The storyteller, writes Walter Benjamin, is the man who would let the flame of his story consume the wick of his life. Peter was precise about language, and he may have dismissed such an idea. Certainly he would have seen no relevance to himself. But sometimes there is about an artist’s life a profound and terrible poetry.
The Monday following my phone call with Peter I was driving to Salamanca through black clouds and heavy-dropped rain that sweeps and slaps rather than falls, while Hobart’s higher suburbs were being coated in snow. The radio news said a solo walker had failed to return from a walking trip to the Western Arthurs. I rang a friend who worked in police search and rescue.
It’s Peter Dom, he said.
They searched in blizzards for three days. Far below, floodwaters rose and covered the beautiful boulders of the upper Huon River. They found him kneeling, looking out to the south-west wildlands. He had been dead for some days, killed by a massive heart attack. As the weather was about to change, Peter had fallen to his knees, bowing before the world he had invited us to love and discover ourselves anew in.
Art & Australia
Spring 2010
IN 1960, six eminent publishers from six different countries met and established a new prize, the Prix Formentor, to which they attached a large purse, and the promise of publication in each of the six different countries for the winner.
The first prize in 1961 was shared by Samuel Beckett and an aged, blind librarian from Buenos Aires, little known even in his own country. His name was Jorge Luis Borges.
‘Fame is a form of incomprehension, perhaps the worst,’ Borges had written two decades earlier when he was a struggling, shy and almost entirely unknown Argentinian writer. Yet, propelled by the Prix Formentor, fame was now to be his fate, and he accepted it with grace. By the end of the decade Mick Jagger, ever a barometer of fashion, reclined in a bath in Nicholas Roeg’s film Performance, reading Borges’ Ficciones.
Borges arrived internationally at a moment when literature seemed spent. The writings of the time were weighed down by a stifling naturalism on one hand, and on the other by a sclerotic modernist experiment so deadening that the books failed to either sell or be read. Writing’s great modernists—Hamsen, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Joseph Roth—were either dead or so advanced in their creative infirmity—Dos Passos, Faulkner, Hemingway all come to mind—that many wished them so; literature’s chief promotional device, the Nobel Prize, seemed to be sinking into an irrelevant decrepitude. Film and television, rather than novels, threatened to become the natural media for storytelling.
Literature had lost its audience, its irreverence, its capacity for games, for invention: in short, both its authority and capacity as a creative force. As though they were gifts he was bestowing, Borges, ever a generous man, gave all these virtues and more back to the world of letters.
In the course of the next twenty years literature was to be reinvented as an artistic and popular force by other South American writers. The innovative, often astonishing works of Márquez, Neruda, Fuentes, Amado, Infante, Ribeiro, Puig, Carpentier, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa found widespread international favour, and influenced writers everywhere. This miraculous alchemy was heralded by the blind librarian of Buenos Aires whose sparely written stories returned fiction to storytelling, whose vertiginous tales of tigers, labyrinths, gauchos and bandits were fun, subversive, amusing, and yet managed, in Kafka’s memorable phrase, to be the axe that smashes the frozen sea within.
Born in Argentina in 1899, a country rent by rival nationalisms, Borges early on broke with the fashionable mission of nationalist letters that elevated novels full of local incident and colour, as well as rejecting their opponents, the international modernists, who despised all things local as regional, and therefore (here the danger of pejorative synonyms being mistaken for truths) mediocre.
Borges—and in this there is much for our often still puerile literati to learn—held that distance from Europe allowed a writer to reinterpret the Western literary tradition. For Borges distance was a liberating virtue, not an oppressive tyranny. This did not mean that a writer need be limited ‘to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine’. ‘Our patrimony is the universe,’ he argued. ‘We should essay all themes.’ A writer who acted within that Western literary tradition, but who, at the same time, did not feel tied to it by any special devotion, was capable of an irreverence that made innovation possible. Borges’ position was that of the outsider: devoted neither to literary nor national tradition, but profoundly shaped by both, and accordingly capable of an irreverence that made innovation possible.
In his youth he wrote poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, but his politics later altered to a polite form of anarchism: he hoped for a society that had no need for government. He was strongly opposed to Peronism, and for his troubles was made Buenos Aires’ official inspector of poultry in 1946. In his old age he sided with the military junta that ran his country, though what he meant by this was ambiguous: ‘I am a member of the Conservative Party,’ he wrote in 1970, ‘which is in itself a form of scepticism.’
In any case, as he observed of Kipling, a great writer succeeds in spite of his beliefs, because their work transcends its own often narrow concerns. He believed with Plato that writers are ‘the scribes of a god who moves them against their own will, against their intentions, just as a magnet moves a series of iron rings’. He was opposed to the then fashionable Sartrean notion of the committed writer; like Kipling, his politics obscured his achievements, and many believed his accommodation of the Argentinian generals cost him the Nobel Prize.
