There is no advocate of dubbing who does not invoke determinism and predestination, swearing that this expedient is the result of an inevitable evolution and that soon we will have to choose between dubbed films or no films whatsoever. Given the global decline of motion pictures—scarcely corrected by a single exception such as The Mask of Dimitrios—the second alternative is not painful. Recent bad films—I am thinking of Moscow’s The Diary of a Nazi and Hollywood’s The Story of Dr. Wassell—prompt us to regard the movies as a kind of negative paradise. “Sightseeing is the art of disappointment,” Stevenson noted. The definition applies to films and, with sad frequency, to that continuous and unavoidable exercise called life.
[1945] [SJL]
Notes
A complete annotation of this volume would require a book of equal or greater length. Here, only some of the passing allusions, otherwise not explained in the text and not available in general reference books, are glossed. In the notes to the individual selections, the original Spanish title is given, followed by first periodical publication and date, and reprinting in book form, if any. Unless otherwise noted, all periodicals were published in Argentina.
Sources
Early (Suppressed) Writings:
Inquisiciones [Inquisitions], 1925. Reprinted in 1994.
El tamaño de mi esperanza [The Extent of My Hope], 1926. Reprinted in 1994.
El idioma de los argentinas [The Language of the Argentines], 1928. Reprinted in
1994·
Contemporary Collections:
Evaristo Carriego, 1930. (In English: Evaristo Carriego, tr. Norman Thnmas di Giovanni, 1984.)
Discusión [Discussion] , 1932.
Historia de Ia eternidad [History of Eternity] , 1936.
Otras inqusiciones, 1952. (In English: Other Inquisitions, tr. Ruth L. C. Simms, 1964.)
Lectures:
Borges, oral [Borges, Speaking], 1979.
Siete naches, 1980. (In English: Seven Nights, tr. Eliot Weinberger, 1984.)
Late and Posthumous Collections:
Antologia personal, 1961. (In English: A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan, 1967.) Borges’ favorite Borges; also includes poetry and fiction.
Nueva antologia personal [A New Personal Anthology] , 1968. A second selection of
favorites; also includes poetry and fiction.
Prólogos con un prólogo de prologos [Prologues with a Prologue to the Prologues],
1975
Borges en/y/sobre cine, ed. Edgardo Cozarinsky, 1980. (In English: Borges in/and/on Film, tr. Gloria Waldman & Ronald Christ, 1988.) Film criticism.
Paginas de forge Luis Borges [Pages from JLB], 1982. Also includes poetry and fiction.
Nueve ensayos dantescos [Nine Dantesque Essays] , 1982. Ficcionario, ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal, 1985. (In English: Borges: A Reader, 1981. Also includes poetry and fiction.
Textos cautivos [Captive Texts], ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal & Enrique SacerioGari, 1986. Articles from El Hagar [ Home].
Biblioteca personal, prólogos [A Personal Library, Prologues],1988.
Textos recobrados 1919-1929 [Recovered Texts, 1919-1929] , 1998. Also includes poetry and fiction.
Complete Works:
Obras campletas I: 1923-1949, 1989. (Evaristo Carriego; Discusión; Historia de Ia eternidad; plus poetry and fiction.)
Obras campletas II:1952-1972,1989. (Otras Inquisiciones; plus poetry and fiction.)
Obras campletas III: 1975-1985, 1989. (Siete naches; Nueve ensayos dantescos; plus poetry and fiction.)
Obras campletas IV: 1975-1988, 1996. (Prologos con un prologo de prologos; Borges, oral; Textos cautivos; Biblioteca personal, prologos.)
Obras completas en colaboracion, 1997. (Collaborative works of fiction and nonfiction.)
The best biography and bibliography to date are, respectively: Emir Rodriguez Mane gal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (1978), and Nicolas Helft, Jorge Luis Borges: Bibliografia campleta (1998). A useful dictionary of references is Daniel Balderston’s The Literary Universe of Jorge Luis Borges (1986).
Some Recurring References
Almafuerte: “Strong Soul,” pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacios (1854-1917), the self-styled Whitman of Argentina. A standard reference book states that Palacios “produced a sequence of misanthropic, megalomaniac poems of titanic defiance”—a description that can only lead to the reader’s disappointment—but Borges claimed that Almafuerte taught all Argentines the aesthetic function of language.
Black Ant: “Hormiga Negra,” the legendary gaucho outlaw Guillermo Hoyo, subject of a popular book by Eduardo Gutierrez (see below).
Bloy, Léon (1846-1917): French writer whose work, according to Borges, is “full of lamentation and invective.” Borges was particularly attracted to Bloy’s notion that everything in the universe, including ourselves, is a symbol that we cannot decipher.
Bossuet, ]acques-Benigne (1627-1704): French theologian, Bishop of Condom, tutor to the Dauphin, and important defender of traditional Catholicism against Protestantism, theaters, new readings of the Bible, Quietism, intellectual curiosity, Spinoza, etc. (Not to be confused with Wilhelm Bousset, the Gnostic scholar whom Borges occasionally cites.)
