Norman Thomas di Giovanni
The Lesson of the Master

A Memoir and Essays on Borges and His Work

New Edition, Revised and Enlarged

Dedication

To Pamela Griffiths

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Foreword to the First Edition

I

In Memory of Borges

II

Borges and His Interpreters

Borges at Play: The Self and the Selves

Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer

Borges and His Sources: A Universal History of Infamy

Borges and His Autobiography

On Translating Borges

A Translator’s Guide

Backward Glances

Afterword

Appendix: A Footnote to Infamy

About the Author

Praise for The Slaughteryard

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

The roots of this book go back exactly a decade, to when Buenos Aires was plunged into the circus celebrations of the Borges centenary. The affair, designated el año borgeano – the Year of Borges – was arranged to span twelve months.

The festivities began on the twenty-fourth of August 1998, the date of the master’s ninety-ninth birthday, with an evening of ‘anecdotes and testimony’ at Buenos Aires’ San Martín Cultural Centre. Here, Borges was remembered by friends and – most incongruously – by politicians, a breed he held in utter contempt.

Two days later, as reported in the pages of La Nación, a book to herald the Year of Years was launched at the city’s Museum of Decorative Arts. The volume, an illustrated edition of El Aleph, Borges’s best collection of stories, was an extravaganza of bookmaking. Twelve years in production, the tome was limited to twenty-five copies and was on sale for $25,000. The artwork employed, among other techniques, watercolour, etching, lithography, pencil, oil, and acrylic. The enterprise was masterminded by two Argentine magnates – one the founder of a ski resort and the other an ex-industrialist in metals. La Nación went on to describe the book as

unique of its kind because each copy has been painted in an exclusive way, leaf by leaf. No one of the 4,000 pages that make up the edition is like any other.

It was a case of life imitating art. A few years earlier, Borges had devised a Book of Sand, consisting of an infinite number of pages of which none was the first and none the last. The volume bore countless small illustrations two thousand pages apart, but no one of them could be found twice. Borges dubbed his creation monstrous, ‘a nightmarish object, an obscene thing’.

My own book, translated as La lección del maestro, appeared in Buenos Aires in the wake of this yearlong apotheosis. The city, in 2003, was still basking in the heady afterglow of Borges’s deification. Several reviewers therefore angrily rounded on me; to them, my essays laid a heretical claim to my having sat at the right hand of God. That was of course both absurd and impossible. The Borges I had written about was the Borges of several decades earlier, who was then only a god-in-waiting.

I did not fare much better with certain English reviewers, who seemed unable to believe that I could have played the part I described in Borges’s life. The memoir about this, ‘In Memory of Borges’, was written from jottings in notebooks of the period. In their breezy shorthand I wanted to reflect the rush of our lives, of our compressed and packed days. I also wanted to provide examples of the sort of playful irony and humour that Borges and I shared and that were his hallmarks. This somehow rankled. When I wrote, meaning just the opposite, that a certain article in a Buenos Aires weekly was about me and not about Borges, the essay was branded ‘quite transparently a work of aggrieved limelight seeking.’ Unfortunately the reviewer had missed the joke. I’d never had to seek the limelight with Borges because from the outset of my career with him I had been thrust into it.

‘Some Borges aficionados are irritated (to put it mildly)’, wrote another critic, ‘that di Giovanni’s association with Borges developed from the role of passive translator to active collaborator.’ Borges himself had no such qualms. He once told an audience, ‘When we attempt a translation, or re-creation, of my poems or prose in English, we don’t think of ourselves as being two men. We think we are really one mind at work.’ For ‘irritated’, perhaps ‘envious’ would have been the better word choice – again the right-hand-of-God syndrome.

Someone else found the book ‘burdened with grudges’ and complained that I had ‘scores to settle with executors, editors, translators and academics, who are accused of being mean-minded, middling, incompetent and obfuscating respectively.’ On one of these counts I do bear a grudge, and why should I not air it? Decades of my work, a significant portion of it also Borges’s, have been consigned to the dustbin. His executor refused to honour Borges’s word; I was informed by the American publisher of his fiction that ‘the estate would not allow us to republish Borges under the old … terms.’ On the spot, my formal contractual agreements of twenty or more years were unilaterally declared null and void.

Nor have I been the only person incensed about this turn of events. Many readers of Borges, some of whom vent their views on the Internet, also feel cheated. Susan Sontag even took the trouble to write to me that

As a fervent Borgesian, I purchased the Viking Penguin three volumes the moment they came out. And it was obvious to me, just reading here and there among old favorites … that the whole enterprise was incoherent and indigne. Contemptible. A travesty.

A word about ‘A Translator’s Guide’. An Argentine reviewer berated me for not naming the errant translators quoted in the text. But my purpose was not to blacken the reputation of any individual, only to draw attention to certain common failings and pitfalls that plague most prose translation. As stated in the piece, I was attempting to throw a lifeline to monolingual publishers’ editors and, possibly, to the apprentice translator.

Readers of ‘Borges and His Autobiography’ must be let in on something that I deliberately omitted the first time round. The Barcelona firm that tried to publish the autobiography without my permission was forced to lock horns with me in a protracted lawsuit. They did not dispute that I owned fifty per cent of the said work but claimed that Borges had made me a gift of it. Of necessity they held that I was not its co-author. (At stake in this distinction – for them – was the matter of my damages.) María Kodama, executor of the Borges Estate, waded in with an affidavit stating that it did not seem to her that I had co-written the essay. Why should it have seemed so to her? When the piece was composed, in 1970, she did not occupy centre-stage in Borges’s life and had no idea what he and I were up to in our daily work sessions.

The publisher’s claims were all the more bizarre when set alongside the introduction to the book by its translator, the Latin-American professor Aníbal González. He pointed out that the autobiography ‘is the product of a collaboration with another writer, the translator di Giovanni. It is, then, not just a text written in another language but also in part, literally, by someone else.’

To close this sordid episode on a sunny note, let me report that the Spanish Supreme Court – thanks to the efforts of my lawyer Alejandro Angulo – eventually found in my favour.

I am often asked to write brief comments or reminiscences about my Borges years. Three such pieces, under the collective title ‘Backward Glances’, have been added here to close this new edition. Their histories are as follows.

‘A Reader’s Life’, commissioned by Erica Wagner as a review of James Woodall’s The Man in the Mirror of the Book, first appeared under the title ‘Trapped inside the house of fame’ in The Times, 11 July 1996.

‘Borges Remembered’, commissioned by Sophy Roberts, first appeared under the title ‘Borges and Me’ in Departures, October 2006.

‘The Other Borges’, commissioned by Khademul Islam, first appeared in the Daily Star, Dhaka, 20 June 2009.

The three were also printed together in the Raconteur, Winter 2010, under the title ‘Backward Glances: Remembering Borges’.

Warm thanks are due to Marcial Souto, to Susan Ashe, and to my son Tom di Giovanni for sage counsel, editorial and otherwise. Finally, for being the Maecenas of this book’s second edition, I want to express my gratitude to Scott Pack, of The Friday Project, an obvious maverick who does not shrink from the company of fellow mavericks.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Keyhaven, Lymington

Hampshire

November 2009

Foreword to the First Edition

The twenty-fourth of August 1999 marked the centenary of the birth of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine’s best known and one of its greatest literary figures.

Some thirty years ago, while he was delivering a series of public addresses at Harvard University, our paths crossed, we began working together on translations of his work into English, and we became friends. Looking back now, I find that the impact of Borges on the course of my life seems to have been only inches short of a miracle. Within a few brief months of our meeting, publishers began to compete for his stories and poems and essays in the new versions of them that we were making. On the eve of his return to Buenos Aires, in April 1968, he invited me to join him in his country, and seven months later I was there, plunged into the thick of his life and into the life of Argentina.

