Month: November 2008

I seldom bother to read, much less cite, a poet’s prologue, so I’m a little surprised at how much I enjoyed reading Borges’ prologue to “In Praise of Darkness.” I think it probably gives a better indication of what to expect from his poetry than anything I’m going to have to say, and perhaps gives a clearer view of his poetry than the few poems that I choose to highlight, which probably say more about me than about him.

Prologue

Without thinking about it at the beginning, I have dedicated my now long life to literature; to teaching; to idle hours; to the tranquil ventures of conversation; to philology, of which I know nothing; to my mysterious habit called Buenos Aires, and to those perplexities which not without some pomposity are called metaphysics. At the same time, I should say that my life has not been lacking in the friendship of a certain few, the only kind of friendship of value. I do not think I have a single enemy or, if I have had one, that person never made himself known to me. The truth is but for those we love, no one can hurt us. Now, at three score and ten, I publish my fifth book of poems.

My publisher Carlos Frías suggested that I make use of this “prologue” to describe my ars poetica. Both my inner poverty and my will oppose his idea. I do not possess an aesthetic. Time has taught me a few devices: avoid synonyms, which have the disadvantage of implying imaginary differences; avoid Hispanisms, Argentinisms, archaic usage, and neologisms; to choose ordinary rather than surprising words; to take care to weave the circumstantial details into a story that readers now insist on; to intrude slight uncertainties, since reality is precise and memory is not; to narrate events as if I did not entirely understand them (I got this from Kipling and the Icelandic sagas). Keep in mind that the aforementioned rules are not obligatory and that time will take care of them anyway. Such habitual tricks hardly constitute an aesthetic theory. Moreover, I don’t believe in any aesthetic theories. In general, they are little more than useless abstractions; they vary with each writer and each text, and can be no more than occasional stimulants or instruments.

As I said, this is my fifth book of poems. It is reasonable to presume that it will not be better or worse than the others. Adding to the mirrors, mazes, and swords that my resigned reader expects, two new themes have appeared: old age and ethics. The latter, as everyone knows, was a recurring preoccupation of a certain dear friend given to me by reading him-Robert Louis Stevenson. One of the virtues for which I prefer Protestant nations to those with a Catholic tradition is their regard for ethics. Milton wanted to educate the children in his academy in a knowledge of physics, mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences. Doctor Johnson would pronounce a century later that “Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance.”

In these pages I believe that the forms of prose and verse coexist without discord. I might invoke illustrious precedents-Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, Chaucer’s tales, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, but I would prefer to declare that the differences between prose and verse are slight, and that I would like this book to be read as a book of poems. A book itself is not an aesthetic act, it is a physical object among others. The aesthetic act can only take place when a book is written or read.

It is often stated that free verse is no more than a typographical pretense; I think that an error lurks in such a certainty. Beyond its rhythm, the typographical layout of free verse is there to inform the reader that what awaits him is not facts or reasoning, but poetic emotion. On occasions long ago I aspired to the vast breathing of the psalms* or of Walt Whitman. After many years I realize (not without a bit of sadness) that in all my efforts in free verse I just went from one classical meter to another-the alexandrine, the eleven-syllable line, the seven-syllable line.

In my milongas, I have done my dutiful best to imitate the unfettered courage of Hilario Ascasubi and the street ballads of the barrios.

Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements making up our earth. One or two good lines can hardly make us vain, because they are gifts of Chance or of the Spirit; errors come from us only. I hope the reader will discover something worthy of his memory in these pages; in this world beauty is of all of us.

-J.L.B.
Buenos Aires, June 24, 1969

I do think his emphasis on “metaphysics” sets him apart from poets that I generally admire, though some might argue that R.S. Thomas also deals with metaphysics in his own right. But I generally agree with Borges’ ars poetica, particularly using “ordinary rather than surprising words,” and avoiding synonyms when the original word is more precise.

On the other hand, I think I’d have to disagree that “the differences between prose and verse are slight,” even though I find pleasure in both. Of course, I did cite one of his prose poems that I was rather fond of, and it turns out that they are also included his book of “short stories” that I just purchased.

I would certainly find it difficult to disagree with his parting comment, “I hope the reader will discover something worthy of his memory in these pages; in this world beauty is of all of us.’

I think the following two poems say volumes about Borges’ aspirations as a writer. In this collection, at least, the second poem directly follows the first.

To me, the more shocking of the two is the first one, which begins rather traditionally, by providing a rather acute summary of Emerson, who was known primarily as an essayist and philosopher who had been strongly influenced by Montaigne.