Traumatised by having sex introduced to him by his father’s whore, he lived with his mother in Buenos Aires until her death when he was in his seventies. He had a great affection for women, but for much of his life little luck. He was seen with many, often beautiful, women, contracted one unsuccessful and, at the end of his life, one successful marriage. Following psychoanalysis for his impotence in the mid-1940s he had one of his two main creative outbursts, in which period he wrote the short stories that make up his great book El-Aleph. The obvious assumption of cause and effect here is not necessarily the right conclusion to draw. Time, as Borges was highly aware, is successive, but the workings of the springs and coils of the soul are not.
Unlike many of the South Americans who followed in his wake, in what became known as the Boom, Borges was not an exponent of the Baroque, a style he had discarded as a youthful excess. Nor was his work rooted in what the Cuban Alejo Carpentier first famously described in 1949 as ‘lo real maravilloso’ (literally: ‘the real marvellous’), and which later became popularised as the ‘magical realism’ of the everyday Latin American world.
Borges was a classicist in style. By his own admission he grew up in a library of English books, and his works seemed more rooted in an ethereal erudition than in the eroticised earthiness of a Márquez or an Amado. Borges rightly described his own progress as that ‘from the mythologies of the slums and the outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity’. His was, as a biographer, James Woodall, has written, ‘a new metaphysical daring in fiction’.
He never wrote a novel, though his work, in its concerns, its clarity and its innovation, carries the weight and authority of that of the very greatest of novelists. ‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books,’ wrote Borges, ‘setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them . . . I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.’ And in so doing, he suggested in a few pages worlds of vast mystery and wonder.
Unlike Márquez and the magical realists, who looked so much to the North Americans—most particularly Faulkner, whom they in their youth called the Old Man, the Colonel who remained forever at the centre of their literary labyrinths—B
orges, for all his breadth of reading, looked to European, and specifically English writing. The modernist writer par excellence, his influences were however anything but fashionable modernists.
Chesterton, Stevenson, Kipling, Thomas de Quincey were his masters, yet as he once pointed out, a writer invents his own influences as surely as his own work: to reread any of these writers after reading Borges is to discover depths and nuances of meaning that hitherto were invisible. But then, as Borges also wrote, reading is ultimately a more profound, more intellectual and more creative act than writing. His works were in many ways written as homage to the act of reading. They also serve as a reawakening for the reader to the mysterious profundity of that act of grace, the moment when a reader grants the written word the authority of their life and soul.
The English, as opposed to the Hispanic, character of the writers he favoured was not an accidental choice. Borges had inherited from his English grandmother, Fanny Haslam, a condition that saw the retinas of his eyes slowly detach, and a belief in his own Englishness, which he understood as a sort of separateness and perhaps a solace for his shyness. Equally fluent from an early age in Spanish and English (in consequence of his Northumbrian grandmother he spoke the latter with a slight Northern cast), translating Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish at the age of nine, Borges developed the highest regard for English as a language of literature. Correspondingly, his first and principal understanding of literature was of it as English writing, leading him to first read even the greatest work of his own literature—Don Quixote—in English translation. The Quixote, Borges later noted, ‘was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene deluxe editions’.
In Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges (1999), a deluxe edition of Borges’ stories newly trans- lated by Andrew Hurley, we have the beginnings of a similar incomprehension born of an over-reverence, unhappily coupled to a desire for a Borges canon that most benefits his estate, rather than his readers, or his writing as he wrote it.
The book’s redeeming virtue—and it is considerable—lies in its organisation of Borges’ principal stories in the order they were published originally, rather than in the confused compendiums that have served the English-speaking world for so long. By virtue of its breadth and this organisation, it is the best introduction to Borges in our language, and for that reason an important work. One can only add that this is perhaps more in the nature of an indictment than a recommendation.
Its vice lies in its translations. It is not that these are bad: it is just that we already have better. Hurley’s translations, though not markedly different from those of his often illustrious predecessors, such as Alastair Reid, tend, where they differ, to be inferior. But that is only part of the problem.
There is little wrong with these translations when compared to their predecessors, because there is little different. But what differences there are tend to be for the worse rather than the better. Where Borges’ stories were light, irreverent and often very funny, this compendium in its entirety takes on the portentous weight and feel of an American novel written by one of the masters of that empire in its terminal infirmity, whereby a book’s significance seems directly connected to its heaviness. Borges’ stories never weighed anything.
This was never more evident than with the best translations of all: those made of much of his work by Borges himself, in collaboration with the North American Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Introducing one of his own translations, Borges wrote that Spanish and English ‘are not, as is often taken for granted, a set of interchangeable synonyms but are two possible ways of viewing and ordering reality’. Accordingly, his aim was always to make ‘the text read as though it had been written in English’, an admirable virtue not always apparent in some of Hurley’s uneasier translations.
Borges, better read in English than most English, seemed to see his translations as being as much an original work as the Spanish stories with which they shared the same tales and characters. Where Hurley’s Borges sometimes becomes wordy, muddy, or overly ornate, Borges’ Borges is crystal clear, punchy, and well told. It will be to our loss if these great works written in English by Borges disappear from publishers’ lists and hence our culture in the wake of this official translation.
