Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  Un estudiante de Dublín escribe una novela sobre un tabernero de Dublín que escribe una novela sobre los parroquianos de su taberna (entre quienes está el estudiante), que a su vez escriben novelas donde figuran el tabernero y el estudiante, y otros compositores de novelas sobre otros novelistas. Forman el libro los muy diversos manuscritos de esas personas reales o imaginarias, copiosamente anotados por el estudiante

  (OC4 435).

  [A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers of novels about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student (SNF 162).]

  It reads like the type of infinitely regressive plots Borges would invent and then teasingly credit to imaginary authors such as Herbert Quain in ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’; or like the endless series of dreams within dreams which dimly occur during the ‘unánime noche’ (OC1 451) [unanimous night] of ‘The Circular Ruins’; or the multiple possibilities in the invisible labyrinth of time in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, those dimensions of time which may go on ad infinitum and which in turn recall the cyclical nature of Finnegans Wake.

  Thus Borges’s journey through Irish literature gradually progressed from Joyce to Yeats, O’Brien, and Gogarty. In the October 1936 section ‘Literary Life’ Borges recounts Joyce’s often-cited first meeting with Yeats. In Chapter VII of his monumental biography, Richard Ellmann retells Yeats’s version of his first exchange with the young Joyce: ‘Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, “I am twenty. How old are you?” I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old” ’ (JJII 103). What concerns us here is that Borges incorporated his own variation of this anecdote in his bi-weekly column of El Hogar. Moreover, he astutely coordinated Joyce’s meeting with Yeats with yet another criss-crossing between the two Irish writers, namely Joyce’s refusal to sign the petition against Yeats’s controversial play The Countess Cathleen:

  James Joyce fue el único estudiante que en la Universidad de Dublin se negó a firmar una nota de protesta contra el poeta W. B. Yeats, por su drama ‘Countess Cathleen’. Años después, cuando por primera vez se encontraron, Joyce le dijo a Yeats:

  ‘¡Qué lastima que no nos hayamos conocido antes! Usted es demasiado viejo para ser influenciado por mí.’82

  James Joyce was the only student of University College, Dublin who refused to sign a note of protest against W. B. Yeats’s drama ‘Countess Cathleen’. Several years later, when they met for the first time, Joyce said to Yeats:

  ‘We have met too late! You are too old to be influenced by me.’

  These anecdotes gave rise to another Irish tale — in this case refracted through Joyce and Yeats — which appeared in the 1938 section of ‘Literary Life’. It concerns the famous escape of the poet, novelist, and surgeon Oliver St John Gogarty during the Irish Civil War, coincidentally an anecdote that at the time had highly amused Joyce. As Richard Ellmann reports: ‘The only incident that amused him in the Irish Civil War was Gogarty’s escape from I.R.A. troops by plunging into the Liffey and swimming to safety’ (JJII N.535). If in Ulysses Joyce turned Gogarty into the infamous and grotesque ‘plump Buck Mulligan’ (U 1.1), Borges similarly saw Gogarty as the subject of literary inspiration; but while a scornful Joyce had mocked him, Borges, fascinated by Gogarty’s glorious escape, provided him a more dignified fate by turning the historical incident into a legend of heroism and supernatural intervention. Moreover, this journalistic report on an Irish theme may also be classified as a Borgesian ficción, or so called ‘fable’ in its own right, and due to its conciseness it can be cited in full:

  Durante la última de las guerras civiles de Irlanda, el poeta Oliver Gogarty fue aprisionado por los hombres de Ulster en un caserón a orillas del Barrow, en el condado de Kildare. Comprendió que al amanecer lo fusilarían. Salió con un pretexto al jardín y se arrojó a las aguas glaciales. La noche se agrandó de balazos. Al nadar bajo el agua renegrida, en la que reventaban las balas, le prometió dos cisnes al río si éste lo dejaba en la otra ribera. El dios del río lo escuchó y lo salvó y el hombre cumplió el voto

  (OC4 395).