All that is a story yet to be told. Back then, while these events were unfolding, everything was hectic and crowded, and I was offered no leisure for reflection. Yet never once was I unaware of how rich and marvellous was life alongside Borges. So rich and indelible were those days of our close association, in fact, that even now, over a decade after his death, he still inhabits most of my working hours and occasionally, at night, even my dreams.

The little memoir and the essays collected here are in the nature of a homage and a contribution to the celebration of Borges’s life and work. The book is no attempt to deliver the final word on him or on any aspect of what he wrote. Offering simple guidance and a commonsensical approach to reading him, the pieces are more tentative and modest. In most ways, these pages are the close-up view, the record, of someone who worked on a daily basis with Borges at a distinctive and critical period of his life, when he overcame various adversities and experienced a rich late flowering.

The Lesson of the Master has had a singular genesis. At the outset of our association, when Borges and I were working on an English edition of his selected poems, he described me in a letter to his Buenos Aires publisher, the late Carlos Frías, as the volume’s ‘onlie begetter’. It was a term that both men, teachers of English literature, savoured.

Originally, I wanted to publish the memoir that opens the present volume as a tailpiece to Borges’s ‘Autobiographical Essay’, a 20,000-word text that he and I composed together in English, in 1970. The Borges Estate, however, did not look kindly on the idea. No explanation, no reasons, were given for their decision, but somehow my work of 1988 was not deemed worthy of appearing alongside my work with Borges of 1970. An Argentine editor came along, however, and said that he would undertake to publish the two essays separately.

Working with Borges, one had come to appreciate the fact that less was more, but my thirty-odd-page essay, I thought to myself, was about to become the slimmest book on record. Marcial Souto, my mentor in these matters and himself a minimalist in literary creation, was also apprehensive. (It was he who had brought the original project to the Argentine editor’s attention.) Souto suggested that I couple with the memoir some other related piece or pieces of mine. I sent him a further essay, twenty pages long, and he approved. For a month or two after, I was haunted by the melancholy notion that – when all I wanted was to bring out a volume worthy of the master – I was about to become holder of the even less distinguished record of producing the second slimmest book in publishing history. This would not do. Ransacking my papers, I began to turn up the material that eventually made its way into the present pages. It is in this roundabout way, then, that the Borges Estate is the ‘onlie begetter’ of these essays. To the Estate and to Mr Souto, my thanks.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

October 1999

I

In Memory of Borges

There is an article, really a piece of photojournalism, in one of those Argentine weekly magazines, in which I can be seen walking down a Buenos Aires street with Borges leaning on my arm. Was the magazine Siete Días or Gente? That I no longer remember, but all the other details I am fairly clear about. It was 1969; we were walking east along Belgrano Avenue, crossing Santiago del Estero or more likely Salta, a block or two from the small flat where Borges was still living with his first wife. I am wearing my brown herringbone tweed suit and a tie, concessions to the demands of sober, formal Buenos Aires. We are crossing or about to cross Salta, Borges clutching my right arm in his somewhat frantic blind man’s vice, and the large photograph in the magazine is a picture of me with him on my arm and definitely not the other way round – it is not a photograph of Borges being led along by some anonymous younger man, a foreigner, an American.

That year, on the dot of four every afternoon, five days a week, I picked Borges up from the Belgrano flat and, his arm firmly gripping mine, we walked the ten slow blocks east to the National Library, in Mexico Street, where our early evening’s work awaited us. By this time, he had been Director of the Argentine National Library for fourteen years. The post, of course, was a sinecure. Borges was not a librarian, much less an administrator, and a loyal assistant director, José Edmundo Clemente, did the real work. Once or twice a month perhaps, like a ritual, a secretary came into the big office where Borges and I sat across from each other at a solid long mahogany table, and she would stand over a thick sheaf of papers, turning a corner of each page for him to initial. Whatever the bulk of paperwork, it never proved much of an interruption. Most of the time he initialled away while carrying on his discussion with me; but if things were going particularly well and he was in one of his playful moods, which were frequent, he might indulge in a bit of good-natured ribbing, poking fun at her to me in English or at me to her in Spanish.

‘You see, di Giovanni, how mercilessly she makes me work.’ Often the woman would be halfway out of the room before Borges would remember himself and, for form’s sake, think to ask exactly what it was he had just signed.

‘Only the usual accounts, Señor Borges,’ she would say assuringly, the epitome of correctness and respect.

‘Ah, yes,’ he would rejoin, as if suddenly reminded of some immutable truth.

It was a game. The secretaries, one or two in the morning, a different one or two in the afternoon, hated troubling Borges about anything, especially when he was working, and to this day I am sure that even after it had been explained to him Borges never had the foggiest notion what he was signing.

‘Borges,’ I’d quip when the mood came over me, ‘I can see from here that that sheaf you’re putting your John Hancock to grants the whole library staff an extra two-week holiday with pay.’

And he would do a comic double-take, feigning astonishment, stop scribbling, look up trying to locate the secretary’s face, and repeat to her my remark in Spanish.

‘No, jamás nunca, Señor Borges; le juro.’ And with her oaths to the contrary and not-on-your-lifes, he let himself be readily convinced every time.

This is not to suggest that Borges did not take the job in earnest. He did. But at the same time he knew he was a figurehead – a mere figurehead, he would have phrased it – and, never pompous about anything, he allowed himself to be ironic about the post. Deep down, he was proud of the library, of the position, and grateful for it too. Almost in the manner of a credulous child, he would recite for visitors that the library contained 800,000 volumes. Or later, 900,000. It was one of the few facts Borges ever had at his fingertips. To him facts were the antithesis of the essence of truth, and he found them meaningless. This was the only fact I can remember his spouting that required – unlike the year of his birth, say – frequent updating. The job was the perfect symbol for him, and he was the perfect symbol for the job. Indeed, what library in the world would not have rejoiced at having a Borges as its titular head? He performed the office like a master – as if he had been born to it, or, better, because he had been born to it.

Those evenings of ours were devoted to the translation of stories, poems, and essays of his into English. ‘My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project,’ Borges was to write a year later, when he was seventy-one. ‘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.’

As the young man from Siete Días or Gente knew, all this made a good story: the American from Boston who had suddenly popped up and was shepherding the legendary Borges along the streets of Buenos Aires and working with him at the National Library. In fact, the story had a bit of everything – the exotic and the homely. Here was the lofty National Treasure, for whom New York publishers were competing, whom they had sent one of their own to the ends of the earth to watch over. It proved Borges really was a world figure and not just an oddball local, an Anglophile with a passion for books; it meant that Buenos Aires and Argentina counted in the world for something more than excellent steaks and crack football players. It was a fine tonic for the constant doubt about his identity that assails the porteño at the best of times. These were not the best of times. ‘Nationalism is creeping in all the time,’ Borges sneered. It was the military dictatorship of General Onganía; soon grim-faced Federal police, more of them every week, would be appearing on street corners wearing jack-boots and wielding stubby submachine guns; soon the faithful flock would be bleating for the return of Perón. With the horizon fast shading from leaden to black, enter the young American in the tweed suit who had something in common with half the population of Buenos Aires – a comforting Italian surname. Which was why the story was about me, why the pictures were of me with the National Treasure on my arm and not of Borges with me on his.

I often joked with him about this. As we moved through Florida Street, a pedestrian precinct on the way to his mother’s, people would open a way, turn round, gape, point. ‘It never ceases to amaze me the way strangers seem to recognize me,’ I would tell him, deadpan. ‘“Look,” they say, “there’s di Giovanni – there, with the old man on his arm.”’ It made Borges laugh every time. The passers-by never failed to greet him; some even held their children up for him to touch. He always asked people their names, where they were from. Ah, yes. He had a friend there. A lawyer and a fine poet named Fernández Ordóñez. Borges was a living monument, and the Argentines revered him.

