POETS Day! Jorge Luis Borges as Translated by Richard Wilbur

“On the day before the burning of the Pyramid, the men who got down from their high horses scourged me with burning irons, to compel me to reveal the site of a buried treasure. Before my eyes they toppled the idol to the god, yet the god did not abandon me, and I held my silence through their tortures. They tore my flesh, they crushed me, they mutilated me, and then I awoke in this prison, which I will never leave alive.
– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Writing of the God”

That’s a terrible attitude. I should note that he didn’t despair and by the end of the story achieves an enlightenment which renders his physical circumstances moot, but POETS Day esteems escapism. Constricting circumstances shouldn’t be tolerated. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. There’s an afternoon waiting to be played with.

***

I was reading from a book by Richard Wilbur and stumbled across Borges. There’s a song that’s played as part of the Easter Vigil Mass where the Fall is referred to as felix culpa, or “happy fault.” It’s probably proper theologese to say “blessed fault” but I was told “happy” long ago and it’s happy to me still. The idea is that, though regrettable, Adam and Eve’s disobedience allowed for the Redeemer. Good can come from bad.

Since high school, every time I’ve come across anything – essays, obituaries, especially short stories – written by Borges, I’m trapped. Whether he’s on our conceptions (“…it is easy to design hell, but it does not mitigate the admirable terror of its invention.”), rules regarding detective stories (“Also prohibited are hypnotism, telepathic hallucinations, portents, elixers with unknown effects, ingenious pseudoscientific tricks, and lucky charms.”), proper insults (“The famous camp bed under which the general won the battle.”), or dance (“To speak of the ‘fighting tango’ is not strong enough”) you’re witness to surprising attention. He considers vastly, dismisses with reason, and he’s funny.

The short stories draw you in with fraudulent encyclopedias that rewrite history, imagined infinities, damnable misinterpretations, and murderers playing arcanists. He never published longer than short fiction. When asked why he said that if he ever had an idea for a novel, he’d just write a review of the unwritten book and get all the ideas out that way. He does almost that in the story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” which is as funny a send up of Critical Theory as you’re likely to find and even funnier considering its inconvenient timing for the theorists.

J.K. Rowling is a master of chapter length. The next little bit is always just short enough to stay up a few minutes or to put off getting started on dinner. You can always read one more before putting the book down. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has a few copies from Borges on her shelf. Something happens that brings him back from my periphery and I end up reading multiple short stories or convincing essays that make me consider improbable activities like giving Virginia Woolf another chance. And I keep doing so for two or three days.

Amazon called him The Most Interesting Man in the World. Specifically, whoever composed the blurb for This Craft of Verse, a collection of Borges’s 1997-1968 Harvard lectures on poetry, wrote “Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day,” which is pretty much the same thing. That’s the felix part. What I was reading before the encounter is on the back burner for a bit, but that’s okay. I like my stints in the Borges trap.

I’d not read his poetry until last night. That may seem odd for a fan but I’m peculiar about translations. I want to trust the interlocuter before I spend my time. Richard Wilbur’s among the greatest of our post Eliot poets. Had I known he lent his talents to Borges’s I would have pounced. As it stands I have only the three of his translations, all of them sonnets, found in Wilbur’s 1989 Pulitzer winning New and Collected Poems.

Compass
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
trans. by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall
To Someone, Something, who both day and night
Proceeds in endless gibberish to write
The history of the world. In that dark scrawl

Rome is set down, and Carthage, I, you, all,
And this is my being which escapes me quite,
My anguished life that’s cryptic, recondite,
And garbled as the tongues of Babel’s fall.

Beyond the name there lies what has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow stir the aim
Of this blue needle, light and keen, whose sweep

Homes to the utmost of the sea its love,
Suggestive of a watch in dreams, or of
Some bird, perhaps, who shifts a bit in sleep.

Mysteries; forces at play that are ancient, hidden, and unfathomable. This is of a piece with Borges’s short stories. I can’t speak to his poetic style in Spanish. Wilbur writes with elegance in all senses of the word: simplicity, dignity, and sophistication. I’d like to think that there was a similarity of temperament that drew Wilbur to this work, that he found a kindred around whose themes his preferences would serve. My ambitions in Spanish are rarely grander than getting directions to the bathroom or more hot sauce so I’ll have to rely on the opinion of others.