  [Toward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the poet Oliver Gogarty was imprisoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare. He knew that at dawn he would be shot. Under some pretext, he went into the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with gunshots. Swimming under the black water exploding with bullets, he promised the river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank. The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the poet [el hombre] fulfilled his pledge (SNF 190).]

  Yet it must be mentioned that the main source of Borges’s Gogarty ficción was The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited by W. B. Yeats, a book he reviewed for El Hogar in May 1937 (see OC4 291–92). Significantly, this slim volume had a lengthy introduction in which Yeats justified the somehow disproportionate inclusion of seventeen poems by his friend Oliver Gogarty, whom he deemed ‘one of the great lyric poets of our age’.83 The disproportionateness of the Gogarty entry in the anthology becomes even more apparent if viewed in comparison to the meagre inclusion of only three poems by Joyce. It appears, then, that Borges based his El Hogar version of Gogarty’s escape on the first-hand account offered by Yeats in his introduction. Yeats’s report goes thus:

  Twelve years ago Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him to safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow.84

  It is unmistakable that Borges offered his readers of El Hogar a rewriting of Yeats’s résumé of Gogarty’s escape, inasmuch as the task of the translator involved, for Borges, an uplifting and re-creative experience. Since Borges’s ‘tale of Gogarty’ is directed to a readership that may not have known the various intricacies of the Irish Civil War, Borges padded his vignette with additional historical details. Therefore, Yeats’s indefinite ‘twelve years ago’ becomes in Borges ‘toward the end of the civil war’. Similarly, Yeats’s vaguely defined ‘enemies’ and ‘house on the edge of the Liffey’ is rendered by Borges as ‘some Ulster men’ and ‘a house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare’. The decorous Borges omits Yeats’s ‘pleading a natural necessity’ and instead substitutes it for the more general ‘under some pretext’. In a remarkable fictional twist, Borges poetically infuses Yeats’s ‘under a shower of revolver bullets’ and turns it into ‘the night grew large with gunshots’. Finally, Gogarty’s salvation plea to the river Liffey is enriched by Borges with a more ritualistic invocation to the pagan powers of the god of the river, who is in turn reported to ‘have heard him and saved him’. Borges, of course, was careful to delete Yeats’s final intrusion in the narrative, whereby he claimed to have been present ‘when he [Gogarty] fulfilled that vow’.

  Notes to Chapter 2

  1. See, OC1, pp. 232; 262; 266; 363; 418. See also, S pp. 27; 140–41; 206; 214. And, OC4 pp. 217; 235–36; 258; 272; 291; 319; 324; 353; 355; 435.

  2. John King, Sur: A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal and its Role in the Development of a Culture, 1931–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 201.

  3. For a list of all the foreign writers translated by Sur, see Doris Meyer, Against the Wind and the Tide: Victoria Ocampo, with a selection of essays by Victoria Ocampo, trans. by Doris Meyer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 115.

  4. James Joyce, Esteban el héroe, trans. by Roberto Bixio (B
uenos Aires: Sur, 1960).

  5. James Joyce, Desterrados, trans. by A. Jiménez Fraud (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1937).

  6. Patrick O’Neill, Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p. 72.

  7. O’Neill, p. 72.

  8. James Joyce, La noche de Ulises: adaptación dramática por Marjorie Barkentin, Introducción de Padraic Colum, traducido por Celia Paschero y Juan Carlos Pellegrini (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1958).

  9. Laura Mara Lojo Rodríguez,‘ “A gaping mouth, but no words”: Virginia Woolf Enters the Land of the Butterflies’, in The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, ed. by Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst (London: Continuum: 2002), pp. 218–47 (p. 239).

  10. Meyer, p. 101.

  11. Meyer, p. 102.

  12. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 660.

