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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
The piece of Pliny's Natural History which Funes is reciting the third time Borges sees him is from the beginning of Book VII*, chapter 26; in Philemon Holland's translation: AS TOUCHING MEMORIE, the greateſt gift of Nature, and moſt neceſſarie of all others for this life; hard it is to judge and ſay who of all others deſerved the cheefe honour therein: conſidering how many men have excelled, and woon much glorie in that behalfe. King Cyrus was able to call every ſouldior that he had through his whole armie, by his owne name. L. Scipio could doe the like by all the citizens of Rome. Semblably, Cineas, Embaſſador of king Pyrrhus, the very next day that he came to Rome, both knew and alſo ſaluted by name all the Senate, and the whole degrees of Gentlemen and Cavallerie in the cittie. Mithridates the king, reigned over two and twentie nations of diverſe languages, and in ſo many tongues gave lawes and miniſtred juſtice unto them, without truchman: and when hee was to make ſpeech unto them in publicke aſſemblie reſpectively to every nation, he did performe it in their owne tongue, without interpretor. One Charmidas or Carmadas, a Grecian,†††was of ſo ſingular a memorie, that he was able to deliver by heart the contents word for word of all the bookes that a man would call for out of any librarie, as if he read the ſame preſently within a booke. At length the practiſe hereof was reduced into an art of Memorie: deviſed and invented firſt by Simonides Melicus, and afterwards brought to perfection and conſummate by Metrodorus Scepſius: by which a man might learne to rehearſe againe the ſame words of any diſcourſe whatſoever, after once hearing.
†††Carneades, according to Cicero and Quintilian.
 * (The same volume to which John of Pannonia will refer in "The Theologians".)
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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My sorry condition of being an Argentine prevents me from engaging in the genre -- obligatory in Uruguay -- of dithyramb; my subject is after all a Uruguayan.
Line from "Funes, the memorious" has me looking around to see if there are any examples of old Uruguayan dithyramb chanting... and I do not find that, not exactly*. But check out this more recent Chilean group, Ditirambo.
 * And I have a sneaking hunch that Borges is not saying quite what I at first took him to be saying, either -- that the usage is exaggeration or mis-naming, that "dithyramb" is here just a manner of speaking.
posted evening of June 9th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The caprice, the fantasy, the utopia of a Total Library has certain characteristics which are easily mistaken for virtues. Incredible, in the first place, how long it took mankind to arrive at this idea. Certain passages which Aristotle attributes to Democritus and to Leucippus clearly prefigure it; but its tardy inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner; its first expositor, Kurd Lasswitz.
The note in Sur #59 to which Borges referred in the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths, is his essay "The Total Library" -- I thank Daniel Balderston of the Borges Center at U. Pittsburgh for pointing this out to me. "The Total Library" (which has appeared many times in translation, most recently in Selected Non-Fictions) is a lovely read and excellent companion material for "The Library of Babel" -- it lacks the haunting, overpowering sense of futility which is that story's strongest characteristic, but it lays out clearly and concisely the premises underlying the story and its sources of inspiration.
 See also Theodor Pavlapoulos' essay, Lasswitz and Borges: Indexing the Library of Everything; and Lasswitz' story Die Universalbibliothek.
posted evening of June 8th, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, June 6th, 2010
The denizens of the Library have different ways of dealing with their lot in life...
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Es verosÃmil que esos graves misterios puedan explicarse en palabras: si no basta el lenguaje de los filósofos, la multiforme Biblioteca habrá producido el idioma inaudito que se requiere y los vocabularios y gramáticas de ese idioma. Hace ya cuatro siglos que los hombres fatigan los hexágonos... Hay buscadores oficiales, inquisidores. Yo los he visto en el desempeño de su función: llegan siempre rendidos; hablan de una escalera sin peldaños que casi los mató; hablan de galerÃas y de escaleras con el bibliotecario; alguna vez, toman el libro más cercano y lo hojean, en busca de palabras infames. Visiblemente, nadie espera descubrir nada.
A la desaforada esperanza, sucedió, como es natural, una depresión excesiva. La certidumbre de que algún anaquel en algún hexágono encerraba libros preciosos y de que esos libros preciosos eran inaccesibles, pareció casi intolerable. Una secta blasfema sugirió que cesaran las buscas y que todos los hombres barajaran letras y sÃmbolos, hasta construir, mediante un improbable don del azar, esos libros canónicos. Las autoridades se vieron obligadas a promulgar órdenes severas. La secta desapareció, pero en mi niñez he visto hombres viejos que largamente se ocultaban en las letrinas, con unos discos de metal en un cubilete prohibido, y débilmente remedaban el divino desorden.
