Because the individual books of essays were (with one exception) not thematic and were essentially handy repositories for whatever Borges felt like publishing at the time of their reprinting, or were collections gathered decades after the work was written, I have decided to ignore them as an organizing principle. (The publishing history of each essay, however, may be found in the notes.) Instead, I have chosen a simple chronological arrangement, according to first publication—the date is noted at the end of each text—which allows the reader to see the evolution of Borges’ style and the clusterings and revisions of his concerns, and to place each piece in its general historical moment. (I have, however, used the final version of each individual text, as some were slightly revised over the years.) I have divided the book into seven sections, and subdivided these by subgenre: essays, book reviews, film criticism, lectures, and prologues (a particularly Borgesian form: he wrote hundreds of them). Only one section and one subsection are thematic: the Dante essays and the notes he wrote on Germany and World War II; these clearly belonged together. It is hoped that this arrangement will be completely straightforward for readers, although it is unique for an edition of Borges.
Part I (Early Writings) presents eight essays from the first three books, which Borges disowned. Many feel that his self-criticism was overly severe: the essays remain interesting in themselves, and as examples both of youth fully exuberant, preliminary investigations into subjects that would become lifelong obsessions and of the early complex style he would simplify and refine over the decades.
Part II (1929-1936) begins the “canonical” Borges, and is drawn from the books of the early 1930s, as well as uncollected essays from that period and his film criticism. Part III is taken from the hundreds of articles he wrote for the women’s magazine El Hagar [Home] every two weeks from 1936 to 1939. These include some of his one-page “Capsule Biographies” of modern writers, the very short and often hilarious book reviews and notes, and two essays. Given the special circumstances under which they were written and his intended audience, these pieces required a separate section.
Part IV (1937-1945) picks up the chronology again and opens with Borges’ short articles on Germany, anti-Semitism, and the war. It also includes essays (some of which were collected years later in Other Inquisitions), prologues, and further book and film reviews. Part V is the complete text of the remarkable Nine Dantesque Essays, written between 1945 and 1951, unpublished in their entirety in Spanish until 1982, and unknown in English. Part VI (1946-1955) returns to the chronology with more essays that would appear in Other Inquisitions, essays that were included in the reprints of the 1930s books or never collected, prologues, and two written lectures.
In 1955, Borges lost his sight. After that, he wrote no more essays as such, and fewer stories. He devoted himself largely to poetry, which he could compose in his head, and surveys of topics such as American, English, and medieval Germanic literature, which he wrote with collaborators. He did, however, write scores of prologues to various books and to all the volumes in the two series he edited at the end of his life, The Library ofBabel, collections of fantastic tales, and A Personal Library, over seventy of his fa vorite books.
Before his blindness, Borges was so shy that, on the few occasions when he was asked to lecture, he sat on the stage while someone else read the text. In his last three decades, however, as his star rose and he was invited all over the world, he evolved a new form that is still misleadingly given the old label “lecture.” Closer perhaps to performance art, these were spontaneous monologues on given subjects. Relaxed and conversational, necessarily less perfect than the written essays, the lectures are, like the prologues, a particularly Borgesian subgenre and delight.
To emphasize the orality of this late work, I have given the title “Dictations” to Part VII, which begins in 1956 after the loss of his sight and ends with his death in 1986. Five of the lectures are presented, and almost twenty of his prologues, including some important longer ones and some crystalline last thoughts on his readings.
“Fiction” and “non-fiction” are notoriously blurred boundaries in Borges’ fiction, but not in his non-fiction. That is, his fictions may often resemble non-fiction, or include factual elements, but his non-fictions never resemble fiction, or include information that is not independently verifiable. (The word non-fiction, by the way, does not exist in Spanish, and Borges never used it, but essays seemed limiting or misleading for the types of work contained here.)
These writings have a few stylistic traits which perhaps should be signaled in advance. The first is the Borges sentence. He apparently took to heart Henry James’ dictum that the true measure of civility was the proper use of the semicolon. Borges, particularly when he is compiling lists that span centuries, has a predilection for the endless sentence with semicolons as milestones along the route. Previous translators have tended to break these into short sentences that conform to the manuals of English style; the translators here have left them intact.
Second, Borges likes to quote Latin, German, Italian, and French (but surprisingly, not English) sources in the original language and almost never offers a translation, even in the Dante essays with their extensive citations. As an editor, I was torn between preserving the polyglot nature of the texts and a less utopian view of the foreign language skills of many contemporary readers. My compromise was to include both the original and a translation of all quotations and book titles that are essential for understanding the text at that moment, but to leave relatively unimportant things untranslated—for example, a book title that one can easily deduce is a German study of Buddhism. All the editorial translations are contained within square brackets [ ] ; Borges’ rare translations are in parentheses.
