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Jorge Luis Borges
Borges is the genius of 20th-Century literature. His short stories defy description but demand to be read.
A journal devoted to exploring Borges' works and a vast index of his works can be found at the Borges Center at the University of Pittsburgh.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
This is sort of an updated take on Borges' "Los teólogos" I think -- a man is reading and blogging about a book which he's reading in a language not his own (one not available in translation); he manages to create a controversy or at least a bit of publicity around blasphemy in the text which is, however, not actually present in the source material -- it is the product of a fundamental misreading on his part, but nevertheless the controversy necessarily involves the original author of the piece, a contemporary of the blogger's who is not seeking the spotlight. This publicity becomes the author's route to fame or celebrity -- a different fame than he would have had in mind, while the (mis-)translator is of course pretty much ignored in the press and ultimately forgotten by history.
The blind man had categorically stated that he could see, if you'll excuse that verb again, a thick, uniform white color, as if he had plunged his eyes into a milky sea. A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological possibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms, and colors of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colors, forms and images which reality itself might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.
Borges (and guess how excited I am to find the Seven Nights lectures online! At least one of them...):
...People picture the blind man enclosed in a world of black. There is a verse of Shakespeare's which would justify this impression: Looking on darkness which the blind do see; if we understand "darkness" to mean "black," this verse of Shakespeare's is mistaken.
One of the colors which the blind (in any case this blind man) are strangers to is black; another is red. "Le rouge et le noir" are colors we miss. For me, who was used to sleeping in total darkness, it was a great deal of trouble trying to sleep in this world of fog, a greenish fog or blue, vaguely luminous, which is the world of blindness.
"Or discendiam qua giù nel cieco mondo," cominciò il poeta tutto smorto. "Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo."
'Now let us descend into the blind world down there,' began the poet, gone pale. 'I will be first and you come after.'
In Borges' lecture on the Commedia, he says that his experience of reading the Italian text with a parallel, line-by-line translation taught him that "a translation cannot be a replacement for the original text: the translation may however serve as a means, a stimulus to bring the reader closer to the original." This seems arguable to me as applied to translations in general,* though I'm pretty sympathetic to the thought; but I think there's no arguing with the idea that this is the proper role for a bilingual edition of poetry, to bring the reader closer to the original, foreign text.
Last night Borges' lecture on Nightmares sent me off to review Canto IV of Inferno; I was reading it in the Princeton Dante Project's bilingual edition, and finding to my happy surprise that I could follow the Italian pretty well, using Borges' method of reading a tercet at a time slowly in Italian, then in English, then in Italian... This evening I wanted to take another look at the canto and sat down with Pinsky's translation (which is published as a bilingual edition), and discovered that a poetic translation does not serve the function of a parallel translation. Not recommended -- I am finding it strange that Farrar, Straus & Giroux thought it would be a good idea to print the original and Pinsky's translation side by side. Back to the bare-bones parallel translation for me, thanks. Below the fold is Vittorio Sermonti reading Canto IV -- his reading is slow enough and clear enough that I was able to follow along in the text and have a fair idea which word was which...
I've had -- I continue to have -- many nightmares. The most fearsome, the one which has always caused me the most fear, I used it for a sonnet.* Here it is: I was in my room, towards dawn (this was the hour in the dream, I believe), and at the foot of my bed there was a king, an ancient king; I knew in the dream that he was a northern king, a Norwegian king. He did not look on me: his gaze was fixed blindly on the ceiling. I knew he was an ancient king, for his face was one that would be unthinkable today. Then I felt the horror of his presence. I was looking at the king, looking at his sword, at his dog. At the end of all this I awoke. But I lay continuing to think of the king for a while; he made an impression on me. Retold, my dream is meaningless; dreamt, it was fearsome.
I love the way Borges discounts this imagery in his final sentence -- it is similar to the first few lines of his story Ragnarök (a story which I hold out hope that Winston Rowntree someday will decide to illustrate).
*What poem is he speaking of here? Anybody with knowledge about this (or whether this is a red herring) speak up in comments please. The only reference to a Norwegian king I can find in his poems is in El reloj de arena when he speaks of the Saxon king Harold offering Harald Hardrada "six feet of English soil."
posted evening of August 22nd, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Siete Noches
What is B reading? Detective stories in French -- a language he scarcely understands, which makes the novels even more interesting. And even so, he always figures out who was the killer before he reaches the last page.
This is from Bolaño's "Wandering in France and Belgium" -- I like the way he points out that not fully understanding the language can make the reading experience (even) more interesting. This ties in very nicely with B getting interested in Altmann's asemic writing later in the story.
And a longer passage, from Borges' lecture on Dante published in Seven Nights -- Borges is talking ("now that we are among friends") about his own introduction to the Comedia:
Fate (except of course there is no Fate, of course what we call Fate is our failure to understand the complex machinery of causality) led me to three slim volumes... the books of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, rendered in English by Carlyle (not by Thomas Carlyle, of whom we will speak later). They were lovely little books, published by Dent. They fit in my pocket. On one page would be the Italian text and facing it, the text in English, rendered literally. Picture this modus operandi: first I would read a verse, a tercet, in English; then I would read the same verse, the same tercet, in Italian; and I went on this way until I reached the end of the canto. ...
I have read the Comedia many times. But the truth is, I don't know Italian, I don't know any more Italian than what Dante has taught me, and what Ariosto taught me later, when I read the Furioso.
Cool! Borges learned to read Dante the same way I learned to read Borges!
