His work laid little claim to the psychological: in this it marked a singular rupture with the tradition begun so spectacularly by Flaubert a century before. Above all else, Borges belonged, believed Bioy Casares, to that ‘tradition of the great novelists and short story writers, that is, the tradition of the storytellers’. When he and Borges would meet, wrote Bioy Casares, Borges ‘usually declares that he has some news about one character or another; as if he had just seen them, or had been living with them; he tells me what Frogman or Montenegro had been doing the day before, or what Bonavena or Mrs Ruiz Villalba had said’.
His was a joy in life and a joy in stories, two virtues not commonly associated with literature. ‘I hope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remembered,’ Borges wrote in a foreword to one of his later works. ‘In this world, beauty is so common.’
His work opened up Borges to the charges of what Bioy Casares called ‘the habitual conflict between books and life’. In his own soul, one suspects there was no such conflict. Finally the world and the word became one, Borges’ universe became Borges the world-famous writer. ‘A man sets himself the task of drawing the world,’ he wrote in old age. ‘As the years pass, he fills the empty space with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.’
In ‘Parable of the Palace’, the Yellow Emperor’s poet is put to death for capturing the totality of the marvel and the enormity of his great palace in a single poem. But such legends, concludes Borges, ‘are simply literary fictions . . . and his [the poet’s] descendants still seek, though they shall never find, the word for the universe’. Similarly it is impossible to find a word that might describe Borges’ stories. Beauty may be common, but writing of such wonder is not.
The Age
19 June 1999
FRANZ KAFKA’S FRIENDSHIP with Max Brod, wrote Walter Benjamin, ‘is a question mark which he chose to put in the margin of his life’.
In the annals of twentieth-century literature, Jorge Luis Borges’ friendship with his English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, may rank, on the evidence of di Giovanni’s book (The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work, 2003), as no less perplexing.
Recounting through eight essays discussing aspects of Borges and his work the years he spent with the great Argentinian writer, di Giovanni’s prose can sometimes seem as leaden and dull as Borges was otherwise. Yet between 1967 and 1972, in collaboration with di Giovanni, Borges—blind, old and fearful of his powers fading—reworked some of his best stories and poems into what are arguably not fine translations of the greatest Spanish-language writer of the twentieth century, but some of twentieth-century English literature’s finest original works.
To his credit di Giovanni makes no claim for himself other than his friendship and work with Borges, and his book is, by its own admission, a modest volume that seeks to be, and succeeds as, an act of homage to Borges, the man he acknow- ledges as his master.
Sometimes melancholic and occasionally irritable, the book’s touchstone is di Giovanni’s friendship with Borges and the insights that provides. Though di Giovanni is discreet and respectful, the book offers up the occasional fascin- ating tidbit. On Borges’ various, hapless passions for Buenos Aires society women with literary pretensions, di Giovanni notes that Borges described them to him as ‘all unforgettable, all forgotten’. The forewords Borges wrote for their books, were, ‘it was said, the kiss of death’ in Argentinian literary circles.
These essays, possibly not in spite of but because of di Giovanni’s occasional meandering and pedantry, reveal Borges as a very human figure, an idea of the writer at odds with the monstrous literary genius he is too often lauded as. Di Giovanni despises such over-reverence of Borges, both because of its untruth and the way such a view corrupts readings and translations of a writer he views as a great storyteller.
Borges himself translated from English into Spanish, and his translations would seem to speak to his own conception of the great artistic possibilities of translation. For example, William Faulkner’s pivotal influence on the writers of the Latin American Boom has been acknowledged by everyone from Gabriel García Márquez to Maria Vargas Llosa. But it was not the Faulkner of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury that initially fired these writers, but, above all else, the Faulkner of The Wild Palms, as rendered in Spanish by Borges. Could Borges’ translation of The Wild Palms be the work of genius the original is not; the great novel he, Borges, never wrote?
For all his belief in the creative possibilities in translating, Borges was highly aware of the level of incompetence and misunderstanding that can attend translation.
He once read an English translation of a Chinese philosopher containing the following passage: ‘A man condemned to death doesn’t care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.’ This was attended by a footnote by the translator arguing for the superiority of this translation over that made by a rival Sinologist, which read: ‘The servants destroy the works of art, and they will have to judge their beauties and defects.’
At that moment, wrote Borges, ‘a mysterious scepticism slipped into my soul’.
But such scepticism did not incline Borges toward the fashion for literal translations, which, he argued in a lecture at Harvard in 1967, ‘would have been a crime to translators in ages past. They were thinking of something far worthier. They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original.’
Among his audience was the young American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni. He wrote to Borges, asking to meet. Curiously, Borges, notorious for never answering letters, replied.
Di Giovanni met not the great Borges but an old man: shy, lacking in confidence, depressed with his recent marriage and fearful that he had lost his ability to write, so unable to effect a change in his life that di Giovanni was later to engineer a trip to Cordoba to facilitate Borges’ divorce from his second wife, Elsa Astete Millán.