Third, and most important, are the repetitions. Readers will immediately notice that the same phrases, sentences, paragraphs and on one occasion, pages recur throughout the book. The first reaction may well be that Borges, who was earning his living by writing hundreds of articles for diverse publications, was merely cutting corners by repeating himself. This is quite clearly not the case, as I discovered when my first editorial instinct was to wonder if any could be excised. Borges nearly always uses the same sentence to make a different point, or as a bridge between points C and D that are not the points A and B that were linked the last time the sentence was used. The repetitions are part of his lifelong fascination with the way old elements can be reassembled, by chance or design, to create new variations, something entirely different, or something that is exactly the same but now somehow different. This is most clearly visible in one of his longest and most famous essays, “A New Refutation of Time,” which not only cites the same paragraphs from Bishop Berkeley twice, but also reprints a prose piece from the 1920s that he had already reprinted in another “canonical” essay, “A History of Eternity.” (Borges might have liked the fact that this same text is presented here in two different English versions.) Needless to say, none of these translations abridge any of the original texts.
It should also be said that this book has been edited for the English language reader. The result is that, with a half-dozen exceptions, a large portion of Borges’ writing has been neglected here: the hundreds of articles he wrote on Argentine literature and culture. Most of his subjects, unfortunately, are generally unknown outside of the country, and unlike other writers who attempt to explain the national to an international audience, Borges was writing for Argentines about Argentina. These articles would have required a rich subsoil of footnotes to produce a meager interest. But it is important to note, at least, that Borges was an active participant in his national culture and extraordinarily generous, in the form of prologues and reviews, to his contemporaries.
The English-language reader may well be misled by the practice of many of the major modern Anglo-American writers and assume that Borges’ essays are merely addenda to the fiction or poetry, and now of interest mainly to fans or scholars. In Latin America, however, it is fre
quently said that the best Borges is the essayist: the place where nearly all the ideas that propel the short stories, and many more, are elaborated in lively, different, and more detailed ways. This is not to depreciate the stories and poems—Borges himself often complains of a criticism that finds it necessary to tear down one thing in order to promote another—but merely to indicate the high and equal regard in which the non-fiction is held.
In English, unlike many other languages, the essay has played a minor role in twentieth-century literature. In contrast to the other writing forms, there is almost no criticism on the essay, no articulated recognition of the way an essay may be written, and other than comments on its content, no consensus or dissent on how it should be read. At the present moment, it is largely represented by certain of its subgenres—memoir, travel writing, personal journalism, book review, academic criticism—and the kind of free ranging essay that Borges wrote is almost entirely absent from periodicals, outside of small literary journals.
Abroad, essays in an unlimited variety of styles appear daily in the cultural supplements of newspapers or in large-circulation intellectual magazines. They tend to be written by poets or novelists, and it is often the case that the writers are known or respected as poets or novelists, but actually read as essayists. This is the milieu in which Borges wrote: much of the work here first appeared in newspapers. In that world, it was expected that essays be as fascinating as stories, and it is revealing that, perhaps in order for his fiction to be read, he started out by disguising his stories as essays.
—Eliot Weinberger
Selected Nonfictions of Jorge Luis Borges, 1999
The Wall and the Books
He, whose long wall the wand’ring Tartar bounds. . .
—Dunciad, II, 76
I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was that first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned. That these two vast operations―the five to six hundred leagues of stone opposing the barbarians, the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past―should originate in one person and be in some way his attributes inexplicably satisfied and, at the same time, disturbed me. To investigate the reasons for that emotion is the purpose of this note.
Historically speaking, there is no mystery in the two measures. A contemporary of the wars of Hannibal, Shih Huang Ti, king of Tsin, brought the Six Kingdoms under his rule and abolished the feudal system; he erected the wall, because walls were defenses; he burned the books, because his opposition invoked them to praise the emperors of olden times. Burning books and erecting fortifications is a common task of princes; the only thing singular in Shih Huang Ti was the scale on which he operated. Such is suggested by certain Sinologists, but I feel that the facts I have related are something more than an exaggeration or hyperbole of trivial dispositions. Walling in an orchard or a garden is ordinary, but not walling in an empire. Nor is it banal to pretend that the most traditional of races renounce the memory of its past, mythical or real. The Chinese had three thousand years of chronology (and during those years, the Yellow Emperor and Chuang Tsu and Confucius and Lao Tzu) when Shih Huang Ti ordered that history begin with him.