  13. Borges later acknowledged, however, that he co-translated A Room of One’s Own with his mother, Doña Leonor Acevedo de Borges. See Jorge Luis Borges, En diálogo II, with Osvaldo Ferrari (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1986), p. 108.

  14. For a fascinating study of Borges’s translations of Woolf see Patricia Willson, La constelación del sur, pp. 132–60.

  15. Lojo Rodríguez, p. 235.

  16. King, p. 81. King has also persuasively demonstrated the influence that the review Sur had on celebrated Latin American writers such as Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa and, of course, Gabriel García Márquez. See pp. 78–80; pp. 143–44.

  17. Revol later published Teoría del monólogo interior (Córdoba: Univ. Nacional de Córdoba, 1965) and La Tradición imaginaria: de Joyce a Borges (Córdoba: Univ. Nacional de Córdoba, 1971).

  18. Joseph Brooker, Joyce’s Critics: Transitions in Reading and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 60–61.

  19. Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Modernism and “The Plain Reader’s Rights”: Duff-Riding-Graves Re-reading Joyce’, in European Joyce Studies: Joyce’s Audiences, ed. by John Nash (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 29–39 (p. 36). Rabaté also argues that ‘Joyce was not only pleased with efforts like Duff’s and Ogden’s, but also incorporated them into the very substance of Finnegans Wake’, p. 37.

  20. Charles Duff, James Joyce and the Plain Reader, with a prefatory letter by Herbert Read, 2nd edn (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932), p. 6.

  21. Duff, pp. 36–37.

  22. Duff, p. 77.

  23. Duff, p. 24. This is translated in Sur as ‘a ese trabajo [Gilbert] habrá de recurrir el lector corriente que no tenga ni pueda procurarse el texto completo de Ulises’ (p. 90).

  24. See Brooker, p. 61.

  25. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, Borges performed a careful reading of Larbaud’s 1921 lecture on Joyce, which was later published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. Therefore what ought to be stressed here is that Larbaud’s essay stayed in Borges’s mind for quite some time, so much so that in his conclusion of ‘Narrative Art and Magic’, as well as incorporating Duff, he also echoed Larbaud’s prior pronouncements: ‘We begin to discover and to anticipate symbols, a design, a plan, in what appeared to us at first a brilliant but confused mass of notations [...] and we realise that we are before a much more complicated book than we had supposed, that everything which appeared arbitrary and sometimes extravagant is really deliberate and premeditated’, Valery Larbaud, ‘The “Ulysses” of James Joyce’ The Criterion, 1 (1922–1923), 94–103 (p. 97), translator unknown. See also Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, for an insightful discussion of Borges’s references to Gilbert and Larbaud in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’.

  26. See the publicity spaces situated at the beginning of Sur, 76 (1941).

  27. See José Lezama Lima, ‘Muerte de Joyce’, Grafos, 9 (1941), 16. This article was subsequently reprinted in José Lezama Lima, Obras completas, 2 vols (México: Aguilar, 1977), pp. 236–38.

  28. Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 79.

  29. Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 79.

  30. For a discussion of these essays see Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), p. 224, n. 5.

  31. See James Joyce, Gente de Dublín, trad. Ignacio Abelló (Barcelona: Tartessos, 1942). See also the celebrated 1974 version Dublineses by the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Madrid: Alianza editorial, 1974).

  32. See C. G. Jung, ¿Quién es Ulises?, traducción de Ortega y Gasset (Buenos Aires: Santiago Rueda, 1944). See Herbert Gorman, James Joyce: El hombre que escribió Ulises, traducido por Máximo Siminovich (Buenos Aires: Santiago Rueda, 1945).

  33. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934).

  34. Francine Masiello, ‘Joyce in Buenos Aires (Talking Sexuality through Translation)’, Diacritics, 34.3 (2004), 55–72 (p. 63).