I'm interested in the point about not knowing "any more Italian than what Dante has taught me" -- I think that this method of learning to read a foreign language teaches a particular voice before it teaches the language in a more general sense. I am at this point extremely comfortable with Borges' voice, and pretty comfortable with Bolaño's; but opening up a book in Spanish by some other author, I may understand it (like Soldados de Salamina, which I picked up yesterday and have just been breezing through), or it may be like reading Greek (like Hernández' La paloma, el sótano y la torre, which I opened a few days ago and could not make head or tail of).
L: Yeah -- I hope you don't mind me calling at this hour, but ah... I was just wondering if you managed to turn up anything on the ninth attribute of God yet.
Z: The ninth attribute of God?... Well yes, it's the immediate knowledge of everything that will exist, exists or has existed. ...Is everything all right, inspector?
I was interested to find out the other day that Death and the Compass had been adapted into a movie a few years ago, and that the movie is watchable online. It is adapted by Alex Cox, who directed Repo Man, and the (amazing) soundtrack is by Pray for Rain, a band which has apparently been around since the eighties.
Cox directs this piece masterfully -- I am in awe of his adaptation, which took off in a direction I was not expecting at all, but which had me believing by the end of the movie that Scharlach was speaking words Borges had written -- Cox' screenplay has drunk of the same well Borges was going to when he wrote this. The radical deviations from Borges' storyline only serve to make it a better movie, truer to the original. You can watch the movie online at dailymotion.com; I recommend it highly.
An interview with Cox about how he picked this story.
...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the "ingenious layman" Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history.
-- "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" (Hurley's translation)
It was not until I was reading the Quixote this evening and happened on the quoted line (near the end of the ninth chapter) that I realized it is not a mere rhetorical flourish, that Borges is calling attention to the line for his own reasons. (Still not exactly sure what those reasons are...; but the line comes at the end of bit of meta-storytelling that sounds to my ear very Borgesian, about the discovery and translation of Benengeli's history. When I'm reading it now it sounds like Cervantes is being ironic about the truth-value of his story.)
I've started reading Richard Slotkin's Regeneration through violence with the idea that I might be able to draw some parallels between his narrative of myth formation and Borges' stories... In service of that end, here is a passage from "Narrative of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (from The Aleph) and one from Slotkin's book.
John Williams' narrative, The Redeemed Captive, taught that the ultimate salvation of the soul itself was really at stake in the trial by captivity. One of Williams' daughters, who was very young when captured, could not be won from her captors in time for repatriation with her father. The result was typical of the fate of many captives: she forgot her language and her catechism and became at once a papist and a pagan savage, married to an Indian. Despite the efforts of her father and her family to bring her back, she refused all opportunities to resume her former life. On one occasion she returned to the neighborhood of her birthplace (Deerfield, MA) dressed as an Indian. Her friends clothed her in the English fashion and sent her to meeting, but she "indignantly threw off her clothes in the afternoon, and resumed the Indian blanket." By her own declaration she preferred the Indian way of life. ...she declared that she would never move again from Canada to New England because to do so would "endanger her soul."
Her visit occurred in 1740-41 at the height of the Great Awakening, and her presence in the congregation had been the occasion for "A Sermon Preached at Mansfield, August 4, 1741, at a Time set apart for Prayer for the Revival of Religion," by Pastor Solomon Williams. It was perhaps Williams' attempt to use her as an example of God's delivering a soul from bondage to the devil that made her afraid of "losing" in New England the "soul" she had developed in thirty-eight years of captivity.
-- Chapter 4, "Israel in Babylon"
Perhaps for one instant the two women saw that they were sisters; they were far from their beloved island in an incredible land. My grandmother, enunciating carefully, asked some question or other; the other woman replied haltingly, searching for the words and then repeating them, as though astonished at the old taste of them. It must have been fifteen years since she'd spoken her native language, and it was not easy to recover it. She said she was from Yorkshire, that her parents had emigrated out to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians, and that now she was the wife of a minor chieftain -- she'd given him two sons; he was very brave. She said all this little by little, in a clumsy sort of English interlarded with words from the Auracan or Pampas tongue, and behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life... An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism! Moved by outrage and pity, my grandmother urged her not to go back. She swore to help her, swore to rescue her children. The other woman answered that she was happy, and she returned that night to the desert.
--"The Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (Hurley's translation)
This beginning is fairly characteristic of the stories in Brodie's Report -- the narrator (who is often identifiably Borges) distances himself from the story he is telling. He introduces it as a story he heard years ago, that he doesn't remember, quite, and is embroidering with his own inventions -- sometimes (eg "Unworthy") the character who is telling the enclosed story explicitly expects Borges to weave a story out of it, to decorate it with knife fights and lawlessness.
In two or three pieces in Alma del suburbio, Carriego approached the epic; others were closer to social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
-- Borges, foreword to Versos de Carriego
Here are Carlos Gavito and Marsela Duran, tangoing to Eduardo Rovira's "A Evaristo Carriego." The orchestra is the Boston Pops.
* (or "omnipresent sacred rabble" maybe? di Giovanni renders it "cosmic holy rabble".)
Rex Broome has been spending this year (his 40th) Quixotically recording one cover song a day, chosen at random from his library or from a group of requests -- today is day 254 of Broome's quest and he hits a real high point with "Visions of Johanna".
Borges is the genius of 20th-Century literature. His short stories defy description but demand to be read.
social commentary. In Canción del barrio he crossed from Almafuerte's "sacred cosmic rabble"* to the humble middle class. In this second and final step we will find his most famous (if not his greatest) works of poetry. This journey brought him to what we might without deprecation call a poetry of quotidian misery -- a poetry of sick-beds, of failure, of time running in its course, wearing us down and sapping our will to live; a poetry of the family, of affections, of daily habits, even of gossip. It is worthy of note that tango would evolve along the same lines.
