Borges and Joyce Read online

  Epic Proportions versus Compressed Ficciones

  Whilst in this study I take as a point of departure Borges’s renowned anti-novelistic stance, I will show that the dynamic that characterizes his literary relationship with Joyce simultaneously orchestrated sympathy and antipathy, praise and scorn, and affiliation and disaffiliation. In this sense, we could not speak of Borges’s relationship with Joyce without alluding to the ambiguity, unpredictability, and contradictoriness of his responses to the Irish writer. Even what has so far been considered Borges’s most celebratory writing, his 1925 Proa review of Ulysses, indisputably betrayed an early uneasiness with the epic scope and inherent difficulties of Ulysses, which led him to compare Joyce with the baroque experiments of the seventeenth-century Spanish writer Luis de Góngora. This becomes particularly apparent in Borges’s oxymoronic remark in a 1982 interview with Seamus Heaney and Richard Kearney: ‘I did recognize from the beginning that I had before me a marvellously tortuous book.’29 Behind the ambiguousness of Borges’s approach, I will demonstrate, lies a deeper realization that Joyce’s work served him as a looking-glass wherein he was able to find a reflection of the metaphysical, literary, and linguistic issues that occupied him during his career as a writer, critic, and translator. For one thing, Borges continuously gazed, both compelled and horrified, at the sheer scale of Joyce’s novelistic experiments in a conscious endeavour to reposition his aesthetic of brevity as the antithetical response to Joyce’s epic legacy. Moreover, Borges’s constant peeping through the multilayered texture of Joyce’s vast novelistic tableau served him as an excuse to foster a literary debate which enabled him to discuss a wide range of concerns including: the act of reading and interpretation; infinity and total recollection; translation as an act of recreation; translation as an impossibility; the category of literary genres; the heterogeneous catalogue; the literary tradition of the blind bard; and a self-examination of his role as the Hispanic publicist of Joyce. Finally, Borges had to confront the broader, more difficult issues concerning two marginal writers from Ireland and Argentina respectively, in relation to what he deemed as their unquestionable ‘right’ to a Western tradition — as he boldly stressed in his celebrated lecture ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’ (1953) — thus urging fellow Argentine writers to follow the example of the Irish who had taken all European subjects ‘sin supersticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas’ (OC1 273) [‘without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences’] (SNF 426). At the heart of Borges’s irreverential call for action is the assumption that the inheritance of several crowded centuries of Western discourses implies a radical rethinking of a tradition which must be affected, modified, and reinvigorated by the twentieth-century writer, Irish or Argentine. At various times in his life, Borges leaned to the mirror of Joyce’s art to recognize the shifting, composite silhouettes of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare in an attempt to see how their canonical significance has been redeployed across history, culture, and language. The enormous scope of these enquiries and the encyclopaedic nature of Joyce’s enterprise kept Borges occupied during a time span of nearly sixty years; from the youthful, avant-garde gesture of his 1925 review and translation of Ulysses, to the moving testimony of a blind and elderly man who in 1982 joined the Bloomsday celebrations to commemorate the centenary of Joyce’s birth in Dublin. In the extraordinary trajectory of this journey is encapsulated the full arch of Borges’s relationship with Joyce, and the fascinating, yet intriguing literary conversation between two icons of twentieth-century literature.

  Chapters 1 and 2 examine, analyse, and document the complex relationship between Borges and Joyce from a literary, historical, and cultural perspective by offering a comprehensive study of Borges’s reception of Joyce from 1925 to 1946 in the Buenos Aires reviews Proa, El Hogar, Sur, and Los Anales de Buenos Aires. The focus of Chapter 3 is on Borges’s 1941 obituary of Joyce in which he proclaimed Ulysses to be one of the precursors of his then work-in-progress, ‘Funes the Memorious’. With his usual irreverence and customary cheek, he proposed that the story’s paralysed hero from Fray Bentos — who had been gifted with an infallible memory — represented the ideal ‘monstrous’ reader of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The final three chapters discuss the way in which Borges and Joyce conjured up the ghosts of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. The central interrelatedness at stake in these chapters also lays emphasis on the crucial fact that Dante was a reader of Homer, as much as Shakespeare was a reader of a deeply mediated Homeric and Dantean tradition. Moreover, each of these triangular studies shows that the lingering spirits of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare haunted Borges and Joyce throughout their career as writers: their restless phantasms crept up, time and again, in the fabric of their works, eager to be reborn in a new language, culture, and history. The idea of resurrecting the dead appealed to Borges and Joyce, eager to devour their Western legacy and to transubstantiate it into the very essence of their arts.