Compare the above to the same poem as translated by Robert Mezey.

A Compass

All things are words belonging to that language
In which Someone or Something, night and day,
Writes down the infinite babble that is, per se,
The history of the world. And in that hodgepodge

Both Rome and Carthage, he and you and I,
My life that I don’t grasp, this painful load
Of being riddle, randomness, or code,
And all of Babel’s gibberish stream by.

Behind the name is that which has no name;
Today I have felt its shadow gravitate
In this blue needle, in its trembling sweep

Casting its influence toward the farthest strait,
With something of a clock glimpsed in a dream
And something of a bird that stirs in its sleep.

It is no discredit to Mezey to say I prefer Wilbur’s. Mezey’s is wonderful. I get the sense of someone old, or the keeper of a truth that is old, realizing a subtle portent in both versions. Mezey’s poetic persona is learned, someone who works diligently and who knows more than the reader. Wilbur’s understands much that is awesome exists beyond his knowing. His may be a soliloquy. “Hodgepodge” grounds in a way that the airy “dark scrawl” does not. “Kingly” vs. “royal” or “ghost” vs. “spirit” I might say if I were of a mind to presage the linked video clip two paragraphs down. I read a wonder in Wilbur’s that I don’t in Mezey’s.

Quick confession: I’m being petty because I’m a Wilbur fan and this wouldn’t bother me otherwise, but “name” to “dream” is a false rhyme that I inexplicably have to point out. Apologies to Mezey who, as a quick search will show, was a fine and respected poet/translator. Borges’s fiction has often been compared to Poe. Both write gothic tales with weight. That his is truer than Wilbur’s, if less enjoyable, deserves a shrug towards possibility.

Wilbur’s translations were originally published in 1969. Borges was alive at the time. In a 1977 episode of Firing Line, Borges told William F. Buckley, Jr. that most of his reading was done in English.* In fact, he said, he preferred English. He could have put out his own English version of the poems. To my knowledge he did not. Wilbur is among the greatest English language craftsmen to emerge in the wake of Eliot. He’s someone you’d entrust. I don’t know if Wilbur requested permission before or if he contacted Borges at all. I suspect so if not for whatever legal permissions are involved in printing a translation, then out of courtesy. I can’t imagine allowing him to translate only to stand over his shoulder. If things happened differently and Wilbur presented after having made the translations, was Borges impressed by fidelity or enrichment?

Back to the poems as Wilbur put them.

Everness

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross.
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
Everything is: the shadows in the glass
Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
And everything is part of that diverse
Crystalline memory, the universe;
Whoever through its endless mazes wanders
Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
And only from the sunset’s farther side
Shall view at last the Archetype and the Splendors.

Many a desecration has graced the pages of composition notebooks, committed by teenagers after reading a rare poem that manages to touch on mysticism without face planting. It’s not an easy thing to pull off without sounding like Christopher Lee. This poem, and the next as well, should come with a warning, “Don’t try this at home. Ever.” The word “Crystalline” is particularly dangerous and likely to lead to embarrassing pseudo-literariness as I, the former fifteen-year-old who coined, and then refused to renounce for far too long, the phrase “crystalline echo” can attest.

Borges is at home with such things.

Ewigkeit

Turn on my tongue, O Spanish verse; confirm
Once more what Spanish verse has always said
Since Seneca’s black Latin; speak your dread
Sentence that all is fodder for the worm.
Come, celebrate once more pale ash, pale dust,
The pomps of death and the triumphant crown
Of that bombastic queen who tramples down
The pretty banners of our pride and lust.
Enough of that. What things have blessed my clay
Let me not cravenly deny. The one
Word of no meaning is Oblivion,
And havened in eternity, I know,
My many precious losses burn and stay:
That forge, that night, that risen moon aglow.

I’ll look for more of Borges’s poetry. I don’t know if anything else he’s written will strike me quite as a strand of some gossamer attraction barely perceived by “Some bird, perhaps, who shifts a bit in sleep.” In the mean time, I’ll revisit Tlon, The Library of Babel, The Garden of the Forking Path, and other places in or not in Ficciones. This will take a few days.

*The full episode is here and it’s all the stuff we bemoan tv no longer is (even though it rarely was) but should be as Survivor LXXXXCXXXMII: Des Moines hauls in another ratings win.