Carriego, Evaristo (1883-1912): Popular poet in the Palermo section of Buenos Aires where Borges spent his childhood. A friend of Borges’ father, Carriego used to visit every Sunday, and the child would listen to their literary discussions. Borges’ 1930 book on Carriego uses the poet as the central figure for his evocation of “old-time” Buenos Aires.
Don Segundo Sombra: The 1926 novel by Ricardo Güiraldes and an idealized portrait of gaucho life.
El criticón: See Baltasar Gracian, below.
Fernandez, Macedonia (1874-1952): Argentine poet, philosopher, short-story writer, friend and mentor to Borges. His insistence on the dreamlike quality of the material world and the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality were enormously influential on Borges.
Gracian, Baltasar (1601-1658): Spanish writer and Jesuit. His El criticón [The Criticizer], one of Schopenhauer’s favorite books, is an allegory about an Innocent and a Man of the World who visit such Borgesian places as the Source of Illusion, the palace of Queen Artemia (who turns beasts into men), the Inn of the World (with a separate room for every vice), the House of Madmen (home to all humanity), the Wheel of Time, and the Castle of Adventurers, where the travelers become invisible until disillusion returns them to their human form. Gracian’s Agudeza y el arte del ingenio [Wit and the Art of Genius] is the major ars poetica of the Spanish Baroque.
Groussac, Paul (1848-1929): Historian, playwright, literary critic, and one of Borges’ predecessors as director of the National Library. Born in France, Groussac arrived in Argentina at age eighteen, and began to write in Spanish. Borges considered Groussac second only to the Mexican Alfonso Reyes as the greatest modern prose stylist in the language.
Gutierrez, Eduardo (1853-1890): Argentine writer of gaucho adventure novels published in serial form, the most famous of which is Juan Moreira. Borges said he was in finitely superior to James Fenimore Cooper.
Jauregui, Juan de (1583-1641): Spanish poet and translator who introduced terza rima into Spanish and is also known for having painted Cervantes’ portrait.
Lugones, Leopolda (1874-1938): Major Argentine symbolist poet, journalist, and short story writer. Borges violently attacked him in his early, Ultraist years, but later wrote a monograph and various essays on Lugones, calling him “Argentina’s greatest writer.”
Martin Fierro: The eponymous gaucho hero of Jose Hernandez’s narrative poem, pub lished in 1872 and 1879, and generally considered the Argentine national epic. Fierro, the nostalgic symbol of gaucho values, is also a deserter, a murderer, and a coward, as Borges frequently likes to point out.
Mauthner, Fritz (1849-1923): German poet turned philosopher, and one of Borges’ favorite writers. Mauthner was the first philosopher to devote himself to the prob
lems raised by ordinary language. Among his Borgesian beliefs were: the self cannot be found and therefore self-knowledge is impossible; psychology does not exist because language can only describe exterior sense impressions; today’s religion is yesterday’s science; morals are not a possible subject matter of knowledge; truth is historically relative; ordinary philosophy is afflicted by “word superstition,” the belief that reality can be known through language; and language is most suitable for poetry or the expression of religious feelings for there the question of truth or falsity does not arise.
Paulino Lucero:1872 book of gauchesco poems by Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875). Its full, and more engrossing, title is: Paulino Lucero; or The Gauchos of the Rio de Ia Plata Singing and Fighting against the Tyrannies ofthe Republics ofArgentina and Uruguay.
Rosas, Juan Manuel de (1793-1877): The ruler of Argentina from 1835 to 1852. The archetype—for both Borges and Argentina—of the cruel and ruthless dictator, Rosas, oddly, was a distant relative of Borges.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino (1811-1888): The most important Argentine intellectual of the nineteenth century: writer, historian, educator, and president of the country from 1868 to 1874. His 1845 book Facundo is an exploration of Argentine identity and a condemnation of the Rosas dictatorship through the figure of a historical gaucho war lord. Borges wrote that Argentine history would have changed for the better if Facundo Quiroga, rather than Martin Fierro, were its national hero.
Torres Villarroel, Diego de (1693-1770): Spanish poet and satirist, and the leading disciple of Quevedo. His picaresque and corrosive autobiography is considered a masterpiece in Spanish. A favorite of Borges in his early, “baroque” years.
I. Early Writings, 1922-1928
Borges, born in 1899, spent a cloistered childhood in Buenos Aires; English was the first language he learned to read. In 1914, the family moved to Europe, settling in Geneva and later Lugano, where he learned French, Latin, and German. In 1919, the family relocated to Spain, where Borges became associated with the Ultraist group of young poets, and began to publish poems and articles, largely championing the new movement.
It is worth noting that, by age twenty, Borges had discovered most of the writers and books that would become his lifelong companions: Berkeley, Hume, William James, Spencer, the English Romantic poets, and The Thousand and One Nights (all of which he inherited from his father, who also taught him Zeno’s paradoxes); Don Quixote (which he first read in English), Quevedo, Torres Villarroel, Schopenhauer, De Quincey, Kipling, Carlyle, Swinburne, Browning, Chesterton, Wells, Shakespeare, Stevenson, Poe, Twain, Whitman (whom he first read in German), Jack London, Bret Harte, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Virgil, Dante, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, de Gourmont, The Golem, Heine, Nietzsche, Rilke, the German Expressionist poets, and the Kabbalah, among many others.
