"Borges" and "Burgess" (as in Anthony Burgess, of "Clockwork orange" fame)
invite similar implicatures!
L. Helm was referring to Borges in a recent interesting post. The reference
was to a review of Borges's classes on English literature, inter alia.
Some commentary on his link by the author Helm quotes from.
The link reads:
"Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with
violence. Speaking to an interviewer about his childhood in what was then the
outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, he said, “To call a man, or to
think of him, as a coward, that was the last thing . . . the kind of
thing he couldn’t stand."
According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson, Borges’s father"
whose mother was an Englishwoman, Fanny Haslam, of the Henley Haslams (but
originally from Yorkshire).
"handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his
poor eyesight and “generally defeated" demeanour and let the boys who were
bullying him know that he was a man. Swords, daggers — weapons with a blade —
retained a mysterious, talismanic significance for Borges",
I think one of his short stories indeed is entitled, "The shape of the
sword" -- implicating the scar in the shape of a sword of an Irish rebel," as
the story goes.
"imbued with predetermined codes of conduct and honour. The short dagger
had particular power, because it required the fighters to draw death close,
in a final embrace. As a young man, in the 1920s, Borges prowled the obscure
barrios of Buenos Aires, seeking the company of cuchilleros, knife
fighters, who represented to him a form of authentic criollo nativism that he
wished to know and absorb. The criollos were the early Spanish settlers of the
pampa, and their gaucho descendants. For at least a century , the word has
signified an ideal cultural purity that, according to its champions, was
corrupted by the privatisation of the pampa and by the flood of immigrants
from Italy and elsewhere in Europe that took place in the late 19th and early
20th centuries."
Hey, I think Palermo, where Borges grew up, was so-called after a man
surnamed "Palermo" guess from where!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palermo,_Buenos_Aires
In an alternative history of the name, a folk story supported by
journalists, the land would have been originally purchased by an Italian
immigrant
named Juan Domingo Palermo in the late 16th century...
This sort of folk stories L. Horn calls etymythology! Love that!
The link goes on:
"Borges spent much of his 20s attempting to write a full-length epic poem
that would mythologise this “innumerable Buenos Aires of mine," as he called
it — a work that would, in Borges’s words again, “converse with the world
and with the self, with God and with death." He saw it as a way to reflect
the city’s essence, as Joyce had done with Dublin, a way to establish a
lasting cultural identity that Argentina did not yet possess in the world.
His aim, in part, was to enshrine the urban descendent of the criollo, with
his ubiquitous dagger and supposedly honourable outlaw ways. Eventually he
would abandon the project –Borges was never able to conquer the long form;
and though his cultural vision, as it later developed, would be much
broader, the romance of the criollo would continue to animate his imagination.
Some of his finest fiction – including the stories The South, The Dead Man,
and The Intruder, to name just a few — was kindled by the dagger."
Not to mention (then why mention, as Geary says), "The shape of the
sword".
The link goes on:
"The deeply Argentinian nature of Borges’s work is often camouflaged by
his metaphysical preoccupations and far-flung literary references. But his
involvement with Argentine history and politics, and his belief that the
country’s fate was entwined with his own, persisted almost to the end of his
life."
I loved that. In the same paragraph we have "Argentinian" and "Argentine",
which is the Argentine/Argentinian equivalent of Hamlet's dilemma, "To be
[Argentine] or not to be [Argentinian], that is the question." The Brits,
who love Hamlet, shorten both forms to 'Argie'. But the older
Anglo-Argentines would rather be seen dead than using 'Argentinian". Their
letters from
The Argentine to England were always thus written. And they found "Republic"
otiose -- hence "The Argentine" _simpliciter_.
The link goes on:
"Politics was an emotional matter. His family wasn’t wealthy but his
bloodline was illustrious. Some of the most prominent streets of Buenos Aires
are named after his ancestors, most notably Isidoro Suarez, his
great-grandfather on his mother’s side, a hero of the Battle of Junan in 1824
that would
turn the tide in South America’s war for independence from Spain."
And then there was the English line: the Haslams. Oddly, he inherited his
blindness from the English side, and he would often mention that one of his
ancestors is mentioned in the "Lancet" as diagnosed with this rare form of
genetic blindness (But he looked on the bright side, metaphorically, and
could recite Milton "On his blindness" and would often say that "If Homer was
blind, then why can't I?").