Together, they sought to honour Borges’ glorious vision of what was possible with translation: work as good as, even better than, the original. To translate, for Borges, was an invitation to create no less significant than the invitation to write.
Translators tend to be poorly paid and overworked. Though some gain an acquaintanceship, and occasionally a friendship, with a writer, this is rare. They of necessity must do their work quickly, generally in a different country, and their contact with an author is normally restricted to a brief correspondence in which a few factual questions about local detail are asked and answered.
The collaboration of di Giovanni and Borges was of a different order. They quickly hit on a process not so much of translation as, in Borges’ words, ‘re-creation’ of his works in English.
Daily they would meet in the gloomy recesses of the National Library of Argentina, where Borges enjoyed a sinecure as director. Here they revelled in books and words, di Giovanni recalling how they would both savour smelling an ancient dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy that sat on the table on which they worked, discussing nuances of meaning and purpose, sometimes introducing or deleting whole sentences, or even paragraphs, always attempting to ensure that the overall story was enhanced in its English incarnation.
At such work, wrote Borges, they didn’t consider themselves two men: ‘We think we are really one mind at work.’ Pedantic as they were, their bedrock was ideas and story, not words, acting on Borges’ belief that he tried ‘to say what I have to say perhaps not through words, but in spite of them’. Paradoxically, though their grail was not style, their ‘re-creations’ contain English of beauty, and sometimes dazzling virtuosity.
Borges brought to the task several unusual qualities. He was bilingual, having grown up, as
he put it, ‘in a garden, behind a fence of iron palings, and in a library of endless English books’. As an adult he would often conceive titles, phrases and sentences for his works in English and then translate them back into Spanish.
For all his ambition with his English stories, Borges’ ultimate position on translating was sanguine: he believed the test of great literature was precisely its capacity to survive mistranslation and remain compelling.
‘The “perfect” page is precisely the one that consists of those delicate fringes that are so easily worn away,’ wrote Borges. ‘On the contrary, the page that becomes immortal can traverse the fires of typographical errors, approximate translations, and inattentive or erroneous readings without losing its soul in the process . . . Don Quixote wins posthumous battles against his translators and survives each and every careless version . . . the writer’s overriding passion is his subject . . . Genuine literature is as indifferent to a rough hewn phrase as it is to a smooth sentence.’
Di Giovanni lacks such largeness. He nitpicks at the failings of other more recent translations; notably Andrew Hurley’s much vaunted 1998 compendium of Borges’ fiction. His real criticism is never made; it is more, one suspects, in the nature of the deepest of personal hurts.
Such carping particularly and di Giovanni’s book generally makes little sense without understanding his own cruel fate at the hands of the Borges Estate, administered by Borges’ third, last wife of fewer than two months, Maria Kodama.
Translators are normally either paid a set, small fee by the publisher for their work, or, less commonly, a very low percentage of royalties. Borges had hit on a characteristically generous and highly unusual agreement with di Giovanni that saw them split royalties equally. For the Borges Estate, Borges’ arrangement meant a 50 per cent reduction in its income from English language editions of some of Borges’ major works.
In the mid-1990s Maria Kodama had a New York agent negotiate a lucrative new English language deal, selling the English translation rights to Borges’ complete Spanish works. Henceforth, these would be the basis of the official English language editions, authorised by Borges’ own estate, rendering, at a stroke, Borges and di Giovanni’s work redundant and unpublishable, and giving Maria Kodama full copyright and the Borges Estate 100 per cent of English royalties. Bizarrely, in the name of Borges, this was condemning to obscurity those very works Borges had co-authored in English.
Di Giovanni’s story, which is implicit but never told in this odd volume, is one of a loyal friend whose most significant work has been largely lost, hopefully not permanently, because of the woman Borges loved expressing her ongoing respect for her dead husband by managing his literary estate with a strong hand. Literature does not lend itself to the pathos of such a story, because love always plays better between the clapboards than friendship.
Perhaps this is why, finally, we recognise Borges less in di Giovanni’s pages than we do in Borges’ own, and why we feel we come closest to Borges in his own writings when he speaks of his love for other writers’ books: not in such works’ triumph over death, but in their transcendence of the individual soul. As Borges had Shakespeare write, and di Giovanni translate: ‘I, who have been no man, am all men.’
All collaboration is mysterious, wrote Borges. On di Giovanni reading him the finished English draft of his feted story ‘The Circular Ruins’, Borges wept.
‘Caramba,’ said Borges. ‘I wish I could still write like that.’
Yet through his friendship with Norman Thomas di Giovanni, no longer in Spanish but in the tongue of his Staffordshire grandmother, in the language of the writers he revered, Shakespeare and Stevenson and de Quincey and Chesterton, Borges still was writing like that.
Like the ironies in which he delighted, Borges’ tears, unexpected as they are beautiful, appear to us as a truth pregnant with a destiny that once realised, would, through the actions of his widow, finally prove unfulfilled.