In 1921, the family returned to Buenos Aires, and Borges developed the habit of long daily walks and explorations of the city that would continue until his blindness. He founded an Ultraist magazine, Prisma [Prism], which lasted for two issues, and began the regular publication of essays and poems in Argentine and some Spanish magazines. In 1923, his first book of poetry: Fervor de Buenos Aires [Fervor for Buenos Aires]. Shortly after, the family spent a year in Europe attending to Borges’ father’s health. It was to be Borges’ last trip abroad until late in his life.
For the rest of the decade, Borges was, in the words of Rodriguez Monegal, “the acknowledged leader of the young and one of the most public writers in Argentina’s literary history.” He founded an important little magazine, Proa [Prow], regularly contributed to many others, edited an anthology of the new Latin American poetry, and was included in various others, and published two more books of poetry and three books of essays: Inquisiciorus [Inquisitions, 1925]; El tamaño de mi esperanza [The Extent of My Hope, 1926]; and El idioma de los argentinas [The Language of the Argentines, 1928 ].
Borges rejected the complex styles of the early books of essays, which for him, veered between a baroque “Latin in Spanish” and an over-reliance on obscure Argentine words, idioms, and spellings. He never allowed them to be reprinted—except in French translation—and they did not appear again until 1994. Nearly all scholars and critics, however, take the major essays of this period to be essential to an understanding of the work as a whole, and Borges himself used to joke that posterity would probably consider these first books to be his best.
None of the essays in this section are in the Complete Works.
The Nothingness of Personality
“La naderia de Ia personalidad,” Proa no. 1, Aug. 1922. Included in Inquisiciones.
Despite his later rejection of all the prose of this period, Borges felt, at the time, that this was his first fully realized essay.
After Images
“Despues de las imagenes,” Proa no. 5, Dec. 1924. Included in Inquisiciones.
p. 10: Luis Carlos Lopez: Colombian poet (1883-1950) of folkloric simplicity, deliberately pitched against modernism.
p. 11: mirrors are like water: A reference to the 1916 book of Creationist poetry El espejo de agua [ The Mirror of Water] , by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948).
Joyce’s Ulysses
“El Ulises de Joyce;’ Proa no. 6, Jan. 1925. Included in Inquisiciones.
Borges may or may not have been, as he claims, the first Spanish-speaker to read Ulysses, but a Spanish translation of the novel did not appear until 1948.
A History ofAngels
“Historia de los angeles,” La Prensa, 7 Mar. 1926. Included in Tamaño.
Verbiage for Poems
“Palabreria para versos.” An earlier version, under the title “Acerca del vocabulario”
[An Approach to Vocabulary] was published in La Prensa, 2 May 1926. Included in Tamaño.
p. 22: Esteban Manuel de Villegas: Spanish poet (1589-1669) and translator of Horace and Anacreon.
p. 22: Juan de Mena: Spanish poet (1411-1456) and the first to write in a “purified,” non-colloquial, literary form of the language.
A Profession of Literary Faith
“Profesión de fe literaria.” Originally published under the title “A manera de profesión de fe literaria” [By Way of a Profession of Literary Faith] in La Prensa, 27 June 1926. Included in Tamaño.
p. 24: [Julio] Herrera y Reissig: Important turn-of-the-century Uruguayan poet (1875-1910); bohemian, Symbolist, and ultimately, Ultraist.
p. 24: Ferncin Silva Valdes: Uruguayan poet (1887-1975) who proposed a national “nativism” to replace local “criollism.”
p.25: committed by a famous poet: Herrera y Reissig, in the poem “Sepelio” [Interment] in his 1909 book Los peregrinos depiedra [The Pilgrims of Stone]. On the previous page, Borges had identified another citation from the same book, but here does not.
p. 26: Manuel Galvez: Argentine realist novelist (1882-1962).
Literary Pleasure “La fruición literaria,” La Prensa, 23 Jan. 1927. Included in Idioma.
p. 28: The Student of Salamanca: The 1836-37 Romantic narrative poem of the Don Juan story, by Jose de Espronceda.
p. 28: Don juan Tenorio: The 1844 popular play, also of the Don Juan story, by José Zorrilla.
An Investigation of the Word
“Indigación de Ia palabra,” published in two parts, Sintesis no. 1, June 1927, and no. 3, August 1927. Included in Idioma.
Rodriguez Monegal compares this essay to I. A. Richards’ nearly contemporary book, Practical Criticism (1929): “Both start from the same experience: the discussion of a text whose author is unknown to the reader and which, therefore, can only be deciphered by itself. Yet, contrary to Dr. Richards, [Borges] postulates the utter impossibility of scientific criticism . . . for him, every critic (every reader) places himself, willingly or not, in a conditioned perspective; before judging, every reader prejudges. Criticism, or reading, creates the text anew.” The opening sentence of Don Quixote will be placed in another
context, decades later, in Borges’ lecture on detective stories (p. 491).