  Notes to the Introduction

  1. Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), p. 161.

  2. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. by Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

  3. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. by Haun Saussy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

  4. Saussy, p. 3.

  5. Saussy, p. 4.

  6. Saussy, p. 4.

  7. Susan Bassnett, ‘Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century’, Comparative Critical Studies, 3.1–2 (2006), 3–11 (p. 6).

  8. Bassnett, ‘Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century’, p. 6.

  9. Gayatri Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. xii.

  10. Spivak, p. 15.

  11. Spivak, p. 8.

  12. Lucia Boldrini, ‘Comparative Literature in the Twenty-First Century’, in Comparative Critical Studies, 3.1–2 (2006), 13–23 (p. 15).

  13. Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 130.

  14. See Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, ‘Liberating Calibans: Readings of Antropofagia and Haroldo de Campos’ Poetics of Transcreation’, in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 95–113.

  15. Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘Notes to Borges’s Notes on Joyce: Infinite Affinities’, Comparative Literature, 49.4 (1997), 344–58 (pp. 345–46).

  16. Robert Weninger, ‘Comparative Literature at a Crossroads?: An Introduction’, Comparative Critical Studies, 3.1–2 (2006), xi–xix (xiv).

  17. Beatriz Sarlo, A Writer on the Edge, ed. by John King (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p. 47.

  18. All English translations of Borges’s works belong to the editions listed in the bibliography and will be cited parenthetically within the body of the book. All other unreferenced translations are mine.

  19. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 400.

  20. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, 1978), pp. 268–69.

  21. James Woodall, The Man in the Mirror of the Book: A Life of Jorge Luis Borges (London: Sceptre, 1996), p. 278.

  22. Nicolás Helft and Alan Pauls, El factor Borges: nueve ensayos ilustrados (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), pp. 128–39. They also suggest that this posthumous phase of Borges’s publication history has merited the designation of ‘invisible work’, in an appropriate analogy with the similarly neglected period in the oeuvre of the French symbolist writer, Pierre Menard. See Helft and Pauls, p. 129.

  23. Jorge Luis Borges, Textos cautivos: ensayos y reseñas en ‘El Hogar’ (1936–1939), edición de Sacerio-Garí y Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Buenos Aires
: Tusquets Editores, 1986).

  24. Jorge Luis Borges, Borges en revista multicolor: obras, reseñas y traducciones inéditas, investigación y recopilación de Irma Zangara (Buenos Aires: Editorial Atlántida, 1995).

  25. Interestingly, the ambitious 1999 English edition of Borges’s non-fictional work incorporated a variety of writings from the Obras completas, magazines, and other previously unpublished texts in an attempt to distance itself from the obvious difficulties of the Spanish editions. See Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. by Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999).

  26. Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 169 and 210.

  27. See Ulises Petit de Murat, ‘¿Quién sos vos para no discutirme?’ La Maga, año 1, 22 (10 June 1992), p. 17. Petit de Murat also agreed to collaborate with Borges in the translation of Ulysses.

  28. In the last three decades, the relationship between Borges and Joyce has attracted the attention of several critics who have produced a variety of critical essays which explore certain aspects of their literary relationship. For example, Schwartz, ‘Borges y la primera hoja de Ulysses’, Revista Norteamericana, 100–01 (1977), 721–26; Sánchez Robayna, ‘Borges y Joyce’, Insula, 437 (1983), 1, 12; Levine, ‘Notes to Borges’s Notes on Joyce: Infinite Affinities’, Comparative Literature, 49 (1997), 344–59; Chitarroni, ‘Borges y Joyce’, in Joyce o la travesía del lenguaje: psicoanálisis y literatura, Lasic y Szumiraj (compiladoras) (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), pp. 17–24; Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce: Jorge Luis Borges’s and José Lezama Lima’s Antagonistic Readings’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. by Karen Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 63–97; Vegh, ‘A Meeting in the Western Canon: Borges’s Conversation with Joyce’, in English Joyce Studies: Joyce’s Audiences, ed. by John Nash (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 86–97; Rice, ‘Subtle Reflections of/upon Joyce in/by Borges’, Journal of Modern Literature, 24 (2000), 47–62; Waisman, ‘Borges Reads Joyce: The Role of Translation in the Creation of Texts’, Variaciones Borges, 9 (2000), 59–73 and Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005); Willson, ‘Borges, traductor de Joyce’, in La Constelación del Sur: traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno, 2004). It is also important to mention Murillo’s The Cyclical Night: Irony in James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Yet, despite its promising title, this is not a comparative study but rather a separate, yet insightful investigation of their works. In the introduction, however, Murillo highlights important parallels between Borges and Joyce but declares that ‘some basic differences between them restrict the possibilities of a comparative study’, p. x. To some extent, my own study originated as a response to Murillo’s thwarted comparativism, in an attempt to show that a global, open model of comparative literature welcomes not only neat resemblances but also divergences and contradictions.

