[lit-ideas] Re: Borgesiana

  • From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza" for DMARC)
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 05:28:14 -0500

In a message dated 11/24/2015 11:39:42 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: "Very nice and informative. Now I'll go
back
to reading Borges. Thanks! :-)."

You're welcome. As a poet, Helm, I believe you may find some of what Borges
wrote about poetry interesting!

Why was he into "Old English" poetry? The plain answer is that the
Argentines are Francophiles, as New Yorkers are. Although English neo-Gothic
revival as a fad for some rich New Yorkers for a time (and the New Yorkers are
W. A. S. P. s), soon Beaux-Arts style caught on. In Buenos Aires, it is ALL
about Beaux-Arts. Borges's main friend at the period (he loved to socialise
with socialites) was Victoria Ocampo, a Francophile. So, by sticking with
English culture -- and the root of it at it, Old English epics -- he was
trying to be heterox.

His FATHER as "This craft of verse" goes, instilled on Borges a love for
English poetry of the classical type. I don't think Borges Senior was THAT
brilliant and would recite the usual stuff for an Englishman, but very exotic
for an Argentine: stuff like Keats's "Ode to a nightingale". Borges
Senior's mother was an Englishwoman, but I think she was not THAT brilliant.
Borges would say amusingly that HER favourite book was one novel by Bennett
--.
Still, being the snob he was, when Borges was in England with a schlarship
by the British Council, he made the time to visit the graveyard of the
Haslams in Staffordshire (Hanley) -- although the Haslams originated in
Yorkshire, his grandmother had left Hanley to embark in this long trip to the
unknown pampas where she married Colonel Borges -- At that time, this was
anathema: Argentines were supposed to marry Argentines, and Fanny Haslam knew
that from them on she would be an outcast for the English English
Anglo-Argentine community, who discourage that kind of mixed marriages!).

So, I would think Borges kept classical English poetry (as learned to be
loved by his father) as a long-standing interest. He would recite lines from
William Morris, for example, as they only use "Germanic" words.

Whence this interest for OLD English especially? He used to joke that he
started to study Anglo-Saxon when he got blind. But his readings were
elementary in that they included Henry Sweet's readers and Bosworth/Toller's
Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Hamer's Faber compilation of Anglo-Saxon verse was I
think the textbook he used for his lectures at the Argentine Society of
English Culture (which was convenient for him, since it is downtown and not
far
from his modest apartment). In fact, he wrote a "Ancient Germanic
Literatures" textbook in the vernacular, that is hardly deep. He quotes from
some
standard books on Old English literature, such as Tolkien (Beowulf: the
monster and his critics) and books on Old English epic.

The epic I believe fascinated because it was anonymous. But in that
particular manual "Ancient Germanic Literatures" he deals with individual poets

like Caedmon. -- There are chapters on Old GERMAN literature, as well -- so
the book would never be used by, say, an English student!)

He was attracted to the caesura of the Anglo-Saxon verse, and the fact that
they used 'head-rhyme', i.e. alliteration. It is true that the TOPIC also
interested and most English or American writers dealing with Borges (who
are attracted to Borges because he is from South America!) make the point
that the topic of HERO-SHIP that we find in Anglo-Saxon epics may have a point
of contact with Borges's own (but not personal) military past.

All his commentaries on Argentine poetry are ironical: he would love to say
that it is a GREAT shame that the hero of the Argentine saga, that "Martin
Fierro gaucho" was a deserter, and if he wrote about this saga it was to
provoke the Buenos Aires establishment.

When he was at Oxford with the British Council, he did make a point of
meeting with Hamer, who had edited this Faber collection. I don't think Borges
was interested in discussing hero-ship (alla Carlyle) with an Oxford don!
So Borges said he rather posed questions about metrics.

But he said he was CONDEMNED to the vernacular -- not Anglo-Saxon. One
thing is to ADMIRE the anonymous Anglo-Saxon epics (which as he loved to say,
were possibly composed when the English still lived in the Continent, since
all the toponymy is Continental: Denmark, old Angeln, and so forth), but
another is to find yourself being a poet.

His later choice of the sonnet form was heterodox in that by the time he
had experimented with blank verse since his youth (when he was a member of
the "Ultraist" movement of poetry that he imported from Spain). He would love
to recollect how he belonged to so many avant-garde -ism poetic movements.
So going back to the sonnet -- at which the Spaniards excelled with
figures like Quevedo -- was a heterodox move, and a reactionary one. Still,
the
sonnet form -- which hardly has head-rhyme! -- made him popular with some
readers in Buenos Aires, who would have found his earlier poetry too 'modern'
or 'experimental'.

It is said that his short stories are applications of philosophical
theories (and he said that if he was attracted to some philosophical theory, it

was because its 'aesthetic' value -- e.g. Berkeleyian idealism -- not the
truth of it!). It is more difficult with his poetry. In Switzerland he fell in
love with Whitman, and in his various trips to America he would refer to
"New England" poets, too.

While he toyed with 'love' poems, I thought he used 'love' as a poetic
motif and he would hardly dwell on feelings. His poetry tends to be about
himself. Some of his later sonnets, for example, mention the things that made
up
his life: this or that book, this or that literary reference. There was a
period when he made a point about his Argentine military ancestors (as the
reviewer of "Professor Borges" pointed out), but I think he was making a
political, rather than a poetic, point. His father was an anarchist in
Spencer's 'sense', and Borges himself changed alliances over time, ending by
rejecting anything populist -- but then many other did! Of course he was
against the official Argentine policy during the Second World War, when
Argentina
had this affair with Mussolini's Italy, too!

Later on, critics loved to recall that one of his 'best' poems came from
the defeat of the war with the English. In a poem, he comes back to his
favourite topic of the Double, and imagines two soldiers, one who has learned
Shakespeare by heart (as I recall); the other who had a thing for Cervantes.
They end up killing each other. By this time, Borges lived in his world of
memories, and could easily abstract from the incidents of ordinary life (he
was proud of never having read a newspaper) and dream back of his
dreamtigers of his youth -- the tigers as illustrated in the 11th edition of
the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I believe he used to say that his best time in England when he was
sponsored by the British Council was walking the Yorkshire moors. He knew about

the Deirans and the Mercians and the four Yorkshire Ridings, and the battles
of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, and the landscape the Angles would have found
after crossing the North Sea. As a heterodox he took for granted
Graeco-Roman culture (that forms the basis of typical Argentine culture) and
preferred the arid wind-swept moors of Yorkshire to Capri anyday!

(And perhaps the moors _ARE_ more poetic!).

He kept revising his "Complete Works" editing one poem in, and another out.
But again, except for a few love poems he wrote in English, all this stuff
is usually read by English and American readers in translation. But that
would HARDLY bothered him! He said that he read Quixote (again in the
two-volume Dent edition) back in English at his father's biography, and adds
that
when he finally read it in the vernacular he found that the 'translation
by far superseded the original' (but the implicature was jocular, one might
think).

Cheers,

Speranza


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