The long-hoped-for revolution came in September, 1955. After a sleepless, anxious night, nearly the whole population came out into the streets, cheering the revolution and shouting the name of Córdoba, where most of the fighting had taken place. We were so carried away that for some time we were quite unaware of the rain that was soaking us to the bone. We were so happy that not a single word was even uttered against the fallen dictator. Perón went into hiding, and was later allowed to leave the country. No one knows how much money he got away with.
Two very dear friends of mine, Esther Zemborain de Torres and Victoria Ocampo, dreamed up the possibility of my being appointed Director of the National Library. I thought the scheme a wild one, and hoped at most to be given the directorship of some small-town library, preferably to the south of the city. Within the space of a day, a petition was signed by the magazine Sur (read Victoria Ocampo), by the reopened S.A.D.E. (read Carlos Alberto Erro), by the Sociedad Argentina de Cultura Inglesa (read Carlos del Campillo), and by the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (read Luis Reissig). This was placed on the desk of the Minister of Education, and eventually I was appointed to the directorship by General Eduardo Lonardi, who was Acting President. A few days earlier, my mother and I had walked to the Library one night to take a look at the building, but, feeling superstitious, I refused to go in. “Not until I get the job,” I said. That same week, I was called to come to the Library to take over. My family was present, and I made a speech to the employees, telling them I was actually the Director—the incredible Director. At the same time, José Edmundo Clemente, who a few years before had managed to persuade Emecé to bring out an edition of my works, became the Assistant Director. Of course, I felt very important, but we got no pay for the next three months. I don’t think my predecessor, who was a Peronista, was ever officially fired. He just never came around to the Library again. They named me to the job but did not take the trouble to unseat him.
Another pleasure came to me the very next year, when I was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures, and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day. I was hired, and spent ten or twelve happy years at the University.
My blindness had been coming on gradually since childhood. It was a slow, summer twilight. There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it. Beginning in 1927, I underwent eight eye operations, but since the late 1950’s, when I wrote my “Poem of the Gifts,” for reading and writing purposes I have been blind. Blindness ran in my family; a description of the operation performed on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal, the Lancet. Blindness also seems to run among the Directors of the National Library. Two of my eminent forerunners, José Mármol and Paul Groussac, suffered the same fate. In my poem, I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.
One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have mnemonic virtues. In these years, I wrote dozens of sonnets and longer poems consisting of eleven-syllable quatrains. I thought I had taken Lugones as my master, but when the verses were written my friends told me that, regrettably, they were quite unlike him. In my later poetry, a narrative thread is always to be found. As a matter of fact, I even think of plots for poems. Perhaps the main difference between Lugones and me is that he held French literature as his model and lived intellectually in a French world, whereas I look to English literature. In this new poetic activity, I never thought of building a sequence of poems, as I always formerly did, but was chiefly interested in each piece for its own sake. In this way, I wrote poems on such different subjects as Emerson and wine, Snorri Sturluson and the hourglass, my grandfather’s death and the beheading of Charles I. I also went in for summing up my literary heroes: Poe, Swedenborg, Whitman, Heine, Camões, Jonathan Edwards, and Cervantes. Due tribute, of course, was also paid to mirrors, the Minotaur, and knives.
I had always been attracted to the metaphor, and this leaning led me to the study of the simple Saxon kennings and overelaborate Norse ones. As far back as 1932, I had even written an essay about them. The quaint notion of using, as far as it could be done, metaphors instead of straightforward nouns, and of these metaphors’ being at once traditional and arbitrary, puzzled and appealed to me. I was later to surmise that the purpose of these figures lay not only in the pleasure given by the pomp and circumstance of compounding words but also in the demands of alliteration. Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale’s-road” is no great feat. The Norse skalds went a step further, calling the sea “the sea-stallion’s-road,” so that what originally was an image became a laborious equation. In turn, my investigation of kennings led me to the study of Old English and Old Norse. Another factor that impelled me in this direction was my ancestry. It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine, but the fact that the Haslams lived in Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past. (My fondness for such a northern past has been resented by some of my more nationalistic countrymen, who dub me an Englishman, but I hardly need point out that many things English are utterly alien to me: tea, the Royal Family, “manly” sports, the worship of every line written by the uncaring Shakespeare.)
