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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility -- they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.
What really got my attention in Josipovici's piece Borges and the Plain Sense of Things, was his focus on the postscript to the story, on the narrator's experience of Tlön infiltrating and disintegrating our world. I see now that I have in the past read this story as if it were written by a Tlönian metaphysician, as a work of fantasy: my understanding of the story has been twofold, of Borges asking me to imagine a world where idealism is the obviously correct way to understand reality and a human conspiracy to invent such a world, and of Borges asking me to imagine this invented world overtaking our own. But I've been missing, or not paying enough attention to, a third aspect of this (vast) story, how Borges the narrator feels about this alteration of reality. (Maybe I should have been tipped off by Borges' footnote #2, in which he refers to Russell's idea that the world could have been "created only moments ago, filled with human beings who 'remember' an illusory past." It has never been very clear to me what this note is doing in the story; but it could certainly be there to tie the thought-experiment in to the present moment in history from which Borges is writing.)Speaking of footnotes -- one of the things that is great about this edition of the fictions, is Hurley's painstakingly researched, unobtrusive endnotes. They are easily ignorable when you want to read the story without interruption; and they add a whole lot when you read the story with interruptions. I am taken aback to find that all of the people named in this story (excluding, perhaps, Herbert Ashe) -- Carlos Mastronardi, Néstor Ibarra, Alfonso Reyes, Xul Solar, etc. -- are real figures from Borges' milieu, and very interested at some of the books referenced. And this does not come from Hurley's notes -- but I was very happy to learn that there really is an Anglo-American Cyclopædia from 1917, which really is a reprint of an older edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
posted evening of March 17th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Gabriel Josipovici's essay on "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" has prompted me to go back and take a look at Borges' fictions (and to check out from the library the Collected Fictions, and to be confirmed in my impression of Hurley's translations as pitch-perfect, and to resolve to buy the volume.) One thing I'm noticing -- making very slow progress, with a lot of re-reading -- is that the  identification-with-other that I like so much in most of the fiction I read is not present so strongly in Borges. The narrators are identifiably Borges -- the only case I've noticed so far where this is untrue, "Man on Pink Corner," is a comparatively weak story, it feels like he is trying too hard. This is not a short-coming, precisely; in some stories like "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" or "The Shape of the Sword," it is exactly the right thing. But it it really noticeable, and striking, for instance in "The Library of Babel" -- the narrator cannot be a denizen of the Library, else how would he have any knowledge of the books and languages he names, but must instead be Borges imagining himself in that situation. I as a reader get to identify with Borges but not, or only at second hand, with the nameless man who wanders endlessly through the Library. It is a long time since I've read most of these stories, and I am still in the early part of the collection -- I will try and keep an eye out for whether this style of narration continues throughout.
posted evening of March 16th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
I happened today on Borges' essay on "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (thanks for the link, Dave!) -- Douglas Crockford has put a parallel translation of it online on his web site, it's not clear whose translation he's using. Great fun to read, and it includes a list of the types of animals which I'm pretty sure is included as a fragment in Book of Imaginary Beings:
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge*. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into:
- belonging to the Emperor
- embalmed
- trained
- piglets
- sirens
- fabulous
- stray dogs
- included in this classification
- trembling like crazy
- innumerables
- drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
- et cetera
- just broke the vase
- from a distance look like flies
Wilkins made an early attempt to create a universal language -- some of his work An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language is online in facsimile here; Borges also references some other early attempts, Johann Martin Schleyer's Volapük, Giuseppe Peano's Interlingua, and Bonifacio Sotos Ochando's Lengua universal. (Pedro Mata's Curso de lengua universal, referenced by Borges, is online in its entirety at Google Books.)
 *Wikipædia notes that the truth of this attribution is open to question. Laszlo Cseresnyesi of Shikoku Gakuin University wrote a post on LINGUIST-l in 1996 discussing the Celestial Emporium. "The responses I have received leave no doubt
that I'd better give up on the search for the
Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Creatures
(and stop pestering my colleagues at the Chinese
Department). However, I believe that one cannot
prove the non-existence of a book conclusively,
and I have had no chance to follow all the
conceivable leads in a major library."
posted evening of October 27th, 2009: 1 response
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Friday, September 18th, 2009
So for a while I've been wondering about the obituary of Poe that Borges attributes to Whitman in his lecture on The Detective Story... Today I tracked it down. (Thanks for their invaluable assistance to Brett Barney and Ed Folsom of the Whitman Archive.) Borges is referring to Whitman's essay A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, in which he says of Poe's poems that "beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excell'd ones, of certain pronounc'd phases of human morbidity." Also worth looking at Whitman's note on Edgar Poe's Significance -- Whitman's take on Poe seems to have been very much in line with Borges' own.
