May 7, 1972

The Other Borges Than the Central One

By E. R. MONEGAL

SELECTED POEMS 1923-1967 By Jorge Luis Borges. DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT By Jorge Luis Borges.

ntil quite recently the only image of Borges in the mind of the American reader was Borges the builder of verbal labyrinths, the monstrorum artifex of many fictions, the teller (or reteller) of myths linking contemporary men to Babel, Babylon, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. In short: a writer to place beside Kafka and Nabokov, Pynchon and Barthelme, a representative of a kind of fiction that resists the temptations of realism, of political or social commitment, of brave humanistic causes. His was a world of irony and pure alienation, of escape into the structural complexities of narrative, of a text whose only ambition was to be read as a text and not as a blueprint for the universe. The Borges of "Ficciones," "Labyrinths," "Dreamtigers," "Other Inquisitions," "The Book of Imaginary Beings," "The Aleph and Other Stories," was basically a many-faced magician, a thoroughly fascinating literary intelligence--to borrow a few words from a review.

This particular image of Borges corresponds to the writer who between 1932 (date of the original edition of "Discusión") and 1952 (when he published "Otras Inquisiciones") created the most astonishing corpus of literary fiction in the Spanish language of this century: four collections of short stories (of which one is still not translated), three volumes of parodies (written with a distinguished younger novelist, Adolfo Bioy Casares), three volumes of fictional essays.

In those books, Borges created a new genre: the essayistic short story that postulates the existence of non-existent books and authors and proceeds to explain and discuss them, creating a reduced "model" of their work that is presented in the place of the unwritten opus. His essays of the same period dealt with real authors and subjects as if they were imaginary, and re-created them by use of the same techniques as in the short stories. An esthetics of reading emerged slowly from these exercises. Borges was the first to make plain to everyone that reading can be (and almost generally is) as creative as writing. The French new novelists and critics found in his inquisitions and fictions the stimuli to develop their own experiments.

Although this general image of Borges is correct, it does not tell the whole story. Only recently the other Borges--the one that precedes and succeeds the central one--is becoming available to the American reader, thanks to Norman Thomas di Giovanni's scholarly translations. This other Borges is less fascinating but as unpredictable as the previous one. It does not always succeed in upsetting all literary notions but still manages to bring out a very personal, unmistakable voice. The relationship between the central Borges we knew and this new Borges is the relationship between the center and the whole. A total Borges will emerge slowly from the new (and the old) books Norman Thomas di Giovanni is translating with Borges's collaboration: a Borges that would be both familiar and strange to the readers of his central books. But a Borges that, if rightly read, will provide the clue to many of the most obscure passages of the central one.

Of the two books under review, "Selected Poems" is the most challenging to readers of the central Borges. It encompasses practically the whole of Borges's creative life, from his origins as an "ultraist" poet, a member of a sect that believed (like the imagist poets) that metaphor was everything, to the old wise man of today who believes in very little except in finding a small voice to say what everybody else is saying. In the earlier books of poems, up to 1929, Borges is still the young poet whose ambition is to coin a verse that will be everything to everybody: the disciple both of Whitman and the German Expressionists poets, the sad, shy inhabitant of a Buenos Aires made more of dreams and loneliness than of reality. The man who continued to write poetry in his forties and fifties was no longer young, no longer so ambitious. A couple of quotations from two beloved minor English poets (Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson) helped him to apologize for not being a great poet.

These apologies came at the time, it is important to underline, when Borges was writing his best fiction and his most original essays. In those days, poetry was a secondary occupation for him, and prose absorbed all his creative capacity. But his diminishing eyesight and the total prohibition to read and write that came in 1956 forced Borges back into poetry. In the long days and nights of his sightless vigil, he entertained himself by composing poems in his mind, and by repeating them to himself until the oral draft was ready to be dictated. After 1956 his poetic output increased considerably, and Borges discovered a new self. Not the young Whitmanesque poet who wanted to summarize the whole world in one poem, nor the reticent, elusive middle-aged poet who approached his craft with such diffidence. But a wise old man who worked in darkness with the same tools as his ancestors, Homer and Milton.