At the library we shuffled through the revolving door and up the grand marble staircase, entering first the outer office with the scruffy, bare, wooden floor, where the secretaries huddled at a tiny table in the corner by the window. Except by that window, the room was lightless, bleak, and spartan. A small wire wastebasket stood beside the table. There was one telephone – big, clumsy, black, its cord frayed. It didn’t matter. The phones, like the secretaries, only worked part-time. The building dated from 1901 and had been, as Borges was fond of telling visitors, the seat of the national lottery. The inner sanctum, Borges’s office, had an extraordinarily high ceiling, green wallpaper printed with bamboo-like fronds, polished mahogany panelling, and a parquet floor. We worked at the old-fashioned conference table in the centre of the room. At the far end was the desk that Paul Groussac, a distinguished predecessor, had had built to his own design. It was U-shaped. If you sat behind it, as Borges never did, it surrounded you. It had strange drawers and odd compartments. Borges later described it briefly at the end of his story ‘There Are More Things’.

The room’s other furnishings were a couple of revolving bookshelves and a tall set of drawers into which Borges slipped the drafts of poems he dictated in the morning to a secretary. Two pairs of doors led off the room straight onto a corridor. These we used only when trying to give the slip to someone who might be waiting in the outer office or when we went to the vast, stark loo that was used only by us. Next door was the room Groussac had died in, a detail Borges took ghoulish delight in recounting. For once upon a time the director had lived on the premises. There were traces of a kitchen that proved it. But Elsa, the new Mrs Borges, whom Borges had married at sixty-eight (she was some ten or twelve years younger), would have none of it. She was right, of course. The library was a gloomy place, and I thought I too would go blind there. There was a dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, whose paper and binding Borges and I were fond of smelling, on the main table. The one place in all Buenos Aires where my tweed suit was no match for the winter was in the dank cavern of Borges’s office. But there was a large, ornate fireplace at my back, where a fire of eucalyptus logs would glow – not burn but glow. If I backed up to it now and again, the icy chill was momentarily dispelled. Still, one was thankful for small mercies.

What the photographs in the magazine article do not show is the crablike walk I had developed, much to the detriment of my lower back muscles. Buenos Aires pavements are narrow, and to negotiate them with Borges on my right arm I had to learn to master the art of walking with my left hip and left arm leading the way. To make matters worse, my extended left hand always carried a briefcase bulging with papers and books. There I was with the National Treasure on my arm, keeping him safe from the murderous traffic, the ubiquitous excavations, and the broken tiles of the city’s pavements, steering him round open pits or dodging beau traps. And all the while the squat buses inched along in step with us, throbbing and belching thick black exhaust over the Treasure; over my herringbone tweed; over his monologue about Victoria Ocampo, whom he dubbed Queen Victoria for her imperial ways, or Ernesto Sabato, dubbed the Dostoyevsky of Santos Lugares for his bouts of melancholia; over an example of the word music of Dunbar, Coleridge, or the Bard himself, whose ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’, capped with ‘making the green one red’, never failed to rouse and thrill Borges – potholes, pitfalls, grime, soot, lethal traffic, and sputtering buses be damned.

Once, fourteen years later and forty miles away across the river in Uruguay, in the town of Colonia, where I was helping make a BBC film about Borges, I stumbled across a half-open gateway that gave a glimpse of a picturesque garden with a big fig tree ripening in the middle of it. I couldn’t resist. In I strolled, utterly captivated. Immediately a man dashed out of a house, a stern look on his face, to halt me in my tracks.

‘Lo felicito,’ I said in my most winning Spanish, trying to disarm him. ‘I congratulate you; your garden is a jewel.’

He drew up to me, tall, handsome, almost sneering, an obvious porteño. Then the belligerence drained from his look.

‘Yo te conozco a vos,’ he said straight out, launching into the familiar. ‘I saw you walking down Calle Florida in 1969 or 1970 with Borges on your arm.’

There are jottings in a series of diaries, the old War Resisters League peace calendars I was partial to at the time, in which I chronicled those first teeming weeks in Buenos Aires after I arrived there in the middle of November 1968. Borges was tireless in showing me the same hospitality in his country that he had thanked me for showing him in mine, when we had parted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven months before.

He and Elsa met my plane at Ezeiza on the night I got there and whisked me straight to the modest hotel she had found for me in the Avenida de Mayo, a short walk from their flat. The next day, after lunch with them, Borges could barely wait to show me the National Library and a few spots nearby, on the old south side of the city, that he both worshipped and had turned into myth. A house from the previous century; a grilled archway; a long street of low houses; a dusty park. ‘After all, these places mean a great deal to me; they’re my past.’ It was touching the way he apologized for the absence of grandeur or glamour he thought that I, as a Bostonian, had a right to expect. But that was politeness. Beneath the courtesy, you were aware of his intense personal pride.

We began work at the library the next morning, a Saturday, when the library was closed, for that had been the pact. I would not come as a tourist; I would only come if we could continue what we had begun at Harvard during the months we had known each other there. The diary for 1968 records that we busied ourselves on his poem ‘Heraclitus’.

That same day he introduced me to a student of his, María Kodama, whom he was to marry seventeen and a half years later, only weeks before his death. And that night, my second full evening in Argentina, he took me to dine at the home of Adolfo Bioy Casares, where I was presented to some of Borges’s closest friends. This was an event I had been looking forward to for months; from the warmth of the reception I received from Bioy and his wife, Silvina Ocampo, I realized Borges had talked to them about me. Bioy and Silvina were both writers – he of novels and stories, she of stories and poems (she was also an accomplished artist who had studied with de Chirico) – and together they and Borges had collaborated on a variety of literary projects. Manuel Peyrou, the novelist, was also there, and towards the end of the meal Teddy Paz, one of the younger literati, ambled in. That evening, that dinner, was truly auspicious, but not just for me, because it marked the start of four enduring new friendships. Bioy got his car out and drove us home at one a.m. By then something had happened to make it one of the most important evenings in Borges’s life.

During those final weeks of his stay in Cambridge, where he had been delivering the 1967–8 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and we had been preparing an English edition of his selected poems, we had read together and chosen and made literal drafts of dozen upon dozen of Borges’s sonnets, a form he increasingly favoured, since he could easily write them in his head. I knew that. But it did not keep me from wearying of those same fourteen hendecasyllabic lines, the inevitability of those seven pairs of rhymes. The very constriction, in fact, was giving me claustrophobia. I told him so – not that it would alter the shape of our project in any way. I told him simply because I saw no one else come forward, even once, and tell him the truth. Every poem, tale, or essay he had ever written was hailed a masterpiece; each of his utterances, on whatever subject, seemed to have cast a spell over academics the length and breadth of America. To me, he confessed his fears, his inadequacies. He felt he would never write again; so did America. Borges’s isolation was cruel, crippling, and complete. He was high up on a pedestal, a monument.

He listened and explained, by rote, that sonnets were all he could now manage. He was not vehement, nor was I. I simply reminded him by their titles of some fine poems written during his blindness that were not sonnets, and no more was said. But within a month or two of his return to Buenos Aires, Elsa began posting me at regular intervals a series of poems that were new and fresh – and not a sonnet among them. By the time I reached Buenos Aires, I was in possession of seventeen uncollected poems.

‘Are these all recent poems, or is this work you found in some bottom drawer?’ I asked him on the morning we tackled ‘Heraclitus’.

‘Why?’ he said in a panic. ‘Don’t you like them?’

‘They’re marvellous.’

‘Ah, that’s a relief,’ Borges said. ‘You see, I was doing what you told me to do back in Cambridge.’

‘Yes, and it means you have half a new book here.’

‘No, no!’ he protested, flying into a rage. ‘I won’t publish another book. I haven’t published a new book in eight years and I won’t be judged by this stuff.’

He was beside himself in a way I had never seen before. It was a hot potato, and I let it drop.

But over dinner the next night at Bioy’s he blurted out aggressively, ‘Di Giovanni has a crazy idea. He wants me to publish a new book of poems.’ It was the manner he used, I was to learn, when he found himself on unsure ground but wanted to give the opposite impression.