At the end of one of my University courses, several of my students came to see me at the Library. We had just polished off all English literature from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw in the span of four months, and I thought we might now do something in earnest. I proposed that we begin at the beginning, and they agreed. I knew that at home, on a certain top shelf, I had copies of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the students came the next Saturday morning, we began reading these two books. We skipped grammar as much as we could and pronounced the words like German. All at once, we fell in love with a sentence in which Rome (Romeburh) was mentioned. We got drunk on these words and rushed down Peru Street shouting them at the top of our voices. And so we had set out on a long adventure. I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift. Personally, I knew that the adventure would be an endless one, and that I could go on studying Old English for the rest of my days. The pleasure of studying, not the vanity of mastering, has been my chief aim, and I have not been disappointed these past twelve years. As for my recent interest in Old Norse, this is only a logical step, since the two languages are closely linked and since of all medieval Germanic literature Old Norse is the crown. My excursions into Old English have been wholly personal and, therefore, have made their way into a number of my poems. A fellow-academician once took me aside and said in alarm, “What do you mean by publishing a poem entitled ‘Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar’?” I tried to make him understand that Anglo-Saxon was as intimate an experience to me as looking at a sunset or falling in love.
Around 1954, I began writing short prose pieces— sketches and parables. One day, my friend Carlos Frías, of Emecé, told me he needed a new book for the series of my so-called complete works. I said I had none to give him, but Frías persisted, saying, “Every writer has a book if he only looks for it.” Going through drawers at home one
idle Sunday, I began ferreting out uncollected poems and prose pieces, some of the latter going back to my days on Crítica.
These odds and ends, sorted out and ordered and published in 1960, became El hacedor (The Maker). Remarkably, this book, which I accumulated rather than wrote, seems to me my most personal work and, to my taste, maybe my best. The explanation is only too easy: the pages of El hacedor contain no padding. Each piece was written for its own sake and out of an inner necessity. By the time it was undertaken, I had come to realize that fine writing is a mistake, and a mistake born out of vanity. Good writing, I firmly believe, should be done in an unobtrusive way.
On the closing page of that book, I told of a man who sets out to make a picture of the universe. After many years, he has covered a blank wall with images of ships, towers, horses, weapons, and men, only to find out at the moment of his death that he has drawn a likeness of his own face. This may be the case of all books; it is certainly the case of this particular book.
Crowded Years
Fame, like my blindness, had been coming gradually to me. I had never expected it, I had never sought it. Néstor Ibarra and Roger Caillois, who in the early 1950’s daringly translated me into French, were my first benefactors. I suspect that their pioneer work paved the way for my sharing with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize in 1961, for until I appeared in French I was practically invisible—not only abroad but at home in Buenos Aires. As a consequence of that prize, my books mushroomed overnight throughout the western world.
This same year, under the auspices of Edward Larocque Tinker, I was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Texas. It was my first physical encounter with America. In a sense, because of my reading, I had always been there, and yet how strange it seemed when in Austin I heard ditch diggers who worked on campus speaking in English, a language I had until then always thought of as being denied that class of people. America, in fact, had taken on such mythic proportions in my mind that I was sincerely amazed to find there such commonplace things as weeds, mud, puddles, dirt roads, flies, and stray dogs. Though at times we fell into homesickness, I know now that my mother—who accompanied me—and I grew to love Texas. She, who always loathed football, even rejoiced over our victory when the Longhorns defeated the neighboring Bears. At the University, when I finished one class I was giving in Argentine literature, I would sit in on another as a student of Saxon verse under Dr. Rudolph Willard. My days were full. I found American students, unlike the run of students in the Argentine, far more interested in their subjects than in their grades. I tried to interest people in Ascasubi and Lugones, but they stubbornly questioned and interviewed me about my own output. I spent as much time as I could with Ramón Martínez López, who, as a philologist, shared my passion for etymologies and taught me many things. During those six months in the States, we traveled widely, and I lectured at universities from coast to coast. I saw New Mexico, San Francisco, New York, New England, Washington. I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This— amateur Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
My second American trip came in 1967, when I held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, and lectured to well-wishing audiences on “This Craft of Verse.” I spent seven months in Cambridge, also teaching a course on Argentine writers and traveling all over New England, where most things American, including the West, seem to have been invented. I made numerous literary pilgrimages—to Hawthorne’s haunts in Salem, to Emerson’s in Concord, to Melville’s in New Bedford, to Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and to Longfellow’s around the corner from where I lived. Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge: Jorge Guillén, John Murchison, Juan Marichal, Raimundo Lida, Héctor Ingrao, and a Persian physicist who had worked out a theory of spherical time that I do not quite understand but hope someday to plagiarize—Farid Hushfar. I also met writers like Robert Fitzgerald, John Updike, and the late Dudley Fitts. I availed myself of chances to see new parts of the continent: Iowa, where I found my native pampa awaiting me; Chicago, recalling Carl Sandburg; Missouri; Maryland; Virginia. At the end of my stay, I was greatly honored to have my poems read at the Y.M.H.A. Poetry Center in New York, with several of my translators reading and a number of poets in the audience. I owe a third trip to the United States, in November of 1969, to my two benefactors at the University of Oklahoma, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, who invited me to give talks there and called together a group of scholars to comment on, and enrich, my work. Ivask made me a gift of a fish-shaped Finnish dagger—rather alien to the tradition of the old Palermo of my boyhood.
