Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952
Page 41
pp. 322-23: buried there, as I shall be: In fact, Borges is buried in Geneva.
p. 323: Guide to Socialism: Borges, for whatever reason, does not cite the full title of Shaw’s 1928 book: The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism.
p. 324: “Feeling in Death”: Borges also reprints this 1928 prose piece in the 1936 “A History of Eternity” (p. 123). As both that essay and the present one are “canonical” (included in the Complete Works), it must be assumed that Borges is using the repetition—like the passages from Berkeley in parts A and B—as an example of the cyclical (or nonexistent) nature of time. Equally Borgesian, perhaps, is the fact that in this book the two texts are in somewhat different translations.
p. 332: Time is a river . . . : These words would later be spoken by the computer that rules the world in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville.
Biathanatos
“El Biathanatos.” First published under the title “John Donne, Biathanatos,” Sur no. 159, Jan. 1948. Included in Otras inqusiciones.
From Allegories to Novels
“De las alegorias a las novelas,” La Nación, 7 Aug. 1949. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Selected for the New Personal Anthology, 1968.
From Someone to Nobody
“De alguien a nadie,” Sur no. 186, Mar. 1950. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Selected for the Personal Anthology, 1961.
A footnote to the penultimate paragraph, on Buddhism, is included in the Complete Works but omitted here, as it appears embedded in the essay “Personality and the Buddha” (p . 347, the passage beginning “the first books of the canon . . . ”).
p. 342: Shankara: Indian philosopher and saint (788-820) and the main representative of Advaita-Vedanta. He wrote: “May this one sentence proclaim the essence of a thousand books: Brahman [the Eternal Absolute] alone is real; the world is appearance; the Self is nothing but Brahman.”
The Wall and the Books
“La muralla y los Iibras,” La Nación, 22 Oct. 1950. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Selected for the Personal Anthology, 1961, and the New Personal Anthology, 1968.
Personality and the Buddha
“La personalidad y el Buddha,” Sur nos. 192-194, Oct.-Dec. 1950. Never reprinted. Not in the Complete Works.
Pascal’s Sphere
“La esfera de Pascal,’’ La Nación, 14 Jan. 1951. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Selected for the New Personal Anthology, 1968.
The Innocence of Layamon
“La inocencia de Layamón;’ Sur no. 197, Mar 1951. Included in early editions of Otras inqusiciones, but omitted from later ones. Not in the Complete Works.
p. 354: [Emile] Legouis: French literary historian (1861-1937), co-author of a History of English Literature.
On the Cult of Books
“Del culto de los Iibras,” La Nación, 8 July 1951. Included in Otras inqusiciones.
The passage from St. Augustine is taken from the Henry Chadwick translation.
Kafka and His Precursors
“Kafka y sus precursors,” La Nación, 19 Aug. 1951. Included in Otras inqusiciones.
The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald
“El enigma de Edward FitzGerald,” La Nación, 7 Oct. 1951. Included in Otras inquisiciones. Selected for the Personal Anthology, 1961.
Borges does not mention a third incarnation of Omar-FitzGerald: his own father, whose translation of the Rubáiyát Borges published in his magazine Proa in the 1920s. According to Rodriguez Monegal, Borges’ description of the sensitive, sad, and bookish FitzGerald is equally applicable to Borges Sr.
Coleridge’s Dream
“El suefio de Coleridge,” La Nación, 18 Nov. 1951. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Se lected for the New Personal Anthology, 1968.
The quotation from Bede is taken from the J. A. Giles 1847 revision of the 1723 John Stevens translation.
Forms of a Legend
“Formas de una leyenda,” La Nación, 8 June 1952. Included in Otras inqusiciones. Selected for the Personal Anthology, 1961.
The Scandinavian Destiny
“Destino escandinavo,” Sur nos. 219-220, Jan.-Feb. 1953. First reprinted in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Complete Works.
