—“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
In an Afterword to his collection of prose and verse entitled The Maker (1960), Jorge Luis Borges summed up his life’s work:
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
For Borges, the labyrinth became both potent metaphor and an architectural principle of his stories. Labyrinths teach us about will and relinquishment. We relinquish will to follow the path laid out for us, entering a meditative state, an OM. Yet we make choices within the labyrinth, select one fork over another to discover our fate. Labyrinths are like puzzles, like games with, potentially, mortal stakes. They are like literature, like us. They are outside us and inside us at the same time.
Borges, an Argentine who lived from 1899 to 1986, was a maker of patterns and mysteries, alternately violent, comic, or a combination of both, often metaphysical. As a lecturer and then a librarian, he was steeped in literature. His stories can seem too brainy, too contrived, a playground for critics, but the motives of his characters are rarely straightforward. His friend and translator Alastair Reid wrote that “Borges seems to have lived almost entirely in literature, in the mind-travel of his reading.” Women hardly figure in his world. Sensuality is held at arm’s length. Yet, rereading Borges after many years away from him, I find myself amazed, labyrinthed, by the breadth of experience in his stories, poems and essays. How much he accomplished primarily through short forms—like Poe, whom he so admired. There are political and personal perils in his work. If the writing elevates mental acuity over simple emotionalism, it is hardly devoid of emotions. At his best, Borges can move us while engaging the mind in its matrices of interpretation.
The face, the person found in his labyrinths, is beautiful for its civility, its humanity—qualities we can never have too much of. Penguin has republished much of his work in a “Deluxe Edition” in three paperbacks: Selected Non-Fictions, Collected Fictions and Selected Poems.[1] Had I but world enough and time I would devote many hours and many pages to them, but in this short space I can at least tell you what I admire and enjoy in them.
Borges was an ethical writer without being a moralizing one. Consider, for example, his anti-fascist journalism from the 1930s: “I don’t know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.” The teachings of hatred are all too present to us—I write just days after the US election of 2024. But his opposition to hatred was a lifelong preoccupation. In a 1977 lecture on “Blindness,” he described the affliction that descended upon him gradually over his life, noting that “The world of the blind is not the night that people imagine,” and describing the many gifts his blindness had given him. His spirit is clear: “For me, to live without hate is easy, for I have never felt hate. To live without love I think is impossible, happily impossible for each one of us.”
My point is not that Borges is telling the truth here—his characters certainly know enough of hate—but that he understands humility and gratitude and beauty as the foundations of an ethical life. He had written in 1939, “I hope the years will bring us the auspicious annihilation of Adolf Hitler, this atrocious offspring of Versailles.” So he is not blind to the putative causes of hate, to its very real presence and power in the world. But love motivates his pursuits in books and his blessed library. Eventually politics touched him more personally. Having criticized the leftist dictatorship of Juan Perón, he was removed from a library post and named inspector of poultry. When a military dictatorship replaced the Peróns, he acquiesced to it as a “mild” (his word) libertarian conservative.
His nonfiction celebrates a variety of writers, from the canonized like James Joyce and Walt Whitman to the popular like Ellery Queen and a handful of figures you won’t have heard of. He had studied languages, lived in Europe when young. He loved English literature—his influences include H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson. Intensely intellectual, he also sees through academic pretension. He understands that the erudition on display in Eliot’s The Waste Land “disconcerted (and still disconcerts) the critics, but is less important than the poem’s beauty.”
Borges is no sentimental aesthete. He studies eccentricity and madness, the wild ambitions underpinning both literature and politics:
I read, a few days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all the books that had been written before his time. That these two vast undertakings—the five or six hundred leagues of stone against the barbarians, and the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past—were the work of the same person and were, in a sense, his attributes, inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me.
Being disturbed is easy to understand. In walling out the barbarians and erasing the past, the Emperor himself becomes a barbarian. But the fascination, the satisfaction he finds in the knowledge is also Borgesian, because he sees human nature, our contradictions, our mad ambitions, for what they are, magnificent and destructive at the same time.
Borges’ particular kind of civility rejoices in scepticism and holds dogma at bay. In his “A Defense of the Kabbalah” he writes of his “desire to defend not the doctrine but rather the hermeneutical or cryptographic procedures that lead to it.” He can posit “A book impervious to contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light.” But such a book does not actually exist, and several of his stories deal with the strangeness of trying to create it. Alastair Reid was right: Borges was a metaphysical writer. He set bodies in motion, but in an atmosphere set free by relativity, by mystery and imagination. One important essay casts doubt on the existence of time, while another, “Kafka and His Precursors,” points out that we can find the Kafkaesque in writers who lived long before Kafka: “The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn’t matter.”
His critical prose is a playground of ideas, many of which are demonstrated in his stories and poems.