Otros, inversamente, creyeron que lo primordial era eliminar las obras inútiles. InvadÃan los hexágonos, exhibÃan credenciales no siempre falsas, hojeaban con fastidio un volumen y condenaban anaqueles enteros: a su furor higiénico, ascético, se debe la insensata perdición de millones de libros. Su nombre es execrado, pero quienes deploran los «tesoros» que su frenesà destruyó, negligen dos hechos notorios. Uno: la Biblioteca es tan enorme que toda reducción de origen humano resulta infinitesimal. Otro: cada ejemplar es único, irreemplazable, pero (como la Biblioteca es total) hay siempre varios centenares de miles de facsÃmiles imperfectos: de obras que no difieren sino por una letra o por una coma. | |
It seems likely that these mysteries could eventually be explained with words: if the philosophers' language be insufficient, our multifarious Library has somewhere produced the never-heard language that will do it, the vocabulary and syntax of this idiom. Four hundred years ago already, men were becoming tired of these hexagonal cells... Now there are official sheriffs, inquisitors. I've seen them myself, carrying out their duties: always visibly exhausted -- they speak of a staircase missing a rung, which they almost died on; they speak of the galleries and the staircases with some librarian; sometimes, they grab the closest book and leaf through it, looking for forbidden words. It's plain on its face that none of them expects to find anything.
On these wild hopes followed, as is natural, a bleak sense of depression. The certainty that some one shelf in some hexagon bears precious books, that these precious books are unreachable, was almost intolerable. One heretic sect proclaimed that we must stop our searches; that all humanity must mix letters and symbols, until we devise -- through some incredible stroke of fortune -- the books of canon. The authorities found themselves obliged to enforce a strict prohibition. The sect vanished, but in my childhood still, I saw old men who would hide themselves in the water closets with some metallic discs and a forbidden cup, and weakly they would imitate divine chaos.
On the other hand were those who believed that man's destiny was to eliminate the nonsensical works. They would attack the hexagons, show (not always forged) credentials, would leaf annoyed through one volume and condemb entire shelves: to their hygienic, ascetic fury is due the senseless loss of millions of books. Their memory is execrated -- but those who deplore the "treasures" that they destroyed in their frenzy are ignoring two important facts. One: the Library is so vast as to be only infinitesimally affected by any reduction of human origin. And the other: every volume is unique, irreplaceable; but (since the Library is everything) there are always hundreds of thousands of imperfect copies: works which differ in only one letter, one comma.
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Whew! I sat down to copy a sentence from "The Library of Babel" -- the thing about weakly imitating divine chaos -- and kept seeing other things that needed to go into the post... This story comes close to the end of Borges' first proper collection of fictions, The Garden of Forking Paths, and it crystallizes in new ways some of the themes that have been running through this book -- principally it is a logical extension of "The Immortal," with infinite chaos taking the place of eternal life. The narrator's weariness with trying to understand this infinity is palpable. (The old men weakly imitating divine chaos have me flashing on Homer's asemic writing in that story.) It's funny because I went into today's reading with a memory of this as being one of the weakest stories in this volume, and got knocked over by its power.Anyway -- an overlong post with a too-high excerpting-to-analysis ratio, enjoy...
posted evening of June 6th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June first, 2010
The ending of "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" finds Borges sitting in the hotel in Adrogué where his family spent their summers during his childhood, working on revisions to "an uncertain Quevedian translation... of Browne's Urn Burial."  (What is "Quevedian"? -- It must mean "in the manner of Quevedo" -- I have no idea what this would mean in this context...✱) Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial is a 17th-Century discourse on an archæological discovery, a Roman grave site in Norfolk. The text of Hydriotaphia is online at the University of Chicago's Sir Thomas Browne page, with this amusing note from the maintainer of the site: Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus were published together in 1658, on which edition this web edition is based. They form a work that is somewhat difficult but rewarding to read. The number of critics who have a rock-solid grasp of the entire work can be counted on the fingers of one foot, so there's an open field out there for those inclined towards such work. Most critics read Hydriotaphia and comment on it as though they had in fact finished both sides. Among those whose comments are more interesting are Carlyle, Lytton Strachey, and, somewhat surprisingly, Virginia Woolf. Among those whose work seems to be based on something else the stand-out is Gosse✽, whose commentary is so unrelated to the text putatively in front of him that it becomes a case-study in itself.