Looking back on this past decade, I seem to have been quite a wanderer. In 1963, thanks to Neil MacKay of the British Council in Buenos Aires, I was able to visit England and Scotland. There, too, again in my mother’s company, I made my pilgrimages: to London, so teeming with literary memories; to Lichfield and Dr. Johnson; to Manchester and De Quincey; to Rye and Henry James; to the Lake Country; to Edinburgh. I visited my grandmother’s birthplace in Hanley, one of the Five Towns—Arnold Bennett country. Scotland and Yorkshire I think of as among the loveliest places on earth. Somewhere in the Scottish hills and glens I recaptured a strange sense of loneliness and bleakness that I had known before; it took me some time to trace this feeling back to the far-flung wastes of Patagonia. A few years later, this time in the company of María Esther Vázquez, I made another European trip. In England, we stayed with the late Herbert Read in his fine rambling house out on the moors. He took us to Yorkminster, where he showed us some ancient Danish swords in the Viking Yorkshire room of the museum. I later wrote a sonnet to one of the swords, and just before his death Sir Herbert corrected and bettered my original title, suggesting, instead of “To a Sword in York,” “To a Sword in Yorkminster.” We later went to Stockholm, invited by my Swedish publisher, Bonnier, and by the Argentine ambassador. Stockholm and Copenhagen I count among the most unforgettable cities I have seen, like San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh, Santiago de Compostela, and Geneva.
Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home with me the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land back to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Genevan days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediate sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week after, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet,
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d,
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.
Now, despite my years, I still think of the many stones I have left unturned, and of others I would like to turn again. I hope yet to see Mormon Utah, to which I was introduced as a boy by Mark Twain’s Roughing It and by the first book of the Sherlock Holmes saga, A Study in Scarlet. Another daydream of mine is a pilgrimage to Iceland, and another still to return again to Texas and to Scotland.
At seventy-one, I am still hard at work and brimming with plans. Last year I wrote a new book of poems, Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness). It was my first entirely new volume since 1960, and these were also my first poems since 1929 written with a book in mind. My main concern in this work, running through several of its pieces, is of an ethical nature, irrespective of any religious or antireligious bias. “Darkness” in the title stands for both blindness and death. To finish Elogio, I worked every morning,
dictating at the National Library. By the time I ended, I had set up a comfortable routine—so comfortable that I kept it up and began writing tales. These, my first stories since 1953, I published this year. The collection is called El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report). It is a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling, and is the book I have often spoken about in the past five years. Recently, I completed the script of a film to be called Los otros (The Others). Its plot is my own; the writing was done together with Adolfo Bioy-Casares and the young Argentine director Hugo Santiago. My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project: for nearly the past three years, I have been lucky to have my own translator at my side, and together we are bringing out some ten or twelve volumes of my work in English, a language I am unworthy to handle, a language I often wish had been my birthright.
I intend now to begin a new book, a series of personal— not scholarly—essays on Dante, Ariosto, and medieval northern subjects. I want also to set down a book of informal, outspoken opinions, whims, reflections, and private heresies. After that, who knows? I still have a number of stories, heard or invented, that I want to tell. At present, I am finishing a long tale called “The Congress.” Despite its Kafkian title, I hope it will turn out more in the line of Chesterton. The setting is Argentine and Uruguayan. For twenty years, I have been boring my friends with the raw plot. Finally, I came to see that no further elaboration was needed. I have another project that has been pending for an even longer period of time—that of revising and perhaps rewriting my father’s novel The Caudillo, as he asked me to years ago. We had gone as far as discussing many of the problems; I like to think of the undertaking as a continued dialogue and a very real collaboration.