Shih Huang Ti had banished his mother for being a libertine; in his stern justice the orthodox saw nothing but an impiety; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, wanted to obliterate the canonical books because they accused him; Shih Huang Ti, perhaps, tried to abolish the entire past in order to abolish one single memory: his mother’s infamy. (Not in an unlike manner did a king of Judea have all male children killed in order to kill one.) This conjecture is worthy of attention, but tells us nothing about the wall, the second part of the myth. Shih Huang Ti, according to the historians, forbade that death be mentioned and sought the elixir of immortality and secluded himself in a figurative palace containing as many rooms as there are days in the year; these facts suggest that the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death. All things long to persist in their being, Baruch Spinoza has written; perhaps the Emperor and his sorcerers believed that immortality is intrinsic and that decay cannot enter a closed orb. Perhaps the Emperor tried to recreate the beginning of time and called himself The First, so as to be really first, and called himself Huang Ti, so as to be in some way Huang Ti, the legendary emperor who invented writing and the compass. The latter, according to the Book of Rites, gave things their true name; in a parallel fashion, Shih Huang Ti boasted, in inscriptions which endure, that all things in his reign would have the name which was proper to them. He dreamt of founding an immortal dynasty; he ordered that his heirs be called Second Emperor, Third Emperor, Fourth Emperor, and so on to infinity. . . I have spoken of a magical purpose; it would also be fitting to suppose that erecting the wall and burning the books were not simultaneous acts. This (depending on the order we select) would give us the image of a king who began by destroying and then resigned himself to preserving, or that of a disillusioned king who destroyed what he had previously defended. Both conjectures are dramatic, but they lack, as far as I know, any basis in history. Herbert Allen Giles tells that those who hid books were branded with a red-hot iron and sentenced to labor until the day of their death on the construction of the outrageous wall. This information favors or tolerates another interpretation. Perhaps the wall was a metaphor, perhaps Shih Huang Ti sentenced those who worshiped the past to a task as immense, as gross and as useless as the past itself. Perhaps the wall was a challenge and Shih Huang Ti thought: “Men love the past and neither I nor my executioners can do anything against that love, but someday there will be a man who feels as I do and he will efface my memory and be my shadow and my mirror and not know it.” Perhaps Shih Huang Ti walled in his empire because he knew that it was perishable and destroyed the books because he understood that they were sacred books, in other words, books that teach what the entire universe or the mind of every man teaches. Perhaps the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operations which in some secret way cancel each other.
The tenacious wall which at this moment, and at all moments, casts its system of shadows over lands I shall never see, is the shadow of a Caesar who ordered the most reverent of nations to burn its past; it is plausible that this idea moves us in itself, aside from the conjectures it allows. (Its virtue may lie in the opposition of constructing and destroying on an enormous scale.) Generalizing from the preceding case, we could infer that all forms have their virtue in themselves and not in any conjectural “content.” This would concord with the thesis of Benedetto Croce; already Pater in 1877 had affirmed that all arts aspire to the state of music, which is pure form. Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
—Translated by James E. Irby
The Fearful Sphere of Pascal
It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. The purpose of this note will be to sketch a chapter of this history.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, wearied of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, lashed out at the poets who attributed anthropomorphic traits to the gods, and offered the Greeks a single God, a god who was an eternal sphere. In the Timaeus of Plato we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform figure, for all points of its surface are equidistant from its center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes to speak analogically: God is spherical because that form is best ― or least inadequate ― to represent the Divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, rephrased the image: “The Divine Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction.” Calogero and Mondolfo reasoned that Parmenides intuited an infinite, or infini
tely expanding sphere, and that the words just transcribed possess a dynamic meaning (Albertelli: Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after his death, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigentum constructed a laborious cosmogony: a stage exists in which the particles of earth, water, air and fire make up a sphere without end, “the rounded Sphairos, which exults in its circular solitude.”
Universal history continued to unroll, the all-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons―although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000 according to Hamblicus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth ― who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things. Fragments of this illusory library, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of these fragments, or in the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille (Alanus de Insulis) discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, the following formula, which future ages would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of a sphere without end; Albertelli (as Aristotle before him) thinks that to speak in this wise is to commit a contradictio in adjecto, because subject and predicate cancel each other; this may very well be true, but still, the formula of the Hermetic books allows us, almost, to intuit this sphere. In the thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, where it is given as a citation from Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum Triplex; in the sixteenth century, the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere and which we call God.” For the medieval mind the sense was clear ― God is in each one of His creatures, but none of them limits Him. “The heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometric metaphor of the sphere seemed a gloss on these words.
Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952 Page 5