The Dialogues of Ascetic and King
“Dialogos del asceta y del rey,” La Nación, 20 Sept. 1953. First reprinted in Paginas, 1982. Not in the Complete Works.
A Defense of Bouvard and Pecuchet
“Vindicación de Bmtvard y Pecuchet,” La Nación, 14 Nov. 1954. Included in later edi tions of Discusión, from 1957 on.
Flaubert and His Exemplary Destiny
“Flaubert y su destino ejemplar,” La Nación, 12 Dec. 1954. Included in later editions of Discusión, from 1957 on.
p. 393: O prima Basilio [Cousin Basilio]: 1878 novel by the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz.
A History of the Tango
“Historia del tango.” First printed in its entirety in the 1955 edition of Evaristo Car riego. One section, “El desaffo” [The Challenge] , appeared in La Nación, 28 Dec. 1952.
p. 400: [Friedrich August] Wolf: German philologist and critic (1759-1824).
p. 400: Andrew Fletcher: Scottish writer and politician (1655-1716).
A History of the Echoes of a Name
“Historia de los ecos de un nombre,” Cuadernos del Congreso par Ia Libertad de Ia Cultura [Papers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom], Paris, Nov. 1955. Included in the 1960 edition of Otras inqusiciones; omitted from later editions. Not in the Complete Works.
p. 406: Shakespeare wrote a comedy: All’s Well That Ends Well.
L’Illusion Comique
‘‘L’illusion comique,” Sur no. 237, Nov.-Dec. 1955. Never reprinted. Not in the Com plete Works.
The title comes from the Corneille play that Borges discusses in “When Fiction Lives in Fiction” (p. 160).
Prologues
Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches
Bocetos californianos (Emece, 1946). First reprinted in Prólogos, 1975.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
De los heroes; Hombres representativos (Jackson, 1949). First reprinted in Prólogos, 1975. The translation was by Borges.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Crónicas marcianas (Minotauro, 1955). First reprinted in Prólogos, 1975.
Lectures
The Argentine Writer and Tradition
“El escritor argentino y Ia tradición.” Lecture given at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores, Buenos Aires, 1951. Published in Cursos y conferencias nos. 250-252, Jan.-Mar. 1953; reprinted in Sur no. 232, Jan.-Feb. 1955; and included in later editions of Discusión, from 1957 on.
German Literature in the Age of Bach
“La literatura alemana en la epoca de Bach.” No date given for the lecture. Published in Cursos y conferencias nos. 250-252, Jan.-Mar. 1953; never reprinted. Not in the Complete Works.
Unlike the previous lecture, which was written, this text is based on a transcript.
VII. Dictations, 1956-1986
The onset of blindness ironically coincided with fame: in 1956 and 1957 alone, Borges became the Director of the National Library and a professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires; he received his first important prize; and the first of a flood of book-length critical studies on his work appeared. In 1961, he suddenly became internationally famous when a group of European and American publishers awarded the first Formentor Prize jointly to Borges and Samuel Beckett. Ficciones was simultaneously published in translation in six countries, which led to countless other translations. Borges, accompanied by his mother, began to travel abroad—for the first time since 1924—to deliver lectures throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Israel, and to receive a cascade of some fifty prizes and honorary doctorates. He became a pop icon: in the 1972 film Performan
ce, for example, Mick Jagger reads Ficciones in the bathtub, and when he is shot in the head, a photo of Borges flies out.
Blindness also brought a radical change in Borges’ work. He could no longer write complex pieces of prose, and he returned, after a twenty-year absence, to poetry, which he could compose in his head. He published a dozen books of poems and prose poems in this period. There were two further books of Bustos Domecq stories written with Bioy Casares, and in 1970, after another twenty-year gap, he returned to his own short stories with El informe de Brodie [Brodie’s Report, 1970] and El libro de arena [The Book of Sand, 1975]. Apart from some important prologues and short notes for newspapers, he wrote no essays as such; he did, however, collaborate with assistants on books about En glish, American, and medieval Germanic literature; Buddhism; and imaginary creatures. Besides poetry, his major genres in the last thirty years of his life were spoken: the “lecture,” a spontaneous monologue on a given subject, and the interview. There are countless magazine articles and dozens of books of “conversations with Borges.”
