eruption”. Jünger wrote down in his diary:
“Die Begegnung mit einem Dichter ist fast so selten geworden, wie jene mit einem beinahe gestorbenen oder sogar mystischen Tier, dem Einhorn etwa.”7
“To encounter a poet is nowadays almost that rare, as to encounter an extinct, or even mythical animal, like the unicorn.”
“It is ist ja auch eine große Seltenheit, rarissime, daß ein wahrer Dichter, überhaupt irgendwo, in Erscheinung tritt. Deshalb habe ich ihn, besonders lebhaft begrüßt."8
“It is in fact such a rarity, rarissime, for a true poet, be it anywhere, to make his appearance. Hence I greeted him with special warmth.”
„Borges rezitierte auf Deutsch Angelus Silesius, auch altenglische Verse; dabei wurde seine Sprache de el deutlicher, als ob er auf seine Jugend zurückgriffe.”9
“Borges recited Angelus Silesius (A German poet of the 17th century) in German, as well as Old-English verses. In doing so, his language became clearer, as if he was taking refuge in his youth.”
The conversation (Borges was already almost blind) took place in a carousel of Spanish, German, French, English, and “Old-English”.
A third aspect of the confidences of Jean-Pierre Bernés concerns Borges's relationship (or lack of…) with his Latin-American colleagues. In particular, with neighbouring countries of Argentina, where his animosity vis-à-vis low-level “folklore”, for cheap tourist-consumption, sometimes led him to take considerable distance, and to angry phrases that cannot be reproduced here. For many of those writers, Borges represented the vertex of the "Europeanized", of the “Francophile” English that seemed to enjoy a certain hostility against the populist and indigenous traditions of the region. A biased view, even if pronounced on the sly, since Borges recognized good literature in any mould. There stands, for example, his admiration for the Mexican Juan Rulfo—and others.
In 2008, living en passant in Granada, Spain, another "re-encounter" with Borges was smuggled into my diary.
“8.10.08. On Sunday long walk to La Alambra (Alhambra), climbing the hills. Sunny autumn afternoon, then I went down the far-side of “The Red City”, haunted by the water, the bricks and the red earth, the vegetation (especially the cypress-trees…). At the entrance I read the inscribed poem by Jorge Luis Borges—the soul was embraced by warm clouds. And it's also one of the few things with sensual resonances that I remember about him. A lot of Russians and Scandinavians around.”
It was the poem "Alhambra", published in "Historia de la Noche” (History of the Night), 1977, motivated by Borges' visit in 1976, whose near-blindness did not prevent him from inhaling the radiations of moon and sun, stone and water, emanating from that gift of the world of Islam to Iberia.
We would have to wait until 2009, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for a new communication with Borges, this time through James Joyce (*1882-†1941). The entry in the diary:
“16.06.2009. 22:00. I have just returned from a soirée at the "House of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires". Tribute to James Joyce, "Bloomsday." I hesitated to leave the flat, but I did well. Before I walked down the avenue 25th of May, and I even found that old second-hand book-store, in which in 1977 the Argentine colleague of the "Alliance Française" bought me a book in French about Paraguay (I think Henri Pitaud…). A reading of the fourth chapter of “Ulysses”, in part by Maria Kodama, Borges's wife, who always continues to appear as affable. A very good critical introduction to the book by an Argentine. Afterwards, food and wine were served on the patio below, while a black-and-white film version of the book was being played on a screen, which I don't remember seeing before. There was also the ambassador of Ireland. Back with the 64 bus—in a building next to the "Casa Rosada" some homeless people were getting ready to sleep.”
Was Borges an English writer who accidentally landed in Argentina, and in the confusion he decided to write in Spanish? Or an Argentine who was shipwrecked on the shores of Iceland? Where he might have spent a secret life translating his old writings into “Old-Icelandic” (or “Norse”), manuscripts that are ferociously guarded in a new secret library of Babel, and that perhaps will be published in two or three centuries.
