`I Want to Be Someone Else'

Borges, a master reader, often read us – citizens of the United States, I mean -- more acutely than we have read ourselves. Our inheritance is to be a nation of shape-shifters. Don’t like who you are? Reinvent yourself: Go back to school. Change jobs. Move to the other end of the continent, “the Territory ahead.” Borges knew something about fluid identities, and in “Borges and I” he writes: “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.” When writing about American writers, he often concentrated on their willingness to change, to become another. “Emerson” is a sonnet from The Self and the Other (1964), translated by Mark Strand:

“Closing the heavy volume of Montaigne,
The tall New Englander goes out
Into an evening which exalts the fields.
It is a pleasure no less than reading.
He walks toward the final sloping of the sun,
Toward the landscape’s gilded edge;
He moves through darkening fields as he moves now
Through the memory of the one who writes this down.
He thinks: I have read the essential books
And written other which oblivion
Will not efface. I have been allowed
That which is given mortal man to know.
The whole continent knows my name.
I have not lived. I want to be someone else.”

The last line sounds Jamesian. So bookish and cloistered a New Englander, Emerson longed to experience every occupation he encountered – sailor, soldier, fisherman -- and in his florid imagination, he did. Borges has Emerson close a book (by one of his masters and the subject of one of his best essays) to venture outdoors, to follow the setting sun (“but a morning star”) as though he were emulating his testy friend Thoreau. In Emerson, Borges sees a restlessness and discontent shared by many of his countrymen. From the same collection comes “Camden, 1892,” translated by Alastair Reid:

“The smell of coffee and the newspapers.
Sunday and its lassitudes. The morning,
and on the adjoining page , that vanity –
the publication of allegorical verses
by a fortunate fellow poet. The old man
lies on a white bed in his sober room,
a poor man’s habitation. Languidly
he gazes at his face in the worn mirror.
He thinks, beyond astonishment now: that man
is me, and absentmindedly his hand
touches the unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth.
The end is close. He mutters to himself:
I am almost dead, but still my poems retain
life and its wonders. I was once Walt Whitman.”

This is Horace Traubel’s Whitman, a garrulous, ailing old man living in a cluttered room in New Jersey. To the end – he died March 26, 1892 – he contained multitudes, even former selves, and at least one of them gave us Leaves of Grass. Always mercurial, he made it the defining national trait. He deserved to stand among Emerson’s representative men, an emblematic American, like Louis Armstrong and Sherwood Anderson, self-recreators all. In a prologue he wrote in 1969 for a Spanish translation of Whitman – Hojas de hierba – Borges says:

“Whitman was already plural; the author resolved that he would be infinite.”