The link goes on:
"The battle was fought in the Peruvian Andes, with swords and lances. “No
retumba un solo tiro," not a single gunshot resounded, Borges writes in a
poem to commemorate Suarez. This “clash of the lances" was of high
significance to Borges, as was his great-grandfather’s feat of running through
a
Spaniard “with his spear". Borges’s paternal grandfather was a colonel in the
Indian wars who died in battle. Another ancestor led the vanguard of Jose
de San Martin’s army against Spain. “At last the blow/At last the hard
blade ripping my chest,/the intimate dagger at my throat," wrote Borges in
Conjectural Poem. The poem is not a celebration of violent death but an
anguished response to the coup of 1943 in Argentina that was sympathetic to
the
Nazis. Borges was outspokenly anti-fascist during those critical years. But
his allegiances were split. Culturally he was a nationalist, politically a
liberal. In 1934, a rising faction of right-wing nacionalistas attacked him
for “slyly" concealing his Jewish ancestry. Borges answered the attack with
an essay entitled, a Jew that mocked the nacionalistas’ anti-Semitism and
general bigotry. “I wish I had some Jewish forefathers," he would tell an
interviewer later on – probably because it would have allowed him to take
psychological possession of a bookish tradition he admired. By the early
1940s, nacionalistas were marching in the streets of Buenos Aires, chanting
slogans in support of the Nazis. During World War II, Borges was closely
aligned with socialist and liberal writers. And during the most oppressive
years
of Juan Domingo Peron ’s government, in the early 1950s, he was assigned a
detective to keep track of his moves and monitor his lectures, which were
often caustically critical of Peron. Yet in the conundrum of Argentine
politics of those days, his liberalism was shot through with ambivalence."
In fact, I think he would say that he was an 'anarchist', rather, "alla
Herbert Spencer," "as my father was," he would add.
The link goes on:
"In principle, he favoured a centralised, European-style democracy, but he
worried that such “progressivism" amounted to “submitting to being
almost-North Americans or almost-Europeans, always almost-others" – a threat
to
Argentina’s precarious cultural maturation. He also knew from experience
that, given free elections, Argentines would, more often than not, vote into
power a tyrannical caudillo with no interest in cultivating an independent
judicial system or other reliably democratic institutions. Peron, who was
elected president in 1946 when Borges was 47, was a prime example of this. The
conundrum led Borges to the misguided belief that what Argentina needed
was an enlightened dictatorship that would train its citizens in the ways of
true democracy, and then oversee free elections. His public support for the
violently repressive juntas of Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina and
Augusto Pinochet in Chile, in the 1970s, has left a permanent stain on his
reputation."
And precluded him from getting the Nobel. It was given instead to Garcia
Marquez for "A hundred years of solitude". Interviewed as to what he thought
of the Nobel result, and Marquez's novel, Borges would retort, "Fine, but
perhaps some fifty years long."
The link goes on:
"Without excusing it, one can comprehend it as an act of despair, as
Argentina tumbled toward bankruptcy and civil war, and a seemingly endless
succession of inept governments collapsed. While an official guest of Pinochet,
in 1976, Borges spoke of the “sword of honor" that would draw “the
Argentine Republic out of the quagmire" just as it had done in Chile.
Referring to
the underground guerrilla groups that were battling the junta in Argentina,
he said he preferred “the sword, the bright sword" over the “furtive
dynamite" of the enemy."
The Anglo-Argentines (Borges's grandmother wasn't one!) were wiser in never
using "Republic" and sticking with "The Argentine" _simpliciter_!
The link goes on:
"While in Spain, he called Videla’s junta “a government of soldiers, of
gentlemen, of decent people".
Sheltered at this point by fame, blindness and the private mythology of
honour that he had cultivated for 50 years, he seemed not to understand the
extent of Videla’s reign of terror. He made the mistake of lending the
lustre of his name to a more virulent version of the fascist state he had
condemned in Peron.
Later, when censorship of the press was eased and Borges learned about the
atrocities of the Dirty War, he regretted his support, calling the members
of the junta “gangsters" and “madmen" who should be prosecuted for their
crimes. Professor Borges, the book reviewed here, is the literal
transcription of a course in English literature that Borges taught at the
University
of Buenos Aires in 1966. The course begins with Beowulf and ends with
Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, a total of 25 classes."
-- NOT given in English. The book under review is a translation.