‘But, Georgie,’ Bioy immediately chimed in, chuckling his infectious little chuckle. ‘That seems to me a splendid idea.’

Silvina agreed; Peyrou agreed. I had no need to add a word.

One day the next week, there was an unexpected phone call from Borges, with a hint of mystery in his voice, saying he had an errand to run that morning and would I meet him at the library a bit later on. When around midday we eventually got together again, he was jubilant. ‘I’ve been to see Frías,’ he said. Carlos Frías was his editor at Emecé. ‘I told him, “Frías, I want to publish a new book of poems.”’ Again the aggressive tone.

‘Let me guess his decision,’ I said, playing the straight man. ‘He accepted.’

Borges was stunned and momentarily deflated. ‘Yes. How did you know?’

That did it. His mind was made up. He was writing a new book and he wanted everyone to know he was writing a new book. ‘Thirty-four poems, eh? You think that’s about right, do you? That’s the figure I gave Frías. Now you’re sure we have seventeen. Let’s go over that list of yours once again.’

We went over the list, which he learned by heart, ticking each title off on his fingers. What this meant, I told him, was that from then on we would work together only in the afternoons. He must devote his mornings to dictating new work. Borges offered no demur.

That was a skirmish. The real battle loomed ahead – the bits of evidence are there in the diary jottings – but I would not be aware of this for another six months. The entry for 4 December 1968 relates that in the evening we went out to Palermo, the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires where Borges had grown up, and we walked around the streets before going around the corner to eat empanadas at the home of Elsa’s cousin Olga.

‘Don’t expect anything now,’ Borges had prefaced the journey in his characteristic way.

It was a year and a day since we had first met. We stopped at an old almacén, where two men played with a pack of greasy cards at a plain wooden table. The place was ill-lit and nearly empty. Borges asked for a couple of cañas quemadas, an old-fashioned rum-like liqueur. Afterwards, outside, he confessed, ‘I asked for a small one because a big one would have defeated me.’ He told me he hadn’t been out this way for thirty years. Then, like an eager schoolboy, he showed me a narrow, cobbled alleyway, pointing out that it was untypical for running in a diagonal instead of forming the side of a square. And on the spot he began recounting the ‘plot of a story that has the ghost of Juan Muraña as a protagonist.’ (An entry in a pocket notebook tells me this.) But of course he at once lamented the fact that, though he might still compose poems, he would never set down this story, since there was no way he could ever manage to write prose again. I gave him a sympathetic ear.

He and Elsa were invited to Israel for a few weeks early in the new year, and he came back full of wry little stories about the Holy Land. The Israelis, one notebook jotting tells me, were ‘a bunch of Russians or Germans in disguise, playing at being characters out of the Old Testament – Noahs.’ But he was elated. He was working, which in Borges’s terms meant justifying his existence. And, what was more, harder than ever before in his life. (This was Bioy’s observation; he had close to forty years’ experience of Borges’s habits.) Mornings were spent working on new poems for his book, dictating them to a secretary. In February, our afternoons were given over to a translation and rewriting of the long series of miniature essays that made up The Book of Imaginary Beings. By then I had burned my bridges and decided to stay on in Argentina longer than the five months I had initially planned. We finished the Imaginary Beings on 20 May 1969; he was so delighted with the result that any future translation of the book, he insisted, must be based on our English version. He also insisted that we now celebrate the end of the job by writing some new pieces for the book directly in English. We concocted four, working into them all manner of silly things, like the long Dutch name of one of my friends, a family surname, and my Buenos Aires street and flat number. It was all in good fun and the kind of thing Borges took delight in. Three days later, we wrapped the book up with a new foreword; three days after that, the typescript was winging its way to New York.

‘Norteamérica,’ Borges told the pillarbox, giving it an affectionate pat. ‘I always tell the box where the letter goes. Otherwise, how would it know?’

The jotting in the peace calendar for this year tells that on 11 June Borges and I had worked on Foreword to the First Edition of his 1951 short story ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth’, and that that evening we took a taxi out to his publishers in the two thousand block of Alsina to turn in the last poem of his new book Elogio de la sombra – In Praise of Darkness. An emendation added later in brackets records that ‘more material was turned in after this date.’ This was his fifth book of poems, he was to write in his foreword to the volume later that month, and to ‘the mirrors, mazes, and swords which my resigned reader already foresees, two new themes have been added: old age and ethics.’ As it turned out, there was something else in the book too – a grain of sand that would make a pearl. This was a story, not a prose poem, no more than three or four pages long about a man who hides out in a cellar for nine years.

Borges’s lament about not being able to write down short stories that he was forever working out in his head did not end after our Palermo excursion. Over the next months these stories became a more and more frequent topic of conversation on our walks to and from the library. At some point – but this was much later on – I began keeping track of them; by then the list I drew up numbered eight. That autumn (it was the southern hemisphere) I no longer just lent a silent ear but began a subtle campaign of egging him on, shoring up his confidence, and proving to him that his writing days were far from over. I had two arrows in my quiver. One was the five-page story ‘The Intruder’ that he had dictated to his ancient mother three years earlier; the other was the recent ‘Pedro Salvadores’, the man in the cellar.

‘Sure you can,’ I’d point out. ‘After all, the difference in length between “The Intruder” and any of your other stories is a bare page or two.’

This was a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but he never opposed the argument. On the contrary, my persuasiveness made him open up, and he began using me as a sounding board for yet another tale whose plot he now wove aloud to me. And he’d ask my opinion of specific elements – should he add another incident? Were the main characters different enough?

I never tried to supply answers but would raise more questions. ‘What are the alternatives?’ I kept wanting him to tell me.

He’d ponder, come up with an idea, and we’d kick it around. I knew he was girding himself and working up to something; and I was determined to feed his mood whilst not letting him off the hook.

Then, at his doorstep: ‘No, I fear it’s too late in the day; I don’t think I could manage it.’

‘Tommyrot,’ I’d say. His Edwardian slang, as I called it, was one of our pet jokes. ‘Why not try? It’s a good story. It’s only a matter of writing “Pedro Salvadores” twice. Eight pages. You can do it.’

And on and on it went for several weeks. One day, in the midst of this, Manuel Peyrou rang from La Prensa, where he worked as an editor, to tell Borges that the paper was celebrating its centenary later in the year and was inviting every Argentine writer of note to contribute to a succession of special Sunday supplements. Here was another turning point. Not long after this, Borges took a poem around to them. But the next day, rather than feeling good about it, he was actually glum.

‘I don’t think a poem’s what they had in mind,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think they’d like a story.’

‘Of course they’d like a story. We’d all like a story. Why not write them one?’

I never for a moment believed La Prensa was unhappy with his poem; certainly Peyrou knew that Borges had more or less given up writing stories since 1953. This was Borges having a pang of conscience. La Prensa had offered him the same fee whether they got a poem or a story out of him, and he felt he had cheated them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the mysterious strands were coming together fast now.

It became an open secret at the library that Borges was dictating a full-length short story; he knew I knew, but superstitiously he refused to breathe a word of it to me. He didn’t have to, as the team of secretaries gave me daily reports. It went through two or three drafts and took him two or three weeks to write. He finally came clean when he’d finished, but he made no offer to show me the result. I bided my time.

A few days later I lied and told him I was short of money. Reaching for the billfold he kept in his inside breast pocket, he asked how much I needed. No, I laughed, what I had in mind was the new story, which I wanted to translate and sell to the New Yorker, where our work had been appearing. This took place on a Monday. All right, he said, but not that day. I would have to wait until Friday.

There was no earthly reason for his not handing me the story then and there, except that as the remote possibility did exist that Friday might never come round he could actually trick himself into believing he would escape having to stand judgement. It was complicated; it was capricious; it was Borges.

But that Friday did come round – according to my diary it was 16 May – and the delivery could be put off no longer. After our afternoon’s ration of Imaginary Beings and just before we knocked off, he put the typescript in my hands, saying, ‘Don’t read it until Monday; we’ll talk about it then.’ I suppose it was one last desperate try; maybe he thought he’d have better luck and Monday would never happen.