Borges married an old friend in 1967; the marriage lasted three years. With the return of Peron in 1973, Borges resigned his post at the National Library; for much of his last years—the period of the Argentine military dictatorship—he was out of the country. His mother died in 1975 at the age of ninety-nine. Beginning in 1971, Borges was accompanied in his travels and life by Maria Kodama, whom he married shortly before his death in Geneva in 1986.
Prologues
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Kappa
Kappa. Los Engranadajes (Mundonuevo, 1959). Never reprinted. Not in the Complete Works.
Edward Gibbon, Pages of History and Autobiography
Paginas de historia y autobiografia (Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1961). First reprinted in Prólogos, 1977.
Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain
Catalogo de Ia Exposición de Libros Espanoles (Buenos Aires, no publisher, 1962). Never reprinted. Not in the Complete Works.
p. 444: [Gustavo Adolfo] Becquer: The leading Spanish Romantic poet (1836-1870).
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Hojas de hierba (Juarez, 1969). First reprinted in Prólogos, 1977.
The translation was by Borges.
p. 448: Wacho: Whitman’s spelling of “gaucho.”
Emanuel Swedenborg: Mystical Works
There are two versions of this text. One, dated by Borges “April 1972,” was first published as the prologue to Sig Synnenstvedt, Swedenborg: Testigo de lo invisible (Marymar, 1982). The other—and the basis for the translation here—was the prologue to an undated American edition of the Mystical Works, published by the New Jerusalem Church in New York. According to the bibliographer Nicolas Helft, this book was pub lished in 1977, but the prologue had already been “reprinted” in the 1975 Prólogos.
p. 454: Henry More: English theologian (1614-1687) and one of the “Cambridge Platonists” who attempted to evolve a more rational form of Christianity.
p. 457 “Emanuel Swedenborg”: The poem was first published in Borges’ book El otro, el mismo [The Self and the Other] in 1966. A phrase in the original poem, “el cristalino / Edificio de Dios” [the crystalline/Edifice of God] was changed here to “el cristalino / Laberinto de Dios” [the crystalline/Labyrinth of God], perhaps consciously, perhaps unconsciously in Borges’ dictation.
Lectures
Borges’ lectures from this period were, of course, spoken extemporaneously; there was no written text. The publications in Spanish tend to be exact transcriptions of every word Borges said on the occasion. For the translations here, some false starts and mi nor repetitions have been silently edited out.
The Concept of an Academy and the Celts
Published under the title “Discurso de don Jorge Luis Borges en su recepcion academica” [Lecture by Don JLB at his Academic Reception], Boletin de Ia Academia Argentina de Letras XXVII, nos. 105-106 ( July-Dec. 1962); but Borges refers to the title as “El concepto de una Academia y los celtas.” First reprinted in Paginas, 1982, under the title “Recepción academica.” Not in the Complete Works.
The Enigma of Shakespeare
“El enigma de Shakespeare;’ Revista de Estudios de Teatro no. 8, 1964. Never reprinted in book form. Not in the Complete Works.
Blindness
“La ceguera,” La Opinion, 31 Aug. 1977. Reprinted in Siete naches, 1980.
The lecture was delivered on 3 Aug. 1977 in the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, and was one of seven given that summer. The other six were on the Divine Comedy, night mares, The Thousand and One Nights, Buddhism, poetry, and the Kabbalah.
p. 475: “Poem of the Gifts”: The translation is by Alastair Reid.
Immortality
“La inmortalidad.” First published in Borges, oral (1979).
One of a series of five lectures given in June 1978 at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires. The others were on the detective story (below), Swedenborg, the book, and time.
The Detective Story
“El cuento policial.” First published in Borges, oral (1979).
See note on “Immortality” above.