But then, as Borges, so often disappointed and humiliated in love, had told di Giovanni on his first morning in Buenos Aires, ‘Here, in Argentina, friendship is more important than love.’
The Age
12 July 2003
NELSON ALGREN’S LIFE is terrifying in its proof that talent, love and a determination to speak truth to power can destroy a writer as surely as mediocrity and compromise. A Walk on the Wild Side, the last of Algren’s novels to be published in his lifetime, is in consequence a most moving achievement. It was an act of courage by a man no longer sure of his country, no longer certain of either his own worth or his relevance, convinced only that he had lost the woman who was the great love of his life.
A Walk on the Wild Side is in some ways a desperate attempt by a writer to reassure himself that he can still write, a writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald described himself as being in The Crack-Up—a work at first something of a touchstone for Nelson Algren and later a chronicle of a disintegration foretold—who feels that he has become less through his writing and, worse, that he has nothing left to write.
It is then a novel written against fate, by a writer who even at the height of his success in 1950 foresaw his own forlorn destiny as inextric- ably tied to his vocation as writer.
‘Thinking of Melville,’ he wrote, ‘thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.’
There are no second acts in American literature, Fitzgerald famously remarked, and so it was with Nelson Algren. A Walk on the Wild Side is the final scene in one of the more brilliant first acts in twentieth-century American writing.
Nelson Algren’s irreparably American life tends to read like a novel by Nelson Algren. Compounding the impossible wrath of the gods was the impossible nature of the man born Nelson Algren Abraham in Detroit, 1909, the grandson of Nels Ahlgren, a Swedish adventurer possessed of the unrelenting strength of others’ opinions. Nels Ahlgren converted to Judaism and became a self-appointed rabbi with the name of Isaac Ben Abraham, who emigrated first to the USA then, in 1870, to Jerusalem, where ‘he chastised Jews for their lack of orthodoxy’.
The family made it back to the USA, where Nels Ahlgren deserted his family and became a mercenary missionary, preaching the faith of any group or sect willing to pay for his services. With characteristic perversity and some insight, Algren in his later life claimed to heavily identify with his grandfather.
‘A man who won’t demean himself for a dollar is a phoney to my way of thinking,’ the late-middle-aged Algren wrote in a letter, an opinion consistent with the young Algren’s conviction, taken from Whitman, that he belonged with the ‘convicts and prostitutes’, believing that in humiliation and degradation was to be found truth. The truth mattered to Algren, but it didn’t help.
‘Like all writers,’ wrote his friend John Clellon Holmes, ‘he believed that truth would carry everything before it, and like all writers he was baffled to discover that nothing could be further from the truth.’
Algren’s family moved to Chicago when he was three, and he grew up in poverty on the South Side. Chicago was his first great passion, and the city was booming, aspiring to the title of First City of the Republic. By the mid-century it would all be over and Chicago in spectacular decline: ‘What stopped it is a mystery,’ wrote A. J. Liebling in the New Yorker in 1952, ‘like what happened to Angkor Wat.’
‘Loving Chicago,’ said Algren, ‘is like loving a woman with a broken nose.’
But at the beginning it was for Algren the city of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the White Sox scandal; of the One Big Union and Eugene Debs and impoverished neighbourhoods bounded by Eastern European nationality; of the greatest slaughterhouses in the continent and some of its most celebrated writers—Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg; of what he called the ‘slander-colo
ured evening hour’ and ‘pavement-hued faces’. It was this city in its early twentieth-century struggles and urban romance that shaped Algren’s vision of the USA.
Graduating as a journalist at the height of the depression in 1931, Algren headed south seeking work, and in 1932 landed in New Orleans, a city more Caribbean than North American, where girls ‘were so hard pressed’ they would let a man sleep with them if he bought them a pork sandwich. Later, in an abandoned Texas petrol station, Algren wrote his first short story that led to a book advance. He was subsequently imprisoned for stealing a typewriter.
He returned to Chicago and in 1935 his first novel was published, a gritty tale of a Texan drifter, which sold only 750 copies. Originally called Native Son, the title was changed by the publishers to the appalling Somebody in Boots, Algren’s friend Richard Wright having the sense to later borrow the original title for what would become his most famous novel.
Algren’s second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), was better received, and returning from the war in which he had served as stretcher bearer, Algren’s star further rose with a collection of short stories, The Neon Wilderness (1947).
Algren’s work was attracting attention for its unusual marriage of a sumptuous prose style and a dry humour, with subjects normally rendered in the dreariest of realistic and naturalistic tones: the lives of those at the bottom. Algren’s world, in one of the many memorable phrases he brought into common usage (including ‘walk on the wild side’, ‘monkey on the back’ and ‘I knew I’d never make it to twenty-one anyway’) is ‘a neon wilderness’, and his novels can read like a natural history of American underlife.