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Jorge Luis Borges. This Craft of Verse. Ed.
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Review by Daniel Balderston
After being lost on some reel to reel tapes in a dusty
corner of the Harvard library for thirty years, Borges’s Charles Eliot
Norton Lectures from 1967 and 1968 have suddenly become available to us in
print form (and also on a compact disc, which I have not yet seen or
heard). They are a wonderful find. Borges is in great form: witty, lucid,
learned, self-deprecating. And coming as they do at the beginning of the
period when his world fame made him one of the most interviewed writers
ever, he does not yet repeat himself (as he would go on to do in hundreds
of interviews, in which he often responds to similar questions in the same
words). This is also a carefully edited volume with fine notes, making it
a much more valuable resource than the later lectures that are collected
in Borges, oral and Siete noches.
The titles of the
lectures are: “The Riddle of Poetry,” “The Metaphor,” “The Telling of the
Tale,” “Word-Music and Translation,” “Thought and Poetry” and “A Poet’s
Creed.” Ranging widely, Borges comments on Old English poetry and Homeric
epic, on Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald, on Yeats and Keats and Joyce
and Stevenson, on San Juan de la Cruz and Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, on his
own work. The performances are dazzling, considering that these were
lectures given without notes—by 1967 Borges was too blind to read from a
written text—and that he quotes poems and other texts in a number of
languages, from memory. (In a footnote in the final essay [pp. 148-59] the
editor notes that in a 1976 conversation with a Romanian critic—presumably
Ion Agheana—Borges quoted an eight stanza Romanian poem—in Romanian—that
he had learned from a classmate in Geneva in 1916; his prodigious memory
is also on display in these lectures.) But even more important is the fact
that his thoughts on the subjects of the lectures come across so many
years later as fresh and spontaneous. Even though they were the
distillation of a career as an essayist that had already lasted more than
forty years, the formulation of his ideas in these talks sound new.
In the talk on metaphor, for instance, he does not
merely restate his idea so often expressed after the ultraísta
period that there are only a few essential metaphors (river = life, sea =
death, life = dream, woman = flower and so forth). Instead of the
conservative position expressed elsewhere (which was a reaction against
his youthful enthusiasms), he is here concerned with the function of
metaphor in language and with the endless variations possible in the ways
in which metaphor functions. He quotes a line about “A rose-red city, half
as old as Time,” and comments that it is the “magic precision” of that
“half as old” (36). (The notes inform us that Kipling is quoting here from
the poem “Petra” by Dean Burgon from 1845, which in turn echoes a poem
about Italy written by Samuel Rogers in 1828.) He concludes the essay by
noting that there are hundreds or thousands of patterns in poetic
metaphor, many of them variations on a smaller number of patterns, but
that there are also some metaphors (and “half as old as Time” would seem
to be an example) that do not fit into existing patterns. And he ends the
talk (the spirit of the young ultraísta still very much alive in
him) by saying that “it may also be given to us to invent metaphors that
do not belong, or that do not yet belong, to accepted patterns” (41).
The lecture on translation includes a wonderful
discussion of translations of San Juan de la Cruz’s “Noche oscura del
alma,” where he comments that Roy Campbell’s translation of the famous
line “estando ya mi casa sosegada”—“When all the house was hushed”—“seems
to give us somehow the very music of silence”
(61). He comments at length in this
talk on translations that improve on their originals (an idea he had
already expressed in the essay on Beckford in Otras inquisiciones),
but notes that though he thinks Stefan George’s translations of Baudelaire
are better than Baudelaire, yet “this will do Stefan George no
good, since people who are interested in Baudelaire—and I have been very
much interested in Baudelaire -think of his words as coming from him”
(74). This observation is a gloss on the idea expressed earlier in the
same paragraph that “a translation is never judged verbally. It should be
judged verbally, but it never is” (73-74). He is driving at an interesting
idea that the beauty of a poem—be it an original or a translation—matters
to many writers less than the circumstances of the beauty of the poem. The
reason that Baudelaire’s “voice” in the French original matters is because
that “voice” is interpreted as “coming from” that author, and from “the
context of his whole life” (74).
At the end of the fifth talk Borges writes that his
final talk will be about “a lesser poet—a poet whose works I never read,
but a poet whose works I have to write” (95). This ironic presentation of
self leads into a superb final talk where he notes that he always thought
of himself “as being ‘literary’” (100), and that “the central fact of my
life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those
words into poetry” (100). Interestingly, though, this final talk is
largely about the pleasure that he takes in reading literature. And that
pleasure is what Emily Dickinson called “aslant,” as Borges notes near the
end of the final talk:
I no longer believe in expression: I
believe only in allusion. After all, what are words? Words are symbols of
shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of
what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you. I think
we can only allude, we can only try to make the reader imagine. The
reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely hinting at
something (117).
The crystallization of
earlier reflections (one recognizes here echoes of the essays on Dante,
for instance), these nevertheless stand alone. In their way, these
lectures are an excellent introduction to Borges, as well as a graceful
summation of his thoughts on literature.
Daniel
Balderston
University of Iowa