The story was ‘The Meeting’, a marvellous tale set back in 1910 about two well-off young men who quarrel over cards and fight a duel with knives in which one of them dies. At the same time, on the fantastic side, the story is about the secret life of the weapons the men had chosen. I found it remarkably polished, and the draft contained only a couple of minor flaws. One was that in the dark, in a house without electric light, two characters begin studying a cabinet that houses a collection of old knives.

‘That’s easy,’ Borges said as we worked out the translation. ‘We’ll have one of them light a lamp.’ And on the spot, in English, he dictated a line to correct the lapse. My diary entries record that on 3 June I worked very late typing up ‘The Meeting’ for the New Yorker, and that at the library the next evening Borges and I translated the bits of new material into Spanish and inserted them into a set of galley proofs that we then delivered to La Prensa, where Peyrou gave each of us a copy of his latest novel El hijo rechazado.

Within three weeks we heard from Robert Henderson at the New Yorker that they were taking ‘The Meeting’, and the news had a dramatic effect on Borges. In fact, nothing could have done more just then to send his confidence soaring. In July, on the seventeenth and eighteenth, I read page proofs of Elogio de la sombra to him, then read through them a second time alone. I corrected fresh proofs on the twenty-eighth. The book was published to great acclaim in August, on Borges’s seventieth birthday. Two days earlier, on the evening of the twenty-second, Emecé gave the book an extravagant send-off on a stage in the Galería Van Riel, where one Dr E. Molina Mascías (whoever he was) spoke at some length, and the ‘primera actriz’ (whatever that means) María Rosa Gallo and the ‘primeros actores’ (ditto) Enrique Fava and Luis Medina Castro read a large number of the poems. The place was packed out and a bit of a circus. On the copy of the book he gave me the day before, Borges had written, ‘Al colaborador, al amigo, al promesso sposo’, for in a few days’ time I was to be married. On the Sunday, his birthday, Elsa threw a little party at home with a cake iced in blue and white in the shape and colours of the book itself. You could even read the title on it. It was not at all Borges’s style, but he was nonetheless radiant. The next day was the wedding, with Elsa and Borges as the official witnesses at the registry office, and with her sister Alicia Ibarra and cousin Olga and Teddy Paz as extras. Poor Elsa, she was obliged to throw a second party in two days – this one for the promessi sposi. Silvina Ocampo and Manuel Puig were there; so was Elogio de la sombra – not the book but the cake, or, rather, what was left of it. Plus the wedding cake. By then, though, quite sensibly, Borges had had enough and did not attend. Instead, he went to work at the library.

After that, it all became a whirlwind. In October, two days before ‘El encuentro’ appeared in La Prensa, Borges finished another new story, the one called ‘Rosendo’s Tale’ in English; the day we completed the translation of it we delivered the original to La Nación. Now the work found its way into my hands as soon as he finished it. In November came ‘The Unworthy Friend’, which we took with us to translate in the United States while Borges was lecturing at Oklahoma and where we gave readings and talks at a number of other universities. ‘Juan Muraña’, the story he had told me about the year before on the very spot where it was set, was finished in mid-January 1970. There was no stopping him now. ‘The Duel’ came next, but before he put the finishing touches to it he began dictating ‘The End of the Duel’. He had long since known he was doing the impossible – writing a new book of stories. On 3 March he finished ‘Guayaquil’ and on the fifth began ‘Doctor Brodie’s Report’. The day he finished ‘Brodie’ he began ‘The Gospel According to Mark’, completing the first draft of it in under a week. The only hiccup came when he had reached the eight mark. By then he was so anxious to see the collection in print that he ran out of patience. Not of stories, thank goodness, but of patience. He had another three in mind but he simply couldn’t wait. As the completed stories were very short, a book of them would have come to no more than seventy pages, and I considered that a mistake. He had been invoking Kipling and the Plain Tales from the Hills as a kind of model for his brevity; I pointed out, however, that Plain Tales ran to over three hundred pages and contained forty stories. It was no use; he was going to see Frías to tell him he wanted to publish a book of eight stories. And off he went.

I picked up the phone, got Frías, and explained the situation. ‘Say no to him,’ I told the publisher. ‘Tell him he’s got to write at least three more. They’re there in his head but he’s just being lazy.’

Frías saw that I was right. Borges came back and told me that Emecé wanted another three stories. To his credit, he didn’t sulk over the news for even a second. Sulking, like self-pity, was never one of Borges’s traits. Instead, he immediately set to work writing the three required stories, probably counting his blessings that he had three more stories to tell. I never told him about my intervention. We set about rereading and ordering the book-length typescript in mid-April, a week later he turned it in, and El informe de Brodie was published early in August. By any standard, it was a remarkable achievement; by his own, it was nothing short of a miracle. After nine years without writing a book, he had now, within twelve months, written two.

Like Turner, a painter he admired, Borges in his old age also set out to fashion something new, freer, more personal. In many ways he succeeded; undeniably, the prose of his late work is less cluttered and more responsible. He felt that at last he had found his voice. Six more volumes of poetry were to follow In Praise of Darkness; seventeen more short stories followed Doctor Brodie’s Report.

‘I no longer regard happiness as unattainable,’ he said bravely on reaching seventy-one.

That year, there were no celebrations when the book came out, and certainly there was no cake. Somewhat sadly, circumstances had changed.

There are among my papers two spiral-bound notebooks with ruled pages, workbooks I called them, in which I took down from his dictation on sixty-four recto leaves the story of Borges’s life. As far as I am aware, this autobiography is the single most extensive piece of writing Borges ever committed to paper. Like much else that we did, it too seems to have been born of a series of accidents or obstacles – unforeseen and unforeseeable events that somehow or other, uncannily, we kept turning to advantage.

With The Book of Imaginary Beings in print and a number of the recent stories and poems beginning to appear in American magazines, Borges and I itched for a chance to present in our own versions a selection of his older stories, the ones on which his fame rested. Of course, we would have preferred to translate the seventeen stories of his best book, El Aleph, written in the very rich period between 1945 and 1953, but a competing publisher, who claimed rights to about half these tales, prevented us from doing so. Our own publisher, however, the understanding and very accommodating Jack Macrae, was not averse to obliging us. So by begging, borrowing, and nearly stealing – that is, given the chance, we would have stolen – Borges and I were able to map out the volume that eventually appeared in the autumn of 1970 as The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969.

The exercise in autobiography had twofold roots. The first of them was in the vexing problem just described, when Borges was denied the right to determine the form and fate of his own work. As our compromise volume took shape, I grew ever more convinced that it needed something in addition to our spanking-new translations if we were to avoid hoodwinking the public with yet another anthology of Borges’s work.

The second part of these roots and of the story is a happier affair and even funny. At the University of Oklahoma, several months earlier, I had been able to prevail upon Borges – not without great difficulty – to conclude his set of six lectures on Argentine literature by talking about himself. But on the afternoon of that final lecture he was in a blue funk. He had never before spoken about his own work publicly – it would never have occurred to him to indulge in such a pointless, immodest activity – and it was late in the day, and why on earth, and he simply was not going to be able to go through with it, etc. I saw I had a full-scale panic on my hands. By some strange chemistry, however, his panics always managed to turn the blood in my veins to iced water. It was a partnership, after all, and one of us had to be steady at all times. After our customary afternoon naps – his sleepless and unrefreshing, he claimed – I could see how pent up he was, so I suggested a walk. Our hotel stood about three-quarters of a mile from the campus on what seemed to be the edge of Norman, Oklahoma, where it occupied the corner of a perfectly square block. Arm in arm, Borges and I slowly circumnavigated that block. Once.

‘Just remember your Dickens,’ I told him. Twice.

‘David Copperfield,’ I told him, ‘“I was born on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.”’ And three times.

‘Nothing fancy, now. You’re telling a story, that’s all there is to it.’