William Hamilton's address "Sir Thomas Browne, Jorge Luis Borges y Yo" is reprinted in the Atlantic of June 2003. Borges refers to his translation of Browne's Urne Buriall in this interview. It seems like he did actually translate it or part of it in Quevedian Spanish, I am looking for more info about this. Christopher Johnson has an essay in Translation and Literature called "Intertextuality and Translation: Borges, Browne, and Quevedo".
✱Possibly "Quevedian" just means the language of the translation is archaic, 17th-Century Spanish. -- More info from John and Rick in comments. ✽And Gosse père wrote Omphalos, which prefigures Russell's idea that the world was created just minutes ago with people's memories created intact, which is referenced in a footnote to "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" -- bringing us full circle.
posted evening of June first, 2010: 5 responses
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Saturday, May 29th, 2010
I am not the first author of the story called "The Library of Babel"; those curious as to its history and prehistory may consult the appropriate page of Sur, No. 59, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, Lewis Carroll and Aristotle.—foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths
Victoria Ocampo (sister-in-law of Bioy Casares and an important figure in the Buenos Aires literary scene, and the dedicatee of the title story "The Garden of Forking Paths") published Sur from 1931 until 1992 -- regularly until 1966 and infrequently thereafter. What a wealth of literature must be in those volumes! I am not finding volume 59 online anywhere -- Abebooks has a couple of editions for sale; La Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes has digitized Volumes I - VI. Maybe the NYPL would have it in their collection... off to check in with a couple of librarian friends for advice.
Update: Found it!
posted afternoon of May 29th, 2010: 2 responses
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Friday, May 28th, 2010
I am understanding Aurelianus' motivations a little better, re-reading "The Theologians": previously I got caught up in the dispute between the Church and the Monotoni heretics, so that I missed the primary plot of the story, which is Aurelianus' striving for political stature in the Church. (This ties in nicely with the previous story, "The Dead Man," about BenjamÃn Otálora's striving for political stature in a gang of smugglers in Uruguay -- the two stories have little else in common.) This line seems key, following on the information of the heresy and of John of Pannonia's intention to argue against it: |
Aureliano deploró esas nuevas, sobre todo la última. SabÃa que en materia teólogica no hay novedad sin riesgo...*
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This news troubled Aurelianus deeply, principally the last bit of news. As he was well aware, there can be in theological matters no innovation free of risk...
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Aurelianus is broadly read; he feels guilty at not being completely familiar with his library. (I know the feeling!) Here are some of the sources he uses in constructing his (ultimately too complex, too laboriously researched) refutation of the Monotoni:
- On the Failure of Oracles, from Plutarch's Moralia.
- Euripides' Bacchæ (in which Pentheus claims to see "two suns").
- Origen's De Principiis -- Aurelianus quotes Origen's denial that Judas will betray Christ a second time.
- Cicero's Academics -- Cicero rejects as ludicrous the possibility of multiple parallel universes.
His rival John of Pannonia uses only two Biblical passages as the base for his refutation: The closing verses of Hebrews 9, in which the epistolarian asserts that "it is appointed unto men once to die"; and Matthew's injunction against "vain repetitions" -- and he refers also to Book VII of Pliny the Younger's Natural History**.
Oh and one more source, the book which started the whole ball of heresy rolling is the twelfth volume of Augustine's City of God (Chapter 13), miraculously left undamaged when the barbarians ransacked a monastic library a century before Aurelianus' birth. What a fascinating story this is!
* Update: Well and also,
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Cayó la Rueda ante la Cruz, pero Aureliano y Juan prosiguieron su batalla secreta. Militaban los dos en el mismo ejército, anhelaban el mismo galardón, guerreaban contra el mismo Enemigo, pero Aureliano no escritó una palabra que inconfesablemente no propendiera a superar a Juan.
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The Wheel fell before the Cross; but Aurelianus and John continued their secret battle. They both rode forth in the same army, strove for the same prize, made war against the same Enemy; but Aurelianus did not write a single word which was not -- inconfessibly -- directed at overwhelming John.