posted evening of September 18th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, July 25th, 2009
They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him -- or that he will kill you. I can't remember which; but the gist of it is, that two of you is one too many.-- Double Take
I'm midway through The Double now, and still not sure how to approach reading it. It seems at times like a Woody Allen movie, exploring the humorous consequences of its main character's depression/inferiority complex; at other times I think Saramago has something enlightening to say about depression, but the (overly?) dismissive tone of his narrator makes it impossible to develop this much -- every thing he says, he cuts down. I'm pretty sure the intent of the book is neither broad comedy nor pedagogy, but I'm sort of alternating between these poles in my reading -- I'm hoping Saramago will show his hand a bit when the doubles meet.Bill of Orbis Quintus linked to an interview with screenwriter Tom McCarthy, in which he discusses among other things his most recent project, the movie Double Take (a longer article about the movie is at Art in America). Sounds great -- he says it is based on "a Borges tale about meeting his own double" -- at first I thought this was referring to "Borges and I", but this is probably wrong, unless the relationship between the source text and the movie is very loose indeed.* He's changed it around so that the movie is about Alfred Hitchcock rather than Borges, which seems to me like a excellent move -- not that I wouldn't be glad to see a movie about Borges, but throwing Hitchcock into the mix can only produce good consequences. Here is a clip: ...And yikes! another, mind-boggling, clip underneath the fold.
* (The story referenced is "The Other", from The Book of Sand.)
 (...And thinking further, I'd say the relationship between source text and movie is indeed very loose, and who knows, "Borges and I" may have been the inspiration for this. I need to see more of the movie to have any actual opinion about this, though.)
↻...done
posted afternoon of July 25th, 2009: 3 responses
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Monday, May 25th, 2009
Here is what is confusing me about "Instantes": what was the impetus for Mauricio Ciechanower to publish the poem under Borges' name, and for Elena Poniatowska to back him up (if I'm reading correctly) with a fabricated interview? Were they playing a joke? If so it is an excellent one -- if they were attempting a fraud in earnest it just seems really weird: why? what is the profit for them?... And then if it was a joke, was Alastair Reid in on the joke, or was he duped? He is alive and one could ask him (Poniatowska is also still kicking, don't know about Ciechanower); I don't understand why Almeida did not.
posted morning of May 25th, 2009: Respond
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I did not quite catch this last night; but it is hilarious: Almeida's article is titled "Jorge Luis Borges, author of the poem 'Moments'"; and it is prefaced with a highly relevant quotation from "Pierre Menard".
posted morning of May 25th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Huh: weird! I happened on this poem today, attributed to Borges and with a translation attributed to Alastair Reid. I was kind of taken with it, especially with the way the whole poem is subjunctive and the return to declarative voice in the final line feels kind of crushing. Checking for links with more information about this poem I find many, many pages reprinting the poem and attributing it to Borges, and also two articles (one by Iván Almeida, published in Borges Studies Online, and a shorter one by Eugenio Siccardi which refers to Almeida's piece) denying that Borges wrote this poem. I haven't read Almeida's whole article -- it's late and I'm tired, and I don't speak Spanish -- but he looks to know what he's talking about. Interesting -- what strikes me as really weird about this is attributing a translation of the fraudulent poem to Reid. I hope to have another go at the article tomorrow and see how this plays out.
Instantes
(no por Borges)
Si pudiera vivir nuevamente mi vida.
En la próxima tratarÃa de cometer más errores.
No intentarÃa ser tan perfecto, me relajarÃa más.
SerÃa más tonto de lo que he sido, de hecho
tomarÃa muy pocas cosas con seriedad.
SerÃa menos higiénico.
CorrerÃa más riesgos, harÃa más viajes, contemplarÃa
más atardeceres, subirÃa más montañas, nadarÃa más rÃos.
IrÃa a más lugares adonde nunca he ido, comerÃa
más helados y menos habas, tendrÃa más problemas
reales y menos imaginarios.
Yo fui una de esas personas que vivió sensata y prolÃficamente
cada minuto de su vida; claro que tuve momentos de alegrÃa.
Pero si pudiera volver atrás tratarÃa de tener
solamente buenos momentos.
Por si no lo saben, de eso está hecha la vida, sólo de momentos;
no te pierdas el ahora.
Yo era uno de esos que nunca iban a ninguna parte sin
termómetro,
una bolsa de agua caliente, un paraguas y un paracaÃdas;
Si pudiera volver a vivir, viajarÃa más liviano.
Si pudiera volver a vivir comenzarÃa a andar descalzo a principios
de la primavera y seguirÃa asà hasta concluir el otoño.