Prologues to The Library of Babel
The Library of Babel was a series of short volumes of fantastic tales, each selected and introduced by Borges, and published by Ediciones Siruela in Spain from 1978 to 1986. None of these prologues has been reprinted. They are not in the Complete Works.
Spanish titles and year of publication of the prologues included here: Franz Kafka, The Vulture (El buitre, 1979); Jack London, The Concentric Deaths (Las muertes concéntricas, 1979 ); Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, The Guest at the Last Banquets (El convidado de las ultimas fiestas, 1984); P’u Sung-ling, The Tiger Guest (El invitado tigre, 1985); Charles Howard Hinton, Scientific Romances (Relatos cientificos, 1986).
Prologues to A Personal Library
A Personal Library was Borges’ last project, published in 1985 and 1986 by Emece in Spain and Argentina, and in Italian translation by Franco Mario Ricci. Borges was unable to write the prologues for the last three of the seventy-five volumes. The prologues were collected and reprinted in 1988.
Other books proposed by Borges for the series were: Malcolm Grant, A New Argument for God and Survival and a Solution to the Problem of Supernatural Events; Hans Leisegang, Gnosis; R. B. Cunninghame Graham, A Brazilian Mystic; Navalis, Fragments; Kobo Abe, Woman in the Dunes; Jack London, Valley of the Moon; Aeschylus, Tragedies; Francis Bacon and Thomas More, Utopias; Miguel Asin Palacios, Dante and Islam; Infante Don Juan Manuel, Count Lucanor; Cicero, On Divination and On the Nature of the Gods; Pliny, Selections; Vicente Rossi, Negro Things: The Origins of the Tango; Hillaire Belloc, Milton; Stephen Vincent Benet, Tales before Midnight; Horacia Quiroga, Selections; Arnold Silcock, Introduction to Chinese Art and History; Hans Jacob von Grimmelshausen, The Adventures of Simplicissimus; Martin Buber, Hassidic Tales; Dame Bertha Surtees Phillpots, Edda and Saga; The Tibetan Book of the Dead; Alfred Kubin, The Other Side; Arthur Waley, Chinese Poetry; Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian; Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker; Alfonso Alvarez Villasandino, Selections; Leo Frobenius, The Culture of Africa; G. S. Kirk & J. Raven, The Pre-Socratic Philosophers; An Anthology of the Spanish Sonnet; Marguerite Yourcenar, Stories; Enrique Banchs, The Urn; Sappho, Poems; and Manuel Peyrou, The Sleeping Sword.
Spanish titles of the prologues included here: Julio Cortazar, Stories ( Cuentos); The Apocryphal Gospels (Evangelios apócrifos); H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man (La máquina del tiempo; El hombre invisible); Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (Los demonios); Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Teoría de Ia clase ociosa); Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Temor y temblor); Virgil, The Aeneid (La Eneida); William James, Varieties of Religious Experience; The Study of Human Nature (Las variedades de Ia experiencia religiosa; Estudio sabre Ia naturaleza humana).
p. 518: [Max] Liebermann: German naturalist and impressionist painter (1
847-1935), now largely forgotten, who dominated the German art market from the 1890s until the 1930s, when he was banned by the Nazis.
Acknowledgments
Endless thanks to my co-workers, Esther Allen and Suzanne Jill Levine; thanks to Maria Kodama and Irma Zangara of the Fundaci6n Borges in Buenos Aires for sending me some obscure texts; thanks to Odile Cisneros for help in tracking down quotes and further texts. During the making of this book, I continually missed the presence of my long-gone friend and ur-Borgesian, Emir Rodriguez Monegal, the man who could have answered all my questions.
—EW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. In 1955, with the overthrow of Perón, he was named Director of the Argentine National Library, and in the same year became professor of English and American literatures at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett. He has made three trips to the United States—the latest, in 1969, to attend a conference devoted to his writings at the University of Oklahoma.
ABOUT THE EDITOR/TRANSLATOR