*
My friend Alastair Reid was a fine poet and memoirist whose stance toward life was governed by the ungovernable, by translation. He understood the betweenness of things. Friendships with writers like Borges and Neruda informed his life without anchoring it. He loved Neruda for his voice but was not blind to his moments of folly. He admired Borges without having to find in him a sole arbiter of anything. Translation was his labyrinth, his way of being. You will find Alastair’s fine translations only in the volume of poetry here (I’ll get to it later). Borges’ nonfiction is translated by several hands, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Readers of all three volumes will notice individual works in which the fiction, nonfiction and poetry overlap, so they can compare translations. The three genres of Borges are distinct, but connected like links in a chain.
The Collected Fictions are translated by Andrew Hurley, who has admirably brought the stories across with their verbal wit intact. Consider the opening of “The Aleph,” with its narrator named Borges:
That same sweltering morning that Beatriz Viterbo died, after an imperious confrontation with her illness in which she had never for an instant stooped to either sentimentality or fear, I noticed that a new advertisement for some cigarettes or other (blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of the Plaza Constitución; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series. The universe may change, but I shall not, thought I with melancholy vanity.
It’s the infinite nature of the universe and the vanity of the writer we are shown in the story. “Borges” mocks the ambitions of another writer, Carlos Argentino Daneri, until he is allowed to glimpse Daneri’s secret muse, a mystical letter, an entity out of the Kabbalah, hidden under his basement steps:
The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me). . . .
The passage continues in an ecstatic catalogue of creation, dwarfing the imagination of one man. His vision is religious: “I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.” “Borges” the narrator has just told us that “I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins.” But after this ecstatic vision, he does not improve. Instead, he conceives his literary revenge against Daneri, a plot that is doomed to fail, leaving him only with “the tragic erosion of the years.” Like Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, Borges’ narrator makes use of the loftiest intellect, but is motivated by ordinary human emotion, jealousy. He’s as human as anyone else. Identity in the stories becomes slippery. Doubles and doppelgangers abound.
As he wrote of Eliot’s Waste Land, Borges’ stories put erudition on display, but their most important quality is beauty and the particular pleasure they give—sometimes a pleasure of game-playing, nearly always illuminating our emotions, frank about our violence and our delusions, haunted by multiplicities. In several stories, the universe is a library, just as libraries are universes. “You who read me—” he writes in “The Library of Babel,” “are you certain you understand my language?” Borges makes hermeneutic dramas, and once said he considered scholarship another branch of fiction. His earliest stories mixed scholarship and fiction so deliberately that you can’t tell the difference. Some of them read like fictive essays in criticism—one place where Borges resembles his contemporary, Nabokov. Another would be the comic pedantry of some of his narrators, as we find in the story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where the speaker is both awe-struck and despairing: “There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless.”
Borges’ Argentina is a crossroads of cultures and histories, both connected to and isolated from other nations of the world. He enjoys the world-making of science fiction. One story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” begins, “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.” Reflection, illusion and knowledge combine in a single instant. Late in the story he writes, “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.” His narrator becomes an anthropologist of the fantastic: “Things duplicate themselves on Tlön; they also tend to grow vague or ‘sketchy,’ and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The classic example is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.”
We can compare the violence of Borges’ “The Lottery in Babylon” to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” or wonder at the bitter fatalism of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” another story where the narrator reveals dark motives and regrets. “The Secret Miracle” borrows from Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but is more overtly about the psychology of an artist: “Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friends and many routines, the problematic pursuit of literature constituted the whole of his life; like every writer, he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.” A political prisoner, Hladik faces a firing squad, but just as the guns are fired, God answers his prayer and stops time, allowing him to finish his masterpiece in his mind, if nowhere else: “He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him. Painstakingly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth.” Borges understood that all artists create in the face of oblivion.
In “The South,” a story Borges considered one of his best, a man who has faced death once and will face it again experiences an interlude of acute awareness: “He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly spooned sugar into it, tasted it (a pleasure that had been forbidden him in the clinic), and thought, while he stroked the cat’s black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were separated as though by a pane of glass, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”
Between these eternities, these oblivions, Borges invents.
*
In an essay on Whitman, a poet admired by so many of the South Americans, Borges wrote, “Innumerable are those who, with varying success, have imitated Whitman’s intonation: Sandberg, Edgar Lee Masters, Mayakovsky, Neruda. . . .” Borges the poet never touches Whitmanian excess or ego or exaltation, as Neruda surely did. Yet Borges, too, wrote first-rate poems. As I have said, his prose poems also appear in the volumes of fiction and non-fiction under review here, so the genres overlap. One can find linking themes as well: the endurance of literature and the obliteration of the writer’s person, a love of history even with its savagery, recollections of his homeland with its cultural ties to the broader world, a devotion to formality. He favored sonnets and quatrain stanzas, often rhymed. His weaker poems don’t quite cross over from ideas to poetry. But the best of them are touchstones I return to.
