'Things That Might Have Been and Never Were'

My middle son enjoys a genre of fiction known as “alternate history.” Among its practitioners is the American novelist Harry Turtledove. As I understand it, the premise is simple: change an event in the past and see what happens in subsequent history. Hitler, for instance, dies in infancy. Fleming never discovers penicillin, and his students Florey and Chain never use it to treat streptococcal meningitis. Lee Harvey Oswald is hit by a truck and killed in the Soviet Union. I no longer read science fiction but based on what I’ve been told, alternate history novels resemble the pot-fueled bull sessions I participated in as a university student. 

A similar hypothesis is at work in the poem “Things That Might Have Been” (The History of the Night, 1977) by Jorge Luis Borges, translated into English by Hoyt Rogers:

 

“I think about things that might have been and never were.

The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write.

The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed

As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse.

History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross.

History without Helen’s face.

Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon.

Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South.

The love we never shared.

The vast empire the Vikings declined to found.

The globe without the wheel, or without the rose.

John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare.

The Unicorn’s other horn.

The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once.

The child I never had.”

 

Borges saves the saddest for last. Another of his poems, “The Just” (The Limit, trans. Alistair Reid, 1981), is built around a similar structure, a series of responses to the title:

 

“A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.

He who is grateful for the existence of music.

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.

Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.

The potter, contemplating a color and a form.

The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.

A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.

He who strokes a sleeping animal.

He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.

He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.

He who prefers others to be right.

These people, unaware, are saving the world.”

[Rogers’ translations are collected in Borges’ Selected Poems (ed. Alexander Coleman, 1999). Hoyt Rogers has also translated work by Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Claude and André du Bouchet.]