His poems now are like the conversation of the poet with himself, that other one Borges discusses in a brilliant page of "Dreamtigers" reprinted in one of the appendices of this new edition. It is a private voice though not a confessional one. Even when the poet speaks of the things he loves, of his shortcomings, of his near blindness, he speaks as if about someone else: Borges, the mask, the persona he has finally resigned himself to be. He does not write for publication, he explains rather naively: "I can fairly claim that every piece in this book had its origin in a particular mood, in a necessity of its own, and was not meant to illustrate a theory or to fill out a volume." And in another context, but with the same purpose: "I believe I have found my own voice." (The first statement comes from the foreword to "Selected Poems"; the second from the preface to the first edition of "Doctor Brodie's Report.")

His own voice! It is easy to challenge this and maintain that his own voice can be heard more clearly in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," where he describes an imaginary planet, than the poem "The Borges," where he is talking about some of his ancestors; or that his terrors, hopes and nightmares are more easily recognizable in "The Library of Babel" than in the poem "Limits" (either of its two versions) in which he speaks only of himself. But to challenge him would be superfluous. In his prefaces and forewords, Borges is really indicating a purely autobiographical reading of his own work.

From this point of view, the fact that he not only selected the poems in the present volume, but also collaborated with many translators, as he had in the translation of "The Aleph and Other Stories," is very important. Like Henry James when he revised all his novels and tales for the New York edition, the old Argentine master is now poring over his earlier books and choosing what ought to be translated and how. It is impossible to argue with him that in doing this he could be unjust to some of his most brilliant early work.

His reluctance to authorize a translation of "Historia Universal de la Infamia," his first book of short stories (1935), is well-known. This is, nevertheless, the book that literally transformed the Spanish prose of the thirties and whose long echoes can still be heard in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel García Márquez and "Three Trapped Tigers" by Cabrera Infante, to mention only a couple of the most outstanding Latin American novels of today. Borges has condemned to oblivion the first three books of essays he published, and in selecting his poems for the American edition has allowed only a third of the early ones, and only half of the most recent, to be translated.

The translations themselves, done with the utmost care and scholarship by Norman Thomas di Giovanni or edited by him from versions done by distinguished American and English poets, show Borges's bias in favor of concision and clarity. He has canceled many poems, but even those he has accepted have been corrected to satisfy his present requirements.

The stories collected under the title "Doctor Brodie's Report" have not been changed very much. Except for one, they were written quite recently (in 1970, in fact) and, as Borges points out in a foreword, "the writing and the translation were, except in one case, more or less simultaneous." But again it is the old master's image that comes out stronger here, because these tales are written in a more realistic vein and, in a sense, take Borges back to the writings of his early masters, Maupassant and Kipling. It is very significant that some of these stories repeat the subjects of early stories, but give them a less baroque, more matter-of-fact turn. In this respect it will be useful to compare "Rosendo's Tale" in "Doctor Brodie's Report" with the earlier and flashier "Streetcorner Man" in "The Aleph and Other Stories." In a short afterword to the new volume, Borges indicates his preference for the new story. His opinion could be discussed.

But why argue with the old master? It is much more profitable to read his poems not only for the light they shed on his more complex and elusive fiction but also for the sheer pleasure of listening simultaneously to the young and old craftsman, for the elegant skepticism of many of his verses and the almost child-like love of books and places they reveal. Or to listen to the new "realistic" stories in which the old ghosts of his former fiction (labyrinths, libraries, Scandinavian or Oriental heroes) have been replaced by more commonplace subjects. Only once (in the title story) does Borges go back to one of his childhood books, Gulliver's horrible last voyage, for an ironical view of humanity. But the reader will not have to face the metaphysical horrors of his earlier tales.

To accept these poems and stories at their face value as very simple exercises is to miss what lies behind all this simplicity. As Borges indirectly points out in his preface to the tales, his new texts are not really so simple because "there isn't anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity." Beyond the surface of a linear story like "The Intruder"--in which a woman, loved by two brothers, is finally killed by the older, so that they will not be separated any longer by her--Borges has managed to suggest a tragic situation that is anything but simple. The best, the profound Borges, is here. The total one, of course.

E. R. Monegal teaches contemporary Latin American literature at Yale and is currently writing a literary biography of Borges.

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