Borges, apocrypha and apocalypse

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges never won the Nobel Prize for literature, though there is a short story with the title "A Nobel Prize for Jorge Luis Borges" that won a Palanca award several years ago, whose author’s name we forget but who surfaces ever so often to win awards of this sort, not necessarily having to do with writers winning imaginary awards.

Of course Borges, who died in 1986, will never win the Nobel, the most exalted prize to be handed out in literature and in other fields every October in Stockholm, since the award is not given posthumously. But there is no question that he deserves such award, considering his influence on writers the world over, and which a local writer saw fit to give redress through fiction, a genre at times more realistic than truth.

Recently, an in-law gave us a collection of lectures by Borges, newly unearthed and transcribed as it were from his Charles Elliot Norton lectures in New York in 1967-1968. This Craft of Verse (Harvard University Press) seems to revel in its conversational style, in at times rambling English, as spoken to what could be a select group of Borges’ North American students.

And through these rather open-ended essays we can get a glimpse of the vintage Borges, whose own philosophy of literature – i.e., the written and at times translated word – is here laid bare in all its humility. For as a writer, Borges has always been the master of self-effacement, and yet brimming with a profound wisdom.

Perhaps this wisdom comes partly from his blindness – for he was blind as a proverbial bat towards the last years of his life – and often took to dictating his compositions to a cassette recorder, if not a highly efficient secretary with whom he would occasionally fall in love with.

"Twilight of the dove…" begins one of Borges’ early translated poems, and this problem or dilemma of translation is the gist of one essay wherein the author wonders if we haven’t in fact pre-judged the translated work as inferior to the original.

He further postulates: What if the translator had presented his work side by side with the original, and not told which work was the translated one? Would the objective reader then be able to tell the difference?

The question of translation, and its faithfulness to the original, becomes all the more problematic when we take into account the oft-quoted phrase that poetry is what is lost in translation, interpretation or paraphrase, and considering too that most English-speaking readers came to read Borges only through his translated work from the Spanish, the Argentine branch of the Castillan language.

We at the same time must bear in mind that two of Borges’ more successful poems were actually written straight into English, and are subtitled "Two English Poems," one of which is a paean to an insomniac heroism: "The useless dawn finds me at a deserted streetcorner… I have outlived the night."

At least in this case translators won’t have to wear their eyes out trying to figure out the varied nuances in Borges’ beloved Spanish, because here it is all in fairly understandable, and perhaps the poet’s just as beloved, English. (Borges was an avowed scholar of Old English and Norse literature.)

But enough of translations, which often enough take on a life of their own and become a separate work independent of, if not better than, the original.

In a chapter on the metaphor, Borges in effect indulges in mind games with his listeners, with simple digressions in word associations that have helped carry literature through the ages.

He suggests that there are certain accepted patterns of metaphors that are played out in different themes, the template being something like literary archetypes: Eyes like stars, the flower bespeaking a woman’s beauty, and other such seeming clichés are actually foundations of the metaphoric imagination.

Borges, as is typical of him in acknowledging the masters, quotes liberally and uses a wide range of sources, at one point tipping his hat to the quite disarming line by Byron of the Romantics: "She walks in beauty like the night."

It is not hard to picture Borges being touched by the muse as he ruminates on this line in his progressive blindness, which in an earlier essay he describes as if it were a lingering twilight, with lots of visible yellow and shades in between.

We’ve read Borges’ work in breathtaking translations before, mostly by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with the very lyrical notebooks bearing titles like "Fervor of Buenos Aires" and "Moon Across the Way," but reading him in English as he spoke it is quite a treat in itself.

Borges revels in the parable of the teller of tales eventually becoming also a poet, or is it the other way around; the singer can also be the song, as the poem leaps across the eons steeped in assorted apocrypha.