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Almost hard to see how I missed this focus last time! I was caught up, I guess, in Euphorbus' challenge to the tribunal as the flames devour him -- such a dramatic scene, it overshadows the rest of the story. ** (Note that Naturalis Historia is also one of the books which Borges leaves with Funes (the memorious) the second time he sees him.)
posted afternoon of May 28th, 2010: Respond
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
I've been thinking about asemic writing over the past few weeks, and I was happy to notice this passage (which I had forgotten completely) when I was rereading "The Immortal" this morning:
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Quienes hayan leÃdo con atención el relato de mis trabajos, recordarán que un hombre de la tribu me siguió como un perro podrÃa seguirme, hasta la sombra irregular de los muros. Cuando salà del último sótano, lo encontré en la boca de la caverna. Estaba tirado en la arena, donde trazaba torpemente y borraba una hilera de signos, que eran como letras de los sueños, que uno está a punto de entender y luego se juntan. Al principio, creà que se trataba de una escritura bárbara; después vi que es absurdo imaginar que hombres que no llegaron a la palabra lleguen a la escritura. Además, ninguna de las formas era igual a otra, lo cual excluÃa o alejaba la posibilidad de que fueran simbólicas. El hombre las trazaba, las miraba y las corregÃa. | |
Those who have been reading my story attentively, will remember that a member of the tribe had followed me -- like a dog might follow me -- up to the formless shadow of the walls. When I emerged from the final cellar, I found him in the mouth of the cave. He was stretched out on the sand, where he was languidly tracing and erasing a row of symbols like the letters in a dream, letters which one is on the verge of understanding when they flow together. At first I thought it was some kind of barbarian alphabet; but then I saw how absurd it was, to imagine that men who had never arrived at the spoken word would get to writing. Furthermore, none of the shapes was the same as any other; that excluded, or rendered unlikely, the possibility that they were symbolic. The man was drawing them, then examining them and updating them.
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I've been thinking about asemic writing as a path to expressive, semantic writing, and I'm happy to think about this Immortal (who will be revealed in a few pages to be Homer) languidly tracing and correcting his asemic symbols, contemplating the possibility of communication.
posted evening of May 26th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, May 10th, 2010
In an essay in Perpetual Motion (the second piece down on the linked page), Monterroso talks about first reading Borges and about becoming slowly immersed in his thinking and his puzzles. It is a very nice introduction to Borges; I was surprised to see that the work which opened Monterroso's eyes was Borges' foreword to his translation (1938) of The Metamorphosis:
When I first found Borges, in 1945, I didn't understand him; he was frankly puzzling for me. Delving into Kafka, I found Borges' foreword to The Metamorphosis; and for the first time I saw before me his world of metaphysical labyrinths, of infinities, of eternities, of tragic trivialities, of quotidian relationships comparable to the worst hell imaginable. A new universe, gleaming, ferociously attractive. Crossing from that foreword to all the rest of Borges' work has been for me (and for many others) an activity as important as breathing, and at the same time as dangerous as walking too close to the edge of a chasm. Following him has meant discovering and descending into new circles: Chesterton, Melville, Bloy, Swedenborg, Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf; taking up old friendships: Cervantes, Quevedo, Hernández; and at last returning to his illusory Paradise of the everyday: the barrio, the movie-house, the detective story.
I'm surprised because that foreword does not strike me as among Borges' finest work; it's principally just a capsule biography/chronology of Kafka and his work, and a cursory discussion of some themes in his work. (Obviously discovering Kafka in 1945 would be different from my experience of discovering Kafka in 1985 or thereabouts; but it would still be "discovering Kafka", not "discovering Borges".) There is one paragraph that seems to me to move to a different level:
Critics complain that in Kafka's three novels, there is a lack of linking material; but they recognize that this material is not essential. Myself, I maintain that this criticism indicates a fundamental unfamiliarity with the work of Kafka. The pathos of these "inconclusive" novels arises precisely from the infinite number of obstacles which block, again and again, the paths of his identical protagonists. Franz Kafka did not finish them: their basic property is that they are interminable. Do you remember the first, the most clear of Zeno's paradoxes? Motion is impossible, because before arriving at B we have to cross the intermediate point C, but before we arrive at C, we have to cross the intermediate point D, but before arriving at D... The Greek did not enumerate all of the points; Franz Kafka need not enumerate all the vicissitudes. It is enough for us to understand that they are infinite, like Hell.
(I hope I am understanding correctly how Borges is taking issue with critics of Kafka -- I don't really know whom or what arguments he is referring to.)
