Borges on Writing PDF
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BORGES ON WRITING BORGES ON WRITING Edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. New York First Edition Copyright © , by Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern and Frank MacShane All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast. Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: - SBN: --- (cloth) --- (paper) Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: “The End of the Duel.” Reprinted by permission of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., from doctor brodie’s report, copyright © , by Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. First appeared in The New Yorker. Excerpts from “The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (-).” Reprinted by per- mission of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., from the aleph and other stories -, copyright © by Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. “A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín.” Reprinted by permis- sion of Grove Press, Inc., from a personal anthology, copyright © by Grove Press, Inc. “A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín” and “Conjectural Poem.” Reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence from Jorge Luis Borges’ selected poems -, copyright © , , by Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. “June ,” “The Keeper of the Books,” “Invocation to Joyce,” and “John :.” Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker. Copyright © , by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. These poems will appear in in praise of darkness, to be pub- lished in the Fall, , by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. “The Watcher.” Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker. Copyright © by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. “The Writer’s Apprenticeship” (entitled “Who Needs Poets?”). Reprinted by per- mission of The New York Times. Copyright © by The New York Times Company. Portions of the main text first appeared in Antaeus, The Columbia Forum, and Tri- Quarterly. Contents Introduction Part One FICTION Part Two POETRY Part Three TRANSLATION Appendix: “The Writer’s Apprenticeship” Index Introduction Many readers have been so interested in Borges’ metaphysical com- plexities that they have forgotten he has had to face the same prob- lem every writer faces—what to write about, what material to make use of. This is perhaps the fundamental task a writer must con- front, for it will influence his style and mold his literary identity. Borges has written on a wide range of subjects, but in his most recent work he has returned to his point of origin. The new stories in The Aleph and Other Stories and in Doctor Brodie’s Report are based on his experiences as a young man living in the suburb of Palermo on the Northside of Buenos Aires. In a long autobio- graphical essay published in , Borges described this part of the city as being made up “of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby, genteel peo- ple as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos, famed for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our successful best—to ignore it.” Here is the classic situation of the writer. Borges, the heir of a distinguished line of Argentine patriots, with English blood in his veins and military heroes as ancestors, found himself, through no fault of his own, living in a community on the skids where all the crudities of the New World were painfully obvious. In Palermo, the war between civilization and barbarism was fought every day. For a while Borges kept Palermo out of his literary conscious- ness. And so almost every young writer shies away from writing about the life around him. He thinks it’s dull or embarrassing. Father’s a bore, mother a scold, the neighborhood is shabby and tedious. Who would be interested in it? Therefore the young writer often turns to an exotic subject and renders it in an exquisitely complex and obscure fashion. To a degree, Borges did the same. Although he wrote some stories about Buenos Aires, for the most part he concentrated on literary subjects. “Life and death have been lacking in my life,” he has said; he has also referred to himself as being “infested with literature.” The results, in his early writing, were predictable. At a certain point he tried, he said, “to play the sedulous ape to two Spanish baroque seventeenth-century writers, Quevedo and Saa- vedra Fajardo, who stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in ‘Urne-Buriall.’
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