Considered by Mario Vargas Llosa (and possibly many others…) as "the greatest writer of the Spanish language, after (Miguel de) Cervantes (y Saavedra,) and (Francisco de) Quevedo (y Villegas)"10 Borges's "cultural identity" has been, and continues to remain, a major disputation. It is certain that in his high school-years at the “Lycée Jean Calvin" in Geneva, he did not yet know in what language he would write.
There is no doubt that Borges's Spanish, that writing of pure bones and muscles, at times of overwhelming simplicity, at other times exhaling brief, austere glows of gold and silver, that “bronze of Quevedo”, of which he spoke, could only emerge thanks to the early coexistence with Latin, German, English, French and then the old Nordic languages.
Many insist on the “the Englishness of Borges”11 which has in part to do with the origin of his mother, but in turn with education, and that very witty way of confronting critical issues and of undervaluing oneself, “self-mockery”. Others however insists upon his "Frenchness", or at least underline his "Latinity", his status as a “son of Rome”, as a letter from Professor Duby points out, in which Borges is asked to intervene in a vast collective work, "to counteract that mania kicking around, which insists to root him in Anglo-Saxon culture”12. The very witty Borges may have sanctioned that controversy, when he responded to the French President, Francois Mitterrand, who had elevated him to the range of “Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur”:
“Nothing but a simple epigram (in English): Merci, monsieur le Président.”13
The Borges who returns from Geneva to Buenos Aires is still the porteño (inhabitant of Buenos Aires) who cannot think there might be another fatherland:
„This city that I believed was my past
it is my future, my present;
the years I have lived in Europe are illusory,
I was always (and will be) in Buenos Aires. "
(Arrabal, Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1923)
But already in the eighties, overwhelmed by the political and economic hecatomb of Argentina, Borges only thinks about living in Europe—and dying in Geneva14.
The commemorative plaque on the façade of “Grand Rue 26”, Geneva, where Borges lived (in his last months of life), quotes him:
"De toutes les villes du monde
De toutes les patries intimes
Q'un homme cherche à mériter
A cours de ses voyages,
Genève me semble
La plus propice
Au bonheur."
The Fondation Bodmer insisted on cementing Borges' relationship with Geneva, buying the original manuscript of “El Sur” and later that of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, as well as two essays on Herman Hesse and James Joyce15
The Iceland that in its mature years becomes something of an adoptive homeland:
“A Islandia
De las regiones de la hermosa tierra
Que mi carne y su sombra han fatigado
Eres la más remota, y la más íntima,
Última Thule, Islandia de las naves,
Del terco arado y del constante remo,
De las tendidas redes marineras,
(…)”
El oro de los tigres (1972).
It would not be too risky to state that Geneva, in his youth, had already been partly the Iceland of his mature years. Geneva, which is something like an “Iceland” on the European continent, a Francophone city in a country with a majority of German-speakers, has been for centuries a refuge for iconoclasts, eccentrics, hermits and persecuted all colours, a “great free port” on the shores of a lake, not far from France, Germany and Italy,
Without a doubt, Borges was one of the most brilliant "chess-players" in world literature, one of the few authors who could camouflage himself as a compadrito (a sort of Argentine “Mack the Knife”, Brecht-Weil) from the suburbs of Buenos Aires, a Jewish scholar and theologian in Prague, an Englishman asking for a non-existent book in the book-stores around Cambridge Circus, in London, an Arab wandering the streets of Damascus in search of the Aladdin lamp, or a Roman re-writing Virgil's Aeneid. And even a disciple of Confucius, back in 300 BC in China, drafting what, centuries later, would appear as... Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius, that grand construction of imaginary countries and books, which contains, among others, this phrase:
"My father had joined him (the verb is excessive) in one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidence and that very soon omit dialogue.”16
"Life as an accessory to literature", an attempt to summarize the Borgesian experience, as far as his person is concerned, which appears to have been that of someone for whom "living" was only an “accident” that allows the only "life” that counts: that of reading and writing. Another writer's trap? Yet as a person he lived intensely, in many places and with many people, excluding the gestation of descendants. To decipher the entire personal and literary heritage of the Argentine writer, we require a neat and complete biography, which does not yet exist, and which anyway would require years of work. Let us re-translate the sentence at the beginning of this paragraph. In reality, Borges' literature allows us to embark on the possibility of dreaming about multiple lives, over centuries and centuries, across the entire mapa mundi.
