“I arrive
now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer.
All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared
past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering
mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on
symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is
all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and
circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the
same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these
inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)”
Borges’
accomplishments as a writer are matched by his glory as a reader. He seems to
have read everything and remembered it. He is a voluptuary of the book. He writes
in 1927 essay, “Literary Pleasure” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, On Writing, 2010):
“Our
indolence speaks of classical books, eternal books. If only some eternal book
existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous
morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your
favorite books, reader, are like the rough drafts of that book without a final
reading.”
Two women I
work with, natives of Argentina, told me that Borges was a standard part of the
curriculum in their schools when they were growing up. Neither is a literary
person or ambitious reader, but both expressed national pride when I mentioned
my son’s recent discovery of Borges and my longtime love of his work. In Sabers and Utopia: Visions of Latin America (trans.
Anna Kushner, 2018), Mario Vargas Llosa writes in “Repugnant Laudatory Farce”:
“In reality,
great talents are not ‘produced’ by their countries, and, as such, Borges is
not an Argentine ‘product.’ He came out of an almost indiscernible alliance of
ideas, images, poems, novels, essays, philosophic and theological systems,
coming from many languages and cultures, from the stimulating atmosphere of a
family, a group of friends and acquaintances, but, mainly, from a disposition
or personal gift, a unique and exclusive one, for dreaming, fantasizing,
assimilating great literary creations and ordering Spanish words into phrases,
pages, and books of extraordinary precision and unusual beauty. And for this
reason, like Shakespeare, Goethe, Cervantes, and so many other eminent
creators, Borges belongs not to Argentina but rather to all who read him and
are dazzled by his imagination, his literary culture, his elegance, his irony,
and his magnificent way of using our language, imposing on it the exactitude of
English and the intelligence of French without losing the wild vigor of the
Castilian.”
1 comment:
I commend you to that bastion of pulpy vulgarity and lousy writing, Weird Tales. It regularly published Clark Ashton Smith, and when I first read Borges, I realized that Smith, probably without ever hearing of Borges, had written several stories that Borges himself would have been proud to have produced, among them "The Last Incantation", "The Empire of the Necromancers", and especially "The Last Hieroglyph."
Post a Comment