Every once in a while, Borges’s lips began to move. ‘I was born in Buenos Aires, in 1899,’ he mumbled.

‘That’s the hang of it,’ I said.

He was unconvinced. I couldn’t tell him, but so was I.

Of course, he did marvellously, his audience loved it, and our Oklahoma sponsors, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, were duly pleased. Three months later in Buenos Aires, recalling the little triumph, I had a brainstorm and asked them at Norman to provide us with a transcript of the talk. I wrote to Macrae to tell him that we’d hit on an idea to beef up the book: we would add to it Borges’s story of his own life, written directly in English. The lecture, I knew, would come to around twenty pages; I figured that with a few days’ work we’d be able to flesh it out to thirty. So carried away was I that somewhere along the line I promised Jack we’d provide the book with a kind of appendix as well, also to be written in English, in the form of commentaries on each of the book’s twenty stories. I knew that readers were having difficulty with Borges; worse, I knew that the universities kept him swathed in unnecessary mystery. At the same time, since his stories were really all about himself, his various guises, and dimensions of his thought, what better setting for them by way of introduction than the story of his life?

The pages from Oklahoma reached us sometime in April 1970. By then, we had most of the stories translated and seemed to be on target. But reading the transcript of the lecture, my heart dropped down into my shoes. The talk started out like David Copperfield, all right, but it soon went jumping all over the place without order or logic. Sick with worry, I explained the predicament to Borges, for some reason or other fearing a negative response on his part. Instead, undaunted, and paraphrasing one of his favourite authors – English and nineteenth century, of course – he said, ‘Fling it aside and be free! We’ll start again from scratch.’

We did. On 21 April, the day after the typescript of El informe de Brodie went off to Emecé, we pitched in. That first day I took down five pages. I was prepared this time. I made us outline the material beforehand, breaking his life down into manageable chunks, chapters, of which we ended up with five. I made him stick to that outline. ‘No, no, don’t jump ahead to your mother; let’s get it all down about your father and his family first and then we’ll tackle her.’ It went like that. The next day, I took down five more pages; the day after that, six. At this rate, it was going to come out longer than hoped for, which was all to the good. And better than anything, it looked like being a piece of cake.

On the fourth day, there was a flood of visitors to see Borges at the library and he had a lecture to give at seven o’clock. ‘No work done,’ says the diary entry. The following week started with permission coming from Grove Press to allow us to make new translations of two vital stories, so we immediately tackled them, since it would permit Macrae to send a good portion of the typescript to the printer while Borges and I worked on. But alas! it was not to be so simple. What with the two translations to get out, a steady stream of visitors from abroad plaguing me, and Borges giving lectures on what seemed every other night, we got not one jot further on the story of his life until 16 May. That day we were down to three and a half pages, and it was not much good.

The fact of the matter was that Borges’s mind was on something else. It was at this point that he said to me, ‘I’ve committed what seems to me now an unaccountable mistake, a huge mistake. A quite unexplainable and mysterious mistake.’

He was, of course, referring to his rocky marriage to Elsa, and he was in a pit of despair. It was significant that 16 May was a Saturday. We hadn’t worked together on weekends for a very long time, yet here we were once more at the National Library. And it was not because of our deadline with Macrae – it was because Borges could no longer bear life at home. The marriage was not three years old. My diary records that on two days that week Borges had been too distraught for us even to attempt any work. What he needed was to talk about his private life, a thing that was so completely unlike him it only drove home to me the depths of his misery. Most of what he told me I already knew. He poured it out; I listened.

That Saturday was another turning point, for in the afternoon I invited a friend of ours, a lawyer from Córdoba who was in town that week, to tea at the Molino, the big old-fashioned confitería by the Congress that he was fond of. Two days later, he and I and Borges went to consult a friend of mine, a local lawyer. Between these two legal minds a bleak picture was painted. For starters, there was no divorce as such under Argentine law – only a form of legal separation that everyone referred to as divorce and that was as effective as any divorce but that did not allow for remarriage.

The next six weeks were an agony. As far as I could, I carried on with the autobiography by myself, typing up whatever dictation we had completed, doing the necessary background research, and checking facts and dates. One Saturday we actually managed to revise half the first chapter. But the next was devoted to drawing up a list of Borges’s marital grievances for the Córdoba lawyer. It was not until 28 May that the opening chapter was finished; not until 9 June that we had rewritten the second. We had begun working Sundays now too. But the trouble was that in addition to the delicate, surreptitious work on the legal front – endless meetings with a team of lawyers, countless errands and researching on their behalf – at one and the same time we had too many other matters clamouring for our attention. There were the proofsheets of El informe de Brodie to read. That stole three or so days’ time, and on the heels of that four more days were lost when we had to produce, in English, a thousand-word introduction to an encyclopaedia article for Grolier, the New York publisher, which was at least a year overdue. Macrae, getting understandably nervous, wanted to publish the stories without any of the new material, but I lied through my teeth and wrote to him that all was coming along fine. It was. What I failed to say was fine – but at a snail’s pace.

Meanwhile, I sent the first chapter of the autobiography to Henderson at the New Yorker, asking whether he thought they might be able to use it. He replied at once to say that if the rest were as good, yes. The entire week of 15 June is blank in my diary with only an explanatory scribble, ‘no work on auto. essay this week. Spent most of time preparing the divorce.’ The next month started out with blank pages as well.

D-Day was 7 July 1970. Only it was not an invasion but a getaway. That chill, grey winter’s morning – as part of our elaborately hatched plan – I lay in wait for Borges in the doorway of the National Library, and the moment he arrived I leapt into his taxi and off we sped for the intown airport. Borges, a trembling leaf and utterly exhausted after a sleepless night, confessed that his greatest fear had been that he might blurt the whole thing out to Elsa at any moment. Hugo Santiago, the film-maker, who was in on the plot, and my wife were there at the flight counter with a pair of single tickets to Córdoba for Borges and me, where the lawyer had booked us into a hotel only we two knew the name of. Like good conspirators, we allowed no one knowledge of the whole plan. That way, no lies needed to be told, nor could anything be given away. Doña Leonor, Borges’s ninety-four-year-old mother, who was punctilious in her rectitude, feared that Elsa would be quick to ring her for information, and while Leonor wanted to be able to say in truth that she did not know her son’s whereabouts, still she was anxious to be able to reach him if necessary. That was easy. I gave her a telephone number on a slip of paper in a sealed envelope and had her watch me secrete it in a drawer of her desk.

Bad weather delayed our flight, and a jittery Borges thought the jig was up. Santiago and I did our best to put him at ease, laughing at our own feeble attempts at gallows humour, but it was nervous laughter and both of us, I know, were quaking in our boots. Eventually, by twelve o’clock, our plane took off.

We holed up for a whole week, first in Córdoba, then in Coronel Pringles, where, after a daylong drive across the pampa, we barely arrived in time for a lecture Borges was to deliver on the subject of the Indian raids and the conquest of the desert – meaning the conquest of the Indians – of the previous century. Borges put on a brave face, stubbornly insisting that he was fit to travel these enormous distances, fit to engage in public speaking, but he was on the edge of nervous collapse. The next day his spirits picked up when he could show me the town of Coronel Suárez, some seventy-five kilometres away, named after his great-grandfather. We drove there in caravan with the mayor and other town officials of Pringles, to be met by their counterparts in Suárez, where a splendid midday banquet was laid on for us all. I sat next to the priest, a jolly fellow who, when I told him my religion was nada, nothing, made a rather good pun, retorting, ‘Nada, nada y nunca se ahoga’ – swim, swim, and never drown. Borges, who hated puns, pronounced this one first-rate.