It does then seem an oddity—and a destructive one at that—for us to be presented with a book that has freshly translated from the Spanish many stories for which we already have translations done by Borges himself.
‘Nothing is as co-substantial with literature and its modest mystery,’ Borges once commented, ‘as the questions raised by translation.’ The inescapable question raised here is why translate from the Spanish when we already have originals written by Borges in our language?
The answer would seem to lie in a brief note at the end of Collected Fictions, which tells us that Borges’ literary estate—the Borges Foundation—specified that all the translations in this volume be made from the Spanish collected works. It is not possible to say whether this direction was for literary reasons, or whether it was the deadening hand of a literary estate keeping copyright in its own control by neatly leapfrogging—and hence avoiding—the generous arrangement made by Borges that saw copyright and royalties half-owned by his collaborator, di Giovanni.
Maybe none of this matters. Borges was finally sanguine about translation and so perhaps should we be. ‘Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol,’ wrote Borges. ‘The changes that an innovator may make are trifling.’ One imagines him revelling in the Borgesian confusions of multiple translations.
His contempt for authorised, definitive trans- lations (which he thought the property of ideology and religion, but not letters) was perhaps partly coupled to his humility. Borges never succumbed to what he believed to be ‘the basest of art’s temptations: the temptation to be a genius’. He constantly deflated any estimation of his own work beyond that of storytelling, and even in this regard he felt, somewhat similarly to William Morris, that he only discovered, rather than invented stories. It also arose—one guesses—from his lively awareness of the infinite openness of literature, of the labyrinthine nature of stories, which each writer and each translator partly stripped away, and partly added to. ‘There is no intellectual exercise,’ concluded Borges, ‘that is not ultimately futile.’
Such scepticism about life, about thought, about the fictional nature of all things informed his games ‘with time and infinity’. He regarded scholarship as a branch of fabulous literature, and fabulous literature as a way of approaching the truth. His work consequently blurred boundaries: essays read like stories and vice versa. His short story ‘Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote’ has been described by eminent anthologist Ilan Stavans as ‘probably the most influential essay ever written in Latin America’.
His influence on those writers who have succeeded him seems as protean as his sources: from Julio Cortázar’s seminal novel Hopscotch, inspired by the Borges story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’; to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which combined the influence of Pablo Neruda’s sensual earthiness with Borgesian concerns as to the way reality is endlessly fictional, and fictions are endlessly realistic; to Salman Rushdie, whose recent and far less inspiring The Ground Beneath Her Feet reads like a bad elaboration of a Borges story, an uncomfortable conclusion not helped by the numerous knowing references made through the novel both to Borges’ stories and tropes.
The epitaph ‘a writer’s writer’ seems unfair to one so pleasurable to read, yet inevitable for a writer with such an extraordinary—the adjective is for once justified—capacity to represent a complex world in a few sentences; for whom everything in the world might be the seed of a possible heaven—or a possible hell: ‘a face, a word, a compass, an advertisement’.
His joy in language, both his own and others, was immense: visiting Deerhurst Saxon church in the Co
tswolds in 1963, he recited in Old English the Lord’s Prayer. His sentences were beautifully sculpted, never dull, and often short stories in themselves. In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ we find the following: ‘My father had forged one of those close English friendships with him (the first adjective is perhaps excessive) that begin by excluding confidences and end by eliminating conversation.’
His method was to narrate ‘events as though I didn’t fully understand them’, furthering his sense that ‘literature is naught but guided dreaming’. His tools were irony, and a disingenuous sense of humour that cloaked a darker sensibility. Bioy Casares recalled an early idea of Borges’ for a story, never written, about a Dr Praetorious: ‘a large, easygoing German school principal who, by using annoying means (obligatory games, never-ending music), would torture and kill young children’.
Borges claimed he wished to write ‘plain tales’ that entertained and touched people. ‘I dare not say they are simple, there is not a simple page, a simple word on earth—for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.’
Confucius and Wilkie Collins, the Kabbalah and Kipling, Lao Tzu and Martín Fierro all seem to come together effortlessly in Borges’ strange tales. Borges could indirectly satirise his own style of writing in stories such as ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’, in which a Bombay attorney takes to writing detective novels that display ‘the dual, and implausible influence of Wilkie Collins and the illustrious twelfth-century Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar’. Mystical undercurrents and detective-novel plots, gaucho knife fights and the problem of eternal return, a scholar given the gift of Shakespeare’s memory, which becomes for him an utter torment; Chinese women pirates and fantastic invented second worlds that begin to intrude on the real world and then overtake it, a Czech Jewish writer who beseeches God for time to write his great book, and composes it in its entirety, word for word, in the instant before he is shot dead by a German firing squad; a man who can remember everything that ever happened: on and on the extraordinary conceits flow.