Not to be forgotten: The other Borges, the “shrewd porteño" (inhabitant of Buenos Aires), building on-the-sly labyrinths and puzzles to take revenge for the misfortunes of destiny (especially that of his blindness). Weaving linguistic traps of several carats of exquisiteness, convinced like few others that, at the beginning, and in the beginning, as the Gospel according to Saint John sentences, it was the word. And in the end too. And that is what remains.
Let us return to the epigraph under the title of this contribution, and extrapolate the underlying substance in the text: the only possibility of being a good writer is to have been, and always continue to be, a much better reader. That is Borges's Gospel for all generations to come, even if what we understand as "literature" were to be relegated by the techno-virtual apparatus that accost us, more and more.
1„…”an old Spencerian anarchist“ (1963). Almost a quarter of a century later, in, 1981, again asked by Vargas Llosa, what he now thought of that answer, Borges said, “I would say that the word “boredom” somewhat mild. Perhaps “disgust”. In any case, “boredom” is an understatement”. „Medio Siglo con Borges“, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alfagura 2020. También „Jorge Luis Borges zu Mario Vargas Llosa: Auch Lesen ist Leben“, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19.02.2021.
2Borges, Jorge Luis, Obras Completas, Emece, pg. 576. One of the short-stories contained in El Aleph, 1949.
3Hengist (o Hengest) means “stallion” in Anglo-Saxon, a semi-legendary the 5th century, AC, who appears on the one hand as leader of the Anglo-Saxon (and Danish) invasion of the south-east of England, founder of the “Kingdom of Kent”, and, on the other hand, as follower of the Danish king Hnӕf.
4Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22.03.1999. Rezension: Bellestriktik, von Heinrich Detering.. „Für eine Minute einen Sitzplatz im Paradies“. Besprechung von Jorge Luis Borges: „Der Geschmack eines Apfels“. Gedichte. Ausgewählt von Raoul Schrott. Übersetzt von Gisbert Haefs und Raoul Schrott. Carl Hanser Verlag, München, 1999.
5Bernés, Jean-Pierre, “Jorge Luis Borges. La vie commence...”, París, 2010, pg. 152
6„...Jean-Pierre Bernés était l’ami, le traducteur et l’éditeur du grand écrivain argentin Jorge Luis Borges. Sa maison, à Audenge, regorgeait de trésors, patiemment rassemblés par cet homme qui vivait comme au XVIIIe siècle et qui est ,ort ; cet été ; dans l’indifférence sur le bassin d’Arcachon. « SUD OUEST, par David Patsouris, le 08.01.2021.
7Jünger, Ernst. „Siebzig verweht III, 1993, pgs. 191-192.
8“Ernst Jünger – Besuch von J.L.Borges”, https//:youtu.be/GsfYcflA_X49.
9Jünger, Ernst. „Siebzig verweht III, 1993, pgs. 191-192.
10“El Borges en el claroscuro de Vargas Llosa”, www.el periódico.com, 07.07.2020.
11„Borges´s Englishness”, from a piece in The London Review of Books archive by John Sturrock, originally published on 7.8.1986.
12Bernés, pgs. 167-68.
13Bernés, pg. 167.
14Bernés, pg. 170.
15Blog.fid-romanistik.de, “Jorge Luis Borges und Genf: Eine Spurensuche”, Prof. René Schneider.
16Obras Completas, pg. 437.