EMERSON

Closing the heavy volume of Montaigne,
The tall New Englander goes out
Into an evening which exalts the fields.
It is a pleasure worth no less than reading.
He walks toward the final sloping of the sun,
Toward the landscape’s gilded edge;
He moves through darkening fields as he moves now
Through the memory of the one who writes this down.
He thinks: I have read the essential books
And written others which oblivion
Will not efface. I have been allowed
That which is given mortal man to know.
The whole continent knows my name.
I have not lived. I want to be someone else.

The next few lines seem to capture Emerson’s love of nature, and go on to summarize his fame. Of course, it’s the last line that is completely unexpected. I’m still not sure I understand what it means, much less whether I agree with it. Since I’ve never encountered anything like it in Emerson’s own writing, I’d have to assume that that is how Borges would have felt if he had been Emerson.

Why he would feel that way seems to be suggested in

CAMDEN, 1892

The smell of coffee and the newspapers.
Sunday and its lassitudes. The morning,
and on the adjoining page, that vanity-
the publication of allegorical verses
by a fortunate fellow poet. The old man
lies on a white bed in his sober room,
a poor man’s habitation. Languidly
he gazes at his face in the worn mirror.
He thinks, beyond astonishment now: that man
is me, and absentmindedly his hand
touches the unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth.
The end is close. He mutters to himself-
I am almost dead, but still my poems retain
life and its wonders. I was once Walt Whitman.

Unlike the first poem where Emerson is revealed in the title, it’s not entirely clear that this poem is about Walt Whitman until the last line. The first poem begins on a positive note, whereas this one begins on a negative note. The man is living in “a poor man’s habitation” and appears close to death, with an “unkempt beard and the worn-out mouth./The end is close.” But he is astonishingly happy because he “was once” Walt Whitman and wrote “allegorical verses.”

I wonder if Borges would prefer to be Whitman because he senses he is more like Emerson, which certainly seems the case to me? More and more, though, I’m beginning to suspect that he’s more like Hawthorne than either of those two. His is certainly a rather dark Romanticism rather than an optimistic Transcendentalism, which might simply say that it’s nearly impossible for a modern writer to be be Transcendentalist.

Though I’m often fascinated with Borges’ ideas, too often I find his poetry too “intellectual” for my taste. In that sense, he reminds me more of Emerson, whose ideas I adored and whose poetry I tolerated, than he does of Whitman, whose poetry I adored but whose ideas seemed, at best, derivative.

Occasionally, though I run into poems like these that seem almost perfect:

SOLDIER OF URBINA

Beginning to fear his own unworthiness
for campaigns like the last he fought, at sea,
this soldier, resigning himself to minor duty,
wandered unknown in Spain, his own harsh country.

To get rid of or to mitigate the cruel
weight of reality, he hid his head in dream.
The magic past of Roland and the cycles
of Ancient Britain warmed him, made him welcome.

Sprawled in the sun, he would gaze on the widening
plain, its coppery glow going on and on;
he felt himself at the end, poor and alone,

unaware of the music he was hiding;
plunging deep in a dream of his own,
he came on Sancho and Don Quixote, riding.

As a footnote explains, Cervantes was a soldier in Urbina’s army. How perfect that a sense of “unworthiness” should produce one of the greatest works of literature ever written, a work often described as the first novel. In retrospect, that sense of “unworthiness” probably was essential in creating Don Quixote, one of the most charming failures ever created. What a fine line there is between failure and success.

And a few pages later, I find:

READERS

Of that gentleman with the sallow, dry complexion
and knightly disposition, they conjecture
that, always on the edge of adventure,
he never actually left his library.
The precise chronicle of his campaigning
and all its tragicomical reversals
was dreamed by him and not by Cervantes
and is no more than a record of his dreaming.
Such is also my luck. I know there is something
essential and immortal that I have buried
somewhere in that library of the past
in which I read the story of that knight.
The slow leaves now recall a solemn child
who dreams vague things he does not understand.

This is one of my favorite poems dealing with Borges’ dream motif. He adds another dimension here when he has a “character” dreaming his own adventures, rather than the author dreaming them, and ties these dreams into his childhood dreams, dreams he never quite understood. In an early poem “Break of Day” he says “if things are void of substance/ and if this teeming Buenos Aires/ is no more than a dream/ made up by souls in a common act of magic. In “Ars Poetica,” he says, “To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep/While it is another dream, and that the death/That our flesh goes in fear of is that death/Which comes every night and is called sleep.”