Labyrinths (30 page)

A Problem

Let us imagine that in Toledo a paper is discovered containing a text in Arabic which the paleographers declare to be in the handwriting of the Cide Hamete Benengeli from whom Cervantes derived the
Quixote.
In this text we read that the hero (who, as is famous, wandered over the roads of Spain, armed with sword and lance, and challenged anyone for any reason at all) discovers, after one of his many combats, that he has killed a man. At that point the fragment ends; the problem is to guess or conjecture how Don Quixote would react.

As far as I know, there are three possible answers. The first is of a negative nature: nothing particular happens, because in the hallucinatory world of Don Quixote death is no less common than magic and having killed a man should not perturb a person who fights, or believes he fights, with fabulous monsters and sorcerers. The second answer is of a pathetic nature.

Don Quixote never managed to forget that he was a projection of Alonso Quijano, a reader of fabulous tales; seeing death, understanding that a dream has led him to the sin of Cain, awakens him from his pampered madness, perhaps forever. The third answer is perhaps the most plausible. Once the man is dead, Don Quixote cannot admit that this tremendous act is a product of delirium; the reality of the effect makes him presuppose a parallel reality of the cause and Don Quixote will never emerge from his madness.

There is another conjecture, which is alien to the Spanish orb and even to the orb of the Western world and requires a more ancient, more complex and more weary atmosphere. Don Quixote ― who is no longer Don Quixote but a king of the cycles of Hindustan ― senses, standing before the dead body of his enemy, that killing and engendering are divine or magical acts which notably transcend the human condition. He knows that the dead man is illusory, the same as the bloody sword weighing in his hand and himself and all his past life and the vast gods and the universe.

Translated by J. E. I.

Borges and I

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

Translated by J. E. I.

Everything and Nothing

There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavor of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamerlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet, who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man, who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words "I am not what I am." The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.

For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be someone; he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: "I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself." The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one."

Translated by J. E. I.

Elegy

      Oh destiny of Borges

      to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world

      or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names,

      to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas,

      of Colombia and of Texas,

      to have returned at the end of changing generations

      to the ancient lands of his forbears,

      to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties

      where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood,

      to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London,

      to have grown old in so many mirrors,

      to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues,

      to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases,

      to have seen the things that men see,

      death, the sluggish dawn, the plains,

      and the delicate stars,

      and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing

      except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires

      a face that does not want you to remember it.

      Oh destiny of Borges,

      perhaps no stranger than your own.

(1964)

Translated by D. A. Y.

Chronology

1899
  Born August 24 in Buenos Aires

1914
  Travels with his family to Europe. At the outbreak of the war, the Borgeses settle in Switzerland where Jorge finishes his secondary education.

1919-21
  Travel in Spain ― Majorca, Seville, Madrid. Association with the
ultraist
literary group (Rafael Cansinos Assens, Guillermo de Torre, Gerardo Diego, etc.). His first poem published in the magazine
Grecia.

1921
  Returns to Argentina. Publication with friends (González Lanuza, Norah Lange, Francisco Piñero, etc.) of the "mural" magazine
Prisma ―
pasted in poster fashion on fences and walls of the city.

1923
  Family travels again to Europe. Publication at home of his first book of poetry,
El fervor de Buenos Aires.

1924
  Contributes to the reincarnated
Proa
and
Martín Fierro,
two important literary magazines of the time.

1925
  Appearance of his second book of poetry,
Luna de enfrente,
and his first book of essays,
Inquisiciones.

1926
  Another collection of essays:
El tamaño de mi esperanza.

1928
 
El idioma de los argentinos,
essays.

1929
 
Cuaderno San Martín,
his third volume of verses.

1930
 
Evaristo Carriego,
an essay which honors this Buenos Aires poet, plus other pieces. Borges meets Adolfo Bioy Casares, with whom he will collaborate on various literary undertakings during the next three decades.

1932
 
Discusión,
essays and film criticism.

1933
  Begins to contribute to the literary supplement of the newspaper
Crítica,
which he will later edit.

1935
 
Historia universal de la infamia,
a collection of some of his first tentative efforts at writing prose fiction.

1936 
Historia de la eternidad,
essays.

1938
  His father dies. Borges is appointed librarian of a small municipal Buenos Aires library.

1941
 
El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan,
an anthology of his short stories.

1944
 
Ficciones,
his most celebrated collection of stories.

1946
  For purely political reasons, he is relieved of his post as municipal librarian.

1949
 
El Aleph,
a collection of his stories written during the preceding five years.

1952
 
Otras inquisiciones,
his most important collection of essays.

1954
  The first three volumes of Borges's
Collected Works
are published by Emecé in Buenos Aires. The first book of literary criticism dedicated exclusively to his work and its influence appears:
Borges y la nueva generación
by Adolfo Prieto.

1955 
With the overthrow of the Peronist regime, Borges is named Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires.

1956
  Assumes the chair of English and North American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

1958-59
  Period of reduced literary productivity, marked by a return to poetic composition and the cultivation of extremely short prose forms.

1960
 
El hacedor,
his most recent collection to date of new pieces (prose and poetry). . .

1961
 
Antología personal,
Borges's selection of his own preferred prose and poetry. He shares with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers' Prize. In the fall he leaves for the University of Texas on an invitation to lecture on Argentine literature.

1962 
Lectures at universities in eastern United States. Returns to Buenos Aires and the University where he offers a course in Old English. First book publication in English:
Ficciones
(Grove Press) and a selection of his best prose writings,
Labyrinths
(New Directions).

1963
 Leaves for a brief tour of Europe (Spain, Switzerland, and France) and England where he lectures on English and Spanish American literary topics. Travels later to Colombia to lecture and receives an honorary degree from the University of Los Andes.

1964
 Occasionally publishes poetry in Buenos Aires newspapers. Now blind, he dedicates much of his energy to his classes at the University.

1966
  Receives the Annual Literary Award of the Ingram Merrill Foundation, which includes a prize of $5,000.

1971
  Made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Awarded honorary degrees by Columbia University and the University of Oxford. To date, his most recent books are
Aleph and Other Stories
(Dutton) and
The Book of Imaginary Beings
(Avon).

1972
 
Doctor Brodie's Report
is to be published in January.