The link goes on:
"It’s no surprise that Borges’s discussion of the ancient Anglo-Saxon
epics make up this book’s most inspired chapters. With its harsh consonants
and
open vowels, and its unambiguous vocabulary of things that “correspond to
fire, metals, man, trees," Anglo-Saxon was perfectly suited to the poetry
of battle. Borges had been reading English translations of the epics
throughout his life, but when he was 59, he set out to teach himself
Anglo-Saxon,
a process he called “the pure contemplation of a language at its dawn.""
Woodall recalls that when Borges was appointed a British Council scholar,
the first thing he wanted to do when a party for him was organised at the
Randolph in Oxford was meet with the author of the Faber collection of
Anglo-Saxon verse. Up they went to his room, leaving the other guests (which
included Iris Murdoch) totally unattended!
The link goes on:
"The epics provided him with a kind of literary ideal: concrete, precise
and suffused with the glow of the sword as a magical object."
And the inscription on his graveyard (in Switzerland, where he died) is
straight from a line in the Battle of Maldon, "And they should not be afraid"
(implicature: 'of death'). This is straight from the Faber collection!
The link goes on:
"His reader’s eye was keen, and interestingly unpredictable. He admires the
Finnsburh Fragment over Beowulf, for instance, though it consists of a
mere 60 lines, preserved from what surely was a much longer poem, and
composed, perhaps, as early as the late 7th century. At the heart of the
Finnsburh
Fragment is a Danish princess who has been married off to Finn, the king of
Frisia, to avoid a war."
Bread, butter, and green cheese,
very good English, very good Friese
----- cited by Hazlitt.
The link goes on:
"The princess’s brother, king of the Danes, comes to visit her at Finn’s
castle for the winter. They are attacked by the Frisians and the Danish king
manages to hold them off, but kills his own nephew in the process. Borges
revels in the image of the hall of Finn aglow “with the shimmering of the
swords, ‘as if Finnsburh were in flames’." This glow is not from a fire, as
the king’s guards originally suppose, but from the moon “‘shining through
the clouds’ and onto the shields and spears of the Frisians who have come
to attack"."
In his Old English grammar, Campbell, quoting from Procopius (and Tacitus)
mentions that while the venerable Bede mentions THREE tribes as forming
England (the infamous Angles, Saxons and Jutes -- 'infamous' is a joke on
"1066 and all that") the FRISIANS joined them in that memorable crossing of
the
North Sea!
The link goes on:
"He notes an analogous metaphor in the Iliad that likens a battle to a fire
– the comparison referring “to the glow of the arms as well as its moral
stature" – and also the Scandinavian myth of Valhalla, “illuminated not
with candles but with swords that shine with their own supernatural glow". “
Supernatural" is the key word. In Borges’s ideal literary creation, the
letters of the alphabet themselves would be supernaturally charged. The runic
letters of Saxon, designed with their hard edges to be carved into the metal
of blades and the wood of shields, possessed a special physical power. As
for the origin of the word “runes," Borges tells his students: “The word ‘
run’ in Saxon means ‘whisper,’ or what is spoken in a low voice. And that
means ‘mystery’, because what is spoken in a low voice is what one doesn’t
want others to hear. So runes means ‘mysteries’; letters are mysteries.""
Although some of their mysteries are solved alla Popper. The 'thorn', for
example, is thus called after its shape:
þ
As Tolkien notes, the practicality of the rune is that it is easy to carve
on a tree, where the Anglo-Saxons left their messages.
The link goes on:
"Certainly this is the idea behind Borges’s famous story The Aleph, which
is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. When the protagonist gazes at
the Aleph in the story, the confusion of the universe becomes coherent and
clear. Borges calls himself a “hedonic" reader — he seeks pleasure in books,
and beyond that, a “form of happiness". He advises his students to leave a
book if it bores them: “that book was not written for you", no matter its
reputation or fame. As a reader, he hunts for specific passages, or even
just phrases, that move him. “One falls in love with a line, then with a
page, then with an author," he says. “Well, why not? It is a beautiful
process." Thus, in The Battle of Brunanburh, a 10th-century epic that is
included
in the The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Borges singles out the tactile
description of a crow, “with his beak ‘as hard as a horn’ that eats, devours,
the
corpses of men." Borges approvingly reminds us that, “in the Middle Ages,
circumstantial details were never invented".They were either commemorated for
their experiential truth, or not mentioned at all. The only surviving
full-length Saxon epic, Beowulf, is, to Borges’s mind, “poorly wrought". At
the
time Beowulf was composed, probably during the 8th century, there were
only about 500 Latin words in Saxon, religious words for the most part,
describing abstract and, to the Saxons, alien concepts.