Eventually, we got to our destination, Pardo, where we stayed in the old dusky-rose house belonging to Bioy Casares, the one that figures in the opening of Borges’s story ‘The South’. Eventually, we got back to the autobiography too. In fact, by sheer coincidence, it was at Pardo that we reached the point in his life when Borges met Bioy, and we wrote those pages of the story before crackling eucalyptus fires laid on by Bioy’s steward. Eventually, we finished the autobiography, not there, nor back in Buenos Aires even, but in the town of Tres Arroyos, again in the far south of the province. Borges had been invited to lecture on the poet Almafuerte. It was 29 July. In a room in the Parque Hotel, Borges lay stretched out on a single bed while I sat on the edge of another, a cleared bedside table between us as my desk, taking down the last words of his dictation. They were not the fine words that come at the end of the finished essay but emendations and additions to the conclusion of the previous paragraph, in which he speaks of longing to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against himself. ‘Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbour!’

The next week, back home, galley proofs of The Aleph and Other Stories arrived; the week after, the New Yorker’s cable saying they were taking the autobiography as a Profile. That same day, 12 August, Borges finished the final draft of his long story ‘El Congreso’, and together we finished the last two commentaries and our foreword to the book for Macrae. In my diary, there is no mention that the next day I posted the material off, but I must have. Instead, my mind was already on something else. The abstemious entry reads only, ‘Errands for Brazil trip.’ For it was just then, when he needed it, that the highly remunerative Matarazzo prize had been awarded to Borges for his life’s work.

‘Here in Argentina,’ Borges had told me on my very first morning in Buenos Aires, ‘friendship is perhaps more important than love.’

II

Borges and His Interpreters

For the most part, explanations of Jorge Luis Borges’s work have been more complicated than Borges’s work itself. Employing unpronounceable terminology, sometimes even inventing it, these interpretations usually map out elaborate systems whose outline the author, the most haphazard of men, never had the patience or curiosity to follow. Borges had no system, no programme, no grand scheme, and he tells us so twice over in one of his forewords. ‘I lay no claim to any particular theories’, he wrote in In Praise of Darkness, and added, ‘I am skeptical of aesthetic theories. They are generally little more than useless abstractions….’ He had what he called dreams – by which he meant daydreams. Whim, caprice, and daydreams guided him, even in his private life. So whimsical was he in his daily conduct, in fact, that once asked why he had signed a contract to provide an encyclopaedia article he had no intention of writing, he replied that he was being badgered, that it was a way of changing the subject, and that – as he was leaving for the Argentine the next day – hopefully the publisher would forget all about it.

Such erraticism, hand in hand with a chronic lack of confidence, even spilled over into the way Borges presented his work to the public. Convinced that each published volume would be his last, he never quite knew what to do with a new story or poem. A glimpse into the tangled web of his bibliography in the twenty or so years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s tells the story. Fresh work would find its way unannounced not only into a new edition of an old book but also – still secretly – into one or another impression (or, more accurately, ‘reimpression’) of that edition. (A case in point is Borges’s story ‘La intrusa’, tucked silently into the back of the 1957 edition of El Aleph in its so-called sixth impression, which is dated April 1966.)¹ Had Borges been systematic, his fiction – in terms of separate volumes – would have been richer by at least another title or two.

Writers on Borges have taken him far more seriously than he took himself. Laughter loomed large in Borges’s world, and to him literature was joy. Whenever these things are pointed out to his commentators, inevitably they go all solemn and fall back on the unanswerable. Invoking the subconscious, they claim that Borges was never fully aware of what he had created. Worse still, so po-faced are these exegetes that to a man (or woman) they miss the point that Jorge Luis Borges was one of the great comic writers of our time.

So let’s be guided straight into the vaunted labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges, unencumbered by the thicket of critical apparatus that has grown up around his work. There is a line in Byron’s Don Juan – ‘I only say, suppose this supposition’ – that comes to our aid. If we place these words at the head of almost any Borges story, the Argentine master is made instantly accessible, more so than by any of the vast unreadable library of books, articles, reviews, and doctoral theses that for years now his work has spawned.

Supposing that something were truly unforgettable, thinks Borges; and he imagines the character and circumstances of Funes, a young Uruguayan who, as the result of a childhood accident, is afflicted with total recall, so that he possesses ‘more memories than the rest of mankind since the world began’. Supposing the past could be undone, muses Borges; and he constructs the masterful tale ‘The Other Death’, in which, forty years after committing a cowardly act in battle, a man dies the kind of death he would have preferred to die. What if, asks Borges, all expression, all language, all poetry could be reduced to a single line or even a single word; and he dreams up two of his most genial tales, ‘The Mirror and the Mask’ and ‘Undr’, in which an Irish bard and a Norse skald, respectively, set out in quest of the unfathomable essence of absolute poetry. Or what if, Borges posits, there were a book with an infinite number of pages; and he invents the Book of Sand, a volume in which ‘None is the first page, none the last.’

Borges formally commented on a number of his own stories. Twenty of them, in fact. These remarks, written directly in English, appear in a long-out-of-print volume called The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969. One has only to compare what he said there with what the exegetes have concocted to see how simple and direct Borges was, how far from the inhuman, slightly monstrous literary intelligence he was too frequently made out to be. Having worked with him for a number of years, having lived in Buenos Aires, where I was immersed in his world, having translated ten or so of his books and studied his writing for decades, I find the line from Byron almost magical for the ease with which it lets us into Borges’s mind. In the teeth of the mystification, complication, and misconception that the bulk of Borges’s commentators have strewn in our path, I view him as an exacting craftsman and as a pure and rather old-fashioned teller of tales – one whose starting point is not ‘Once upon a time …’ but rather ‘Let us suppose …’ or ‘What if …’

Some years ago, I commented on a book about this Borges, the story-teller. The volume under scrutiny, I said at the time, was perhaps the the best-written book on Borges to date in English. It managed to be scholarly without too great a reek of the academy. Borges’s stories, its author accurately pointed out,

are exemplary, not morally exemplary like the stories once written by Cervantes and others to teach improving lessons in human conduct, but technically exemplary in that they dramatise the rules and procedures of the narrative genre to which they belong….

The book correctly went on to characterize Borges’s fiction as ‘think pieces’, tales about ideas rather than people. The volume contained several chapters of other valuable insights and observations, including one which comprised a perfect discussion of the philosophical basis of so much of Borges’s work.

Yet oddly the book was peppered with misconceptions and strange little inaccuracies that turned some of its arguments comic. At one point, to illustrate a particular thesis, the volume cited a four-page tale from Borges’s first fictional work, A Universal History of Infamy, claiming that the piece was ‘loosely derived from the Arabic’ and that it was ‘one of Borges’s earliest inventions’. But the story was not by Borges at all. While indeed a similar tale figures in an Arabian collection, the one borrowed by Borges here was an almost straight transcription from the medieval text of the Spanish infante Don Juan Manuel. As it turned out, Borges deliberately chose the story and put it into his own collection for the simple reason that as narrative – as the kind of imaginative narrative he was to make his hallmark – it was a better piece of work than he was then, in the early 1930s, capable of writing. That, it seems to me, is the point that should have been made.

Elsewhere in the same study, discussing another of the tales from A Universal History of Infamy, the author got a more serious detail wrong. Citing a lead given him by an American Borges commentator, Ronald Christ, the author states that Borges’s version of the Tichborne claimant story was derived from an account of it in Philip Gosse’s History of Piracy. It is difficult to comprehend what place the story of the great swindle of Victorian times, involving a noted old Catholic family and the supposed return of their long-lost son, could possibly have in a survey of buccaneers. I once pointed out to Christ that his interpretation had been based not on a reading of Gosse but on an error committed by an Argentine typesetter who, in a reprint of the Historia universal de la infamia, misplaced the linotype slug that accurately credits the source of the Tichborne story to the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Christ later acknowledged this in print and recounted how a simple printer’s error had led to what he called, poking fun at himself, ‘inevitable interpretive fictions’.