As he closes his piece, Monterroso talks about what your encounter with Borges can do to you:
The great problem of reading Borges: the temptation to imitate him is almost irresistable; to imitate him, impossible. Some writers you can get away with imitating -- Conrad, Greene, Durrel -- not Joyce; not Borges. It will sound facile and obvious.
The meeting with Borges never takes place without consequences. I've listed here a few of the things that can happen, for better and for the worse:
- Pass him by without noticing (for the worse).
- Pass him by; retrace one's steps and follow him for a little while to see what he's doing (for the better).
- Pass him by; retrace one's steps and follow him forever (for the worse).
- Find out that one is a simpleton, that until this moment one has never had an idea worth one's while (for the better).
- Find out that one is intelligent, because one enjoys reading Borges (for the better).
- Dazzle oneself with the fable of Achilles and the Tortoise; believe that one has figured it all out (for the worse).
- Discover the infinite and the eternal (for the better).
- Mull over the infinite and the eternal (for the better).
- Believe in the infinite and the eternal (for the worse).
- Leave off writing (for the better).
(Note on the translation: "for the better" is benéfica, "for the worse" is maléfica -- I think these are about right; it is too bad that the English phrases don't match up nicely to the title, as the Spanish words do -- the title is Beneficios y maleficios de Jorge Luis Borges, "Jorge Luis Borges: Blessings and Curses" -- I guess it could be translated as "Jorge Luis Borges for better or worse", but that would sound pretty hokey.)
posted evening of May 10th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, April 12th, 2010
I knew nothing about this book or about this author, until I read Borges' foreword today. Now I want to seek it out and read it... This translation is fairly close to literal, it seems to work pretty well in this case.
From Parmenides of Elea until today, idealism -- the doctrine which affirms that the universe, including time and space and perhaps ourselves, is nothing more than an appearance or a chaos of appearances -- has been professed in diverse forms by many thinkers. Perhaps nobody has educed it with greater clarity than bishop Berkeley; nobody with greater conviction, desperation, and satiric force than the young Scot Thomas Carlyle in his intricate Sartor Resartus (1831). This Latin can be rendered as The Patched Tailor or Mended Tailor; the work is no less singular than its name.
Carlyle invokes the authority of an imaginary professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (Son of God Droppings of the Devil), who publishes in Germany a vast volume dealing with the philosophy of sand*, which is to say appearances. The Sartor Resartus, hardly more than two hundred pages, is a mere commentary and compendium of this gigantic work. Cervantes (whom Carlyle had read in Spanish) had attributed the Quixote to a Moorish author, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This book includes a pathetic biography of Teufelsdröckh, in reality a cryptic, secret autobiography, full of jokes. Nietzsche accused Richter of making Carlyle the worst writer in Britain. The influence of Richter is evident, but he was no more than a dreamer of tranquil dreams, not infrequently tedious, where Carlyle is a dreamer of nightmares. In his history of English literature, Saintsbury holds that the Sartor Resartus is the logical extension of a paradox of Swift's, in the profuse style of Sterne, master of Richter. Carlyle himself mentions the connection to Swift, who wrote in A Tale of a Tub that certain pieces of ermine hide and a wig, placed together in a certain fashion, make up what we call a judge, just as a particular combination of black satin and Cambray is called a bishop. Idealism affirms that the universe is appearance; Carlyle insists that it is a farce. He was an atheist and believed he had disavowed the faith of his parents; as Spencer observed, his conception of the world, of man and of behavior shows that he never ceased to be a rigid Calvinist. His gloomy pessimism, his ethics of iron and fire, are perhaps a Presbyterian heritage; his mastery of the art of the insult, his doctrine that history is a Sacred Scripture which we continually decipher and transcribe and in which we are also written, prefigures -- fairly precisely -- Leon Bloy. He prophecied, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, that democracy is a chaos at the mercy of the electoral urns, and counseled the conversion of all the bronze statues into bathtubs. I know of no book more ardent, more volcanic, more weary with desolation, than Sartor Resartus.
(The literal translation falls down a bit in the final paragraph, I need to go over that a bit more...)
 * (Maybe worth noting in this regard that 30 years later, Borges would title one of his last works of prose The Book of Sand. Or maybe just a coincidence... The first story in The Book of Sand does make a passing reference to Sartor Resartus FWIW.)
posted evening of April 12th, 2010: 3 responses
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Borges is the genius of 20th-Century literature. His short stories defy description but demand to be read.