Borges is annoyed by Beowulf’s piousness and “pompous" tone. Borges, of
course, wrote in a Latinate language"
And I think this Latinateness is retained in this translation of his
English literature 25 classes?
The link goes on:
"[T]he hard Saxon words that represented “essential" things in English
carried for him an exotic sonic power. Latin-derived words in Saxon seemed
imitative and watered down. In his most metaphysical stories and poems, he
searched, in Spanish, for primal, material words. In the alchemy of
composition, their clarity of meaning had the effect of making the overall
mystery of
a story sharper. “I have felt epic poetry far more than lyric or elegy,"
Borges told The Paris Review in 1966, “perhaps . . . because I come from
military stock.""
Well, for Bowra, epic is primary. Even the Italians have their own:
Rinaldo, Orlando, and the rest of them -- not to mention (then why do?) Virgil
with his Aeneid.
The link goes on:
"But in fact he is unexpectedly stirred by the Saxon elegies of the 9th and
10th centuries, when there occurs, in Borges’s words, “the most important
thing that can take place in poetry: the discovery of a new inflection."
The most remarkable of the elegies is the second part of The Dream of the
Rood, when the tree from which the cross was made to crucify Christ speaks to
us directly. The wood of the felled tree is sentient and alive. It tells
us its story, it asks for forgiveness, and we feel the extraordinary
imaginative newness of the poet becoming the voice of a tree. There is nothing
pious or dutifully Christian about this part of the poem. It is the voice of
the earth itself, expressing a torn sorrow. “The cross trembles when it
feels Christ’s embrace," remarks Borges. “It is as if the cross were Christ’s
woman, his wife; the cross shares the pain of the crucified God." In 1973,
I attended a lecture Borges gave in an elegant room at some historical
society in Buenos Aires."
That's pretty vague. I think there are 53 historical societies in Buenos
Aires. The writer possibly means "some literary society (or other)".
The link goes on:
"The lecture was on Jose Hernandez’s 1872 epic poem The Gaucho Martin
Fierro."
Dutifully translated to rhythmic English by an Anglo-Argentine!
"In the poem, Martin Fierro is pressed into military service during the
Indian wars; he deserts, lives with the Indians for a time, kills a man in a
barroom knife fight, and becomes an outlaw, hunted by the authorities.
Fierro is left with two choices: to become a tamed ranch hand for one of the
large beef growers who were in the process of cordoning off the pampa or
surrender to the police, both a form of imprisonment. The rhythm of Martin
Fierro was drawn from the payada, a kind of gaucho field song with a driving
eight-syllable line. The payada would provide the basis for the guitar-sung
ballads known as milongas, which in turn would give way to the tango,
Criollo, gaucho life, like that of the characters in the Saxon epics, was
marked
by an unassailable code of violence. Death was never far away; nor did the
gaucho – who, ideally at least, lived in a cult of courage that Borges
championed and admired — want it to be. This presence of death, as in the
Saxon
epics, provoked an elemental expression that he wished to emulate. He
strove for a warrior-like stature, or some equivalent of it, in his work,
believing it could lift us out of what he called the “nothingness of
personality"
. When he was in his late 70s, he still lived in the modest Buenos Aires
apartment he had shared with his mother until she died. Biographer, Edwin
Williamson, describes his bedroom as resembling “a monk’s cell with its
narrow iron bed, single chair, and two small bookcases where he kept his
collection of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian books" .Those ancient books were
integral to the ethos that sustained this most modern of writers. "Professor
Borges" is an important addition to his work. These are not academic lectures
but spoken essays."
A 'spoken essay' is an interesting form. Borges was blind by then, so he
could not read from notes, which I think was a very good thing -- not that he
was blind, but I don't like a lecturer who reads his essay from notes!
The link goes on:
"What we end up with is the flavour of Borges’s voice, with its spontaneous
digressions and self-entertained ease – his deepest literary influences
and concerns, unmediated by the polished and revised nature of the written
word."
Then there's the Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, which were miraculously
recorded -- and oddly enough, given in the same year that Grice delivered
his William James lectures on Logic and Conversation.
Cheers,
Speranza
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