Some forty pages after first speaking of Gosse in the volume I reviewed, its author made the following full-blown reference to this same story, perpetrating yet another ‘inevitable interpretative fiction’:

As readers of Borges’ story we might … compare his Tichborne claimant with the original…. By comparison with Gosse, Borges’ story is the most blatant of fictions and all the more interesting for being so. He no more wants to imitate Gosse than Bogle [a character in the story] wants to imitate Roger Tichborne. On the other hand, it is Gosse’s story that we have to see as the ‘reality’ from which Borges’ translation departs…. The two versions vary in their circumstances, Borges having invented, for his purposes, quite different circumstances from those invented, or selected, by Philip Gosse.

While I was engaged in the translation of A Universal History of Infamy back in 1971, Borges made me a gift of several of the books he had used as source material when writing his tales. One of them was the Gosse volume, which had been utilized – quite logically – for a story about Chinese pirates. There is no connection or reference whatever in Gosse to the Tichborne affair, therefore I cannot even begin to speculate on what led the commentator to become so carried away by a text that does not exist. But then how typical of Borges, the sleight-of-hand master of bogus attributions and of texts that go missing, to subsume his interpreters in this way.

The story does not end there. In his notes to a 1998 compendium of Borges’s stories, Andrew Hurley – twenty-six years after Christ’s confession of error – could still claim in a statement that is a model of unclarity and equivocation that Gosse’s history is the source given by Borges, but ‘In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his “plays with sources”; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition….’ So much for Hurley’s scholarship and his insight into Borges’s mind. So much for the acumen of the Borges estate in specifying that Hurley’s compendium be based on a substandard edition of Borges’s works. So much for the competence of Borges’s Buenos Aires publisher. A mere glance by any of these at the original edition of the work in question would have been enough to correct the typographical error, set the record straight, and bring to an end decades of waffle and absurd supposition. In the preface to one of his story collections, Borges mocked a standard reference work ‘dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente’ – of which each new edition makes you yearn for the previous one. He laughed when we translated the passage and, with a tinge of sadness, added, ‘My complete works.’

My point is that these interpreters have been so cowed by Borges that rather than read what is there on the page with a bit of common sense they have instead been overly eager to intellectualize, to construct theories, to pit themselves against Borges in playing a far more complicated game than he ever intended. Blame for this to some extent can be laid to the fact that Borges is often studied in English, in poor translations, without reference to his Argentine roots. English-speaking critics, when they first came across Borges’s work in the early 1960s, appeared to believe that he had sprung from nowhere. Because his work drew on all Western (and Eastern) culture, his admirers often branded him a European writer. So did his detractors at home. Paradoxically, these virulent nationalists – because Borges refused to dabble in local colour, because he displayed maverick qualities such as a fondness for irony and subversion, because he thought for himself and was not afraid to speak his mind – could not see his profound roots in Argentine soil.² My greatest discovery when I went to work with Borges in Buenos Aires was to find that his books could not have been written by anyone but an Argentine.

Down the years there has been an uncanny and unholy tendency in academic circles – American ones, in particular – to overinterpret. I suppose this came about for two reasons. One is because the grinders out of doctoral theses do not understand how writers write. As a result of the verbal fireworks perpetrated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, they erroneously believe that the prose writer’s basic unit is the word, when in fact an author works in ideas, pages, paragraphs, or sentences, all guided by cadences – in short, a flow, a sweep, not a dribble. Towards the end of his life, Borges told a London audience that to him literature was made

Not just juggling with words. I try to forget the words and to say what I have to say perhaps not through the words but in spite of the words, and if a book is really good you forget the words.

A second reason for overinterpreting is that the academic, like the politician in office, must perpetuate himself in his position. Therefore, it has been a matter of interpreting or perishing, of putting every word under the microscope and finding the hidden fauna. In Borges exegesis this has often amounted to dwelling on single words and overloading them with significance.

A favourite anecdote about this brand of overloading concerns a private interview I once had with a professor at a Pennsylvania university. He was teaching a Borges story in English and asked me what the significance of the colour red was on the walls of a particular building in a certain Borges story. I imagine he wanted it confirmed that the hue stood for bloodshed and violence, thus foreshadowing the conclusion of the tale in question. Perhaps it did, though I doubt it. (Perhaps it even had a remote political significance, but I doubt that too.) For one thing, I always noted a concern in Borges not to give his endings away, a tendency that made him shun foreshadowing. Not to give their themes away when he attached epigraphs to at least two of his stories, he quoted no words but cited only the name, chapter, and verse of his sources.

Chagrined and disbelieving, my professor walked away when I told him that what Borges had described was the actual colour of an actual structure, one that belonged to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares.³ I knew the place, for once – when Borges was having marital difficulties – he and I had holed up there for a few days. The building, as was common in those parts, was simply red. I never got the chance to tell the professor that the colour, a traditional one, was originally derived from lime wash mixed with the blood of a bull. In fact, in his Spanish, Borges did not employ the general word for red but mentioned a certain vivid red known in the Argentine as punzó. The political comment, if there was one, concerns the use of this particular word. Borges qualified it with a nicely observed detail and said that the place had once been this shade of red but that ‘to its bene fit the years had softened that vivid colour.’ The colour, I prefer to believe, reflects a fact of daily life on the Argentine pampa – as does the fact that the building needed a coat of paint. On two counts, Borges had accurately depicted the structure. Anything else he would probably have looked on as mere cleverness. For the reader of Borges, there is no need to ignore what is before one’s eyes and look for the far-fetched.

When it becomes difficult to trust that a wall is red because it is red because it is red, we must question the limits of legitimate interpretation. Common sense should apply, just as in rabbinical exegesis, as a safeguard against esoteric and misleading interpretation, the primary meaning of language takes precedence. Writers are admired for pinning down an object, a mood, the ineffable, with precision. Borges’s prose, largely modelled on writers like Stevenson, Wells, and Chesterton, is realistic and as such it is full of sharp definition. Alas, the diction and mistakes of poor translations of Borges into English blur his prose and make it the victim of distortion born of ignorance. A common enough meteorological phenomenon, the red ring around the moon that forecasts rain, comes out in one story as ‘the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.’ In another, a small kettle used to brew maté – an everyday household utensil on the River Plate – is transmogrified into a ‘soup cauldron’. In another, ‘a growth of tall reeds’, a common detail of the Argentine countryside, is bludgeoned into ‘a field covered in dried-out straw’. (While Borges was fascinated by the exotic in alien cultures, paradoxically he hated exotic descriptions of life in his own country.) In a fourth, the word jineta, which in Spanish means ‘shoulder braid’ or ‘insignia’, is misread for the word jinetes, which means ‘horsemen’ or ‘riders’. In the tale, the hero, a policeman who is about to take the side of the man he is hunting down, is troubled over his rank and uniform – in other words, over his shoulder braid, the emblem of his authority. The translation in question has him troubled about ‘the other cavalry-men’. The wonder was, Borges remarked, that the translator had not taken jinetas for the feminine of jinetes and had the hero troubled about ‘the Amazons’.

Another stock-in-trade of many interpreters has been the clever game of combing words for double meanings. Not satisfied that the Spanish word fuentes means only ‘fountains’ in a particular instance, one study tells us that the word is more helpfully translated into English as ‘sources’, which is a second Spanish meaning of the word. I grow impatient with this. Borges was writing about public fountains in a place like Trafalgar Square. I do not believe we find ‘sources’ in London squares. Fuente in Spanish can also meaning a serving dish. Why hadn’t that been thrown in for good measure? I am reminded of one translator of a Borges poem who went in for such surrealism when, translating the Spanish word cascos, he opted for ‘helmets’ instead of ‘hoofs’. The poem was about horses. Perhaps in Hieronymus Bosch horses have helmets, but in Borges, on the Argentine pampa, they have hoofs. In this case, the translator – a Latin American and at the time a professor at yet another Pennsylvania university – astonished Borges with his arrogance. The man read his version one day to an audience that included Borges. Afterwards, Borges took him aside and said, ‘Look here, cascos is “hoofs”.’ That evening, the man read the poem out again at another public gathering. Of course, the word had not been changed.

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