DarÃa más vueltas en calesita, contemplarÃa más amaneceres
y jugarÃa con más niños, si tuviera otra vez la vida por delante.
Pero ya tengo 85 años y sé que me estoy muriendo.
A little more: Almeida says Reid did publish this translation, in Queen's Quarterly of Autumn 1992, and seems to be a bit mystified as to why he would have done that. "Perhaps the history of literature is the history of grand errors in reading." Almeida finds the original author of this poem to be Nadine Stair of Kentucky, published in the March 27 1978 issue of Family Circle (Almeida bizarrely calls the magazine Family Circus). ...According to Bryon Crawford, the author's real name was Nadine Strain.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: 3 responses
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Wow, sometimes a passage of  reading just sends you scrambling for reference materials... A izquierda y a la derecha, absortos en su lúcido sueño, se perfilan los rostros momentáneos de los lectores, a la luz de las lámparas estudiosas, como en la hipálage de Milton. This comes from the dedication at the front of Borges' El hacedor -- Borges is dedicating the book to his deceased countryman Leopoldo Lugones, and imagining a library where he would give the book to Lugones. "To the left and to the right, absorbed in their lucid dream, the momentary faces of the readers are outlined in the light of the studious lamps, as in the hypallage of Milton." Wait -- the what of Milton? Wikipædia is useful as normal -- "studious lamps" is a hypallage, an application of the adjective to a different word than the one it's actually describing. Now I was curious and wanted to know why Borges was making reference to Milton here. So I looked; and in the course of surfing around trying to figure it out, made a very useful discovery. In Dreamtigers, Mildred Boyer translates "lámparas estudiosas" as "bright officious lamps" -- why? A search for that phrase brings one directly to the source passage in Milton -- Paradise Lost IX.103-4: Terrestrial Heav'n, danced round by other Heav'ns,
That shine, yet bear their bright, officious lamps I spent a little while trying to figure this one out -- is "officious" rendered as "estudiosas" in the Spanish translation of Milton? That would not make a lot of sense, and besides I'm sure Borges read Milton in English. Ultimately I think it is just a really weird choice on Boyer's part -- Borges is not quoting Milton, he's alluding to him, but Boyer seems to be committed to a reading that says Borges is quoting Milton -- and thus makes the usage not be a hypallage but simply an incoherency. But look at how Andrew Hurley translates the passage in Collected Fictions:To left and right, absorbed in their
waking dream, rows of readers' momentary profiles in the light of
the 'scholarly lamps,' as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives
would have it. This is a little wordy maybe -- but it communicates the image in Borges' piece precisely, indeed it allows me to see the image much more clearly than I had when I was grappling with this unfamiliar word "hypallage".I came across Hurley's translation in an essay he wrote for Cadernos de Tradução, the journal of the translation department at Universida de Federal de Santa Caterina in Florianópolis, Brasil: What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges [PDF]. It is a magnificent article and I want to post about it in more detail, but I strongly encourage anyone interested in Borges to read it. One of Hurley's points in this piece is that the hypallage is a key element of Borges' style. In the following sentences, Borges refers to two more instances of hypallage: the "arid camel" from Lugones' own Lunario sentimental, and Æneid VI.268: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram (approx. "They passed in darkness under the lonely night through shadow." -- according to Borges, a line that both "employs and surpasses this artifice.")You can hear Borges reading this dedication at Poema en audio. Lots more of his readings there too, which I haven't begun to check through yet.
posted evening of May 20th, 2009: 7 responses
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Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Padeces cautiverio, pero habrás dado una palabra al poema.
I was reading from Labyrinths this afternoon and took a look at the third section of the book, "Parables", which had totally slipped from my memory. It is very short pieces, a page or less, not quite "fictions" because they are not plotted, just quick, terse observations of the human condition. The first two pieces, "Inferno, I, 32" and "Paradisio, XXXI, 108" use Dante's comedy to posit the impossibility of knowing one's place in the universe. Sharp and sweet. It looks like these pieces are almost all taken from Borges' 1960 book El hacedor (I think this is roughly "The Creator"; it was published in English as "Dreamtigers"), which is available online from literatura.us -- I think I will try to read some of them in their original language. (A note about translations, though: the translations in Labyrinths, mostly done by James E. Irby, are head and shoulders above the other Borges translations I've been looking at, mostly by Anthony Bonner.)Perhaps some feature of that crucified countenance lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was obliterated, so that God could be all of us.Who knows whether tonight we shall not see it in the labyrinth of our dreams and not even know it tomorrow.
posted evening of May 19th, 2009: Respond
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Borges is the genius of 20th-Century literature. His short stories defy description but demand to be read.