  35. Masiello, p. 63.

  36. César Fernández Moreno, reseña de C. G. Jung, ¿Quién es Ulises?, Sur, 120 (1944), 79–82 (p. 81), my translation.

  37. For a fascinating discussion of the Irish migration to Argentina see Katherine Mullin, ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina: “Eveline” and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. by Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 172–200 (p. 175).

  38. See Stuart Gilbert, ‘L’ambiance Latine de L’art de James Joyce’, Fontaine, 37–40 (1944), 79–88.

  39. See Contrapunto, 4 (1945), 12. This review also published an essay by Jacques Mercaton, ‘James Joyce’, translated by José Mora Guarnido, 5 (1945), 2–3.

  40. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 286.

  41. Rodríguez Monegal also states that ‘some of the more established Argentine and Spanish writers contributed regularly to it’, p. 286.

  42. Gifford, p. 386.

  43. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (London: The Harvill Press, 1996), p. 116.

  44. ‘Para ser hermosa: lo que interesa cuidar cuando se hace el arreglo de los ojos’, El Hogar, 16 de junio, 1939, p. 64.

  45. Holy Bible: The New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), Matthew 6. 22–23.

  46. El Hogar, 16 de Junio 1939, p. 64.

  47. El Hogar, 16 de Junio 1939, p. 46.

  48. El Hogar, 16 de Junio 1939, p. 46.

  49. Gary Leonard, Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 12.

  50. Leonard, p. 30. See also David Pierce, James Joyce’s Ireland (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992) for a reproduction of ‘The Sisters’ as it first appeared in The Irish Homestead, pp. 148–49.

  51. Silvia Barei, Borges y la crítica literaria (Madrid: Tauro, 1999), p. 42.

  52. She is referring here to a claim made by Roberto Alifano. See Barei, p. 42.

  53. Monegal, p. 287.

  54. See Barei, pp. 11–12.

  55. Jorge Luis Borges, Textos cautivos, pp. 21–22, my translation.

  56. Levine, p. 346.

  57. See Duff, p. 31. However, in his 1924 study Gorman also reports that ‘In 1904 he married Nora, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Barnacle, of Galway’, p. 231.

  58. Duff, p. 34.

  59. See Vanderham, p. 5.

  60. Brooker, p. 76.

  61. This typographical mistake is certainly not Borges’s. Since by the time he co-authored this book he was totally blind, the error corresponds to the typist.

  62. It may be argued that Borges’s first acquaintance with Work in Progress took place at the end of 1936. This can be deduced from a statement which appeared in a December 1936 note on the Argentine poet Enrique Banchs, whereby he anticipates his hostile reception of the Finnegans Wake (see OC4 235–37). Borges would have read, however, Duff’s brief discussion of ALP in James Joyce and the Plain Reader.

  63. A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 76.

  64. Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, ed. by Richard Burgin (
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 159.

  65. Burgin, p. 159.

  66. Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 69.

  67. Kearney, p. 48.

  68. Burgin, p. 36.

  69. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, ed. by Colin-Andrei Mihailescu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 88–89.

  70. Sergio Waisman, Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), pp. 175, 177.

  71. Borges is referring here to Stuart Gilbert’s article, ‘Thesaurus Minusculus: A Short Commentary on a Paragraph of Work-in-Progress’, originally published in the literary journal transition, 16–17 (1928), 15–24.

  72. See Waisman, Borges and Translation, for an insightful discussion of Borges’s analysis of these puns, pp. 178–83.

  73. Borges, This Craft of Verse, pp. 89–90.

  74. Borges, This Craft of Verse, p. 85.

  75. Kearney, p. 49.

  76. Fiddian, pp. 28–29.

  77. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 343.

  78. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 344.

  79. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 344.

  80. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 344.

  81. Brooker, p. 198.

  82. Jorge Luis Borges, Borges en ‘El Hogar’: 1935–1958 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000), pp. 18–19.

  83. W. B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. xv.

  84. Yeats, p. xv.

  CHAPTER 3

  James Joyce, Author of 'Funes the Memorious'