  29. Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 47–57 (48).

  CHAPTER 1

  Ulysses in Transit, from Paris to Buenos Aires: The Cross-Cultural Transactions of Larbaud, Borges, and Güiraldes

  In an interview with Seamus Heaney and Richard Kearney that took place during the centennial celebrations of Joyce’s birth in Dublin, 16 June 1982, a blind and elderly Borges — who attended the symposium as a guest of honour1 — spoke about his first encounter with Joyce: ‘Let us go back to the early nineteen twenties. A friend of mine gave me a first edition of Ulysses which had just been published by Sylvia Beach in Paris’.2 The friend who bestowed upon the young, avant-gardist Borges an editio princeps of Ulysses was Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927), the celebrated Argentine writer whose gaucho masterpiece Don Segundo Sombra (1926)3 became an instant best-seller during his lifetime and rapidly achieved the status of national treasure. Güiraldes had, in turn, secured his copy of Ulysses through his close friendship with the French critic, writer and translator, Valery Larbaud. According to the accounts wherein Sylvia Beach methodically recorded the subscribers to the first publication of Ulysses, Güiraldes purchased copy no. 47 of the 100 copies of the deluxe Dutch handmade paper edition sold at 350 Francs each.4 In a letter of 22 February 1922, Larbaud asked Beach to reserve him three copies of Ulysses, one for Güiraldes, the second for his wife, Adelina del Carril, and the third for Victoria Ocampo, the Argentine writer, critic, and founder of the influential Buenos Aires review Sur [South].5 The Larbaud–Güiraldes financial and cultural exchange signified the immediate migration of the newly released Ulysses to the remote and distant geography of Buenos Aires.

  In his seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ Walter Benjamin defies traditional approaches to translation and proposes that the original owes its surviving life to the translation and not vice-versa. Thus the original is endowed with an ‘afterlife’, a utopian survival by means of which it depends upon the translation for its ever-recurring existence.6 Drawing on this suggestive metaphor, Karen Lawrence asserts in Transcultural Joyce that: ‘[Joyce’s texts] are carried metempsychotically across cultural, linguistic, national, and gender divides to undergo a “change of manners”.’7 On its auspicious transatlantic journey to Argentina, Güiraldes’s copy of Ulysses embarked on the nomadic, transnational trajectory of the translated text. The voyage of the book culminated, nearly two years later, in Borges’s 1925 review of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ which appeared in the Buenos Aires avant-garde review Proa [Prow]. Following his avant-gardist impulses, Borges equated the innovative Ulysses with the futuristic title of the review, and infused his translation of ‘Penelope’ with his current nationalistic agenda by rendering Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated soliloquy into a distinctive type of Spanish saturated with Argentine diction. If Joyce’s Eveline failed to elope to the distant promise of Buenos Aires, then Borges’s Molly Bloom embodies the unfulfilled fate of her literary sister and proudly incarnates her new Argentine identity. What is, then, the itinerary followed by Ulysses in its migration to the Southern Hemisphere? And, upon arrival, how did ‘Penelope’ undergo its transformative process as an Argentine résumé of Ulysses? In order to answer these questions and to understand the crucial role that Borges played in the early reception of Ulysses in the Hispanic world, it is essential to provide a preliminary survey of the complex interactions that contributed to the dissemination of Joyce in Spain and Latin America. This chapter seeks to uncover a literary map that charts the early reception of Joyce in Argentina by focusing on Borges’s 1925 review of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’. It starts with a historical exploration of the cultural negotiations between Larbaud and Güiraldes which resulted in the safe arrival of Ulysses in Buenos Aires. It then discusses Borges’s review and translation, particularly through the rich symbolic meaning conveyed by the nautical image of Proa. It demonstrates that the voyage of Ulysses to South America signified not only