He was lucky in his translators. The Selected Poems edited by Alexander Coleman contains versions by thirteen different hands, most of them fine poets, and there are others not included in this book. For example, Richard Wilbur did some excellent versions not found here, and the Australian poet Stephen Edgar has also translated Borges well. The late Robert Mezey made a project of translating all the poetry, but failed to secure permission from the estate to publish. Much of his work languished in a kind of samizdat—I used to have all of it on a CD, but lost it when I moved overseas. I remember Mezey’s versions being excellent. Among the translators I most admire in this edition are Eric McHenry, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid and Mark Strand.
Borges was fond of writing Prologues and Afterwords for individual volumes of verse—usually to voice his misgivings about their accomplishment. There are many fine poems in the early volumes, but he breaks through to something grander and more memorable in El hacedor (The Maker). Its opening prose poem is a tribute to Homer, another blind poet: “Little by little, the beautiful universe left him behind: a stubborn mist blurred the outline of his hand, the night was emptied of stars, and the ground grew uneven beneath his feet.” In another prose poem, “Everything and Nothing,” he writes of Shakespeare: “The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting inspired him to write famous lines.” But it’s the verse that really sticks with me. I remember as an undergraduate hearing Alastair Reid deliver his translation of “Poem of the Gifts,” which alludes to Borges’ appointment as Director of Argentina’s National Library:
No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God, who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch.
Borges remains modest before the world, offering a beautiful circumspection in “The Hourglass”: “The sand of every cycle is the same / and infinite is the history of sand. . . .”
Here, from “Rain,” is another lovely quatrain translated by Alastair:
Quite suddenly the evening clears at last
as now outside the soft small rain is falling.
Falling or fallen. Rain itself is something
undoubtedly which happens in the past.
Borges writes of “la lluvia minuciosa,” and Alastair gives us the “small rain” of his own tradition, a gift of that great poet, Anonymous. In “Ars Poetica” W. S. Merwin skillfully matches Borges’ mirror-stanzas (water rhymed with water, river rhymed with river), so we can understand Borges also as a musician of wonder.
Then comes El otro, el mismo (The Self and the Other, 1964), where the density of perfect poems increases, beginning with a moving Prologue: “The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. . . . Poetry wants to return to that ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it makes its way in a hesitant, daring way, as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after I am dead.” He knows like Keats that he is, by writing poetry, waging a posthumous existence.
One of the masterpieces in this collection, “Matthew XXV:30,” rises to a more impassioned voice:
Borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings,
a bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir saga,
algebra and fire, the charge at Junín in your blood,
days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering,
dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy—
all this was given to you, and with it
the ancient nourishment of heroes—
treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
(trans. Alastair Reid)
Remember, from earlier in this review, that perfect book he could posit without really making it? The same goes for the poem, an Ur-poem by which all other poems would be measured. Borges continually falls back into imperfection, but beautifully. He writes in “To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology” (translated by Merwin), “. . . all that we know of you, eclipsed friend, / is that you heard the nightingale one evening.” In this he is like Cavafy, continually schooled by history in the nature of loss.
I become a list-maker, naming poems that reward rereading. “A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín,” recalls an ancestor who fought in the Wars of Independence against Spain, and offers a description of battle worthy of Homer. “The Dagger” ponders an instrument of death, one of Borges’ recurring images: “Sometimes it moves me to pity. Such force, such purpose, / so impassive, so innocently proud, and the years go past, / uselessly.” Fittingly, the classicist poet Robert Fitzgerald translates Borges’ sonnet entitled “Odyssey, Book Twenty-three,” which concludes, “Where is that man now / Who in his exile wandered night and day / Over the world like a wild dog, and would say / His name was No One, No One, anyhow?” And Mark Strand gives us another sonnet ending “Here too the never understood, / Anxious, and brief affair that is life.”
If the tone of futility weighs on you, lower your eyes on the same page to “Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf,” translated by Alastair Reid:
At various times I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast encompassing
circle can take in all, accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
It’s the spirit of love and gratitude again, the basis of Borges’ ethics and aesthetics. None other than John Updike translates “The Enigmas,” with its concluding riddle: “I want to drink its crystal-pure oblivion, / To be forever; but never to have been.”
The best writers, no matter how self-effacing, become characters we love or admire. We are finding the lineaments of Borges’ face. He is on the path, in the labyrinth, making his OM. Let us join him by reading “To Whoever Is Reading Me” (translated by Alastair Reid):
You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read—on it, already written,
the date, the city, and the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
the universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.
[1] SELECTED NON-FICTIONS, by Jorge Luis Borges, ed. and trans. by Eliot Weinberger, trans. by Esther Allen and Suzanne Jill Levine. Penguin Classics. $29.00p. COLLECTED FICTIONS, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Andrew Hurley. Penguin Classics. $29.00p. SELECTED POEMS, by Jorge Luis Borges, ed. by Alexander Coleman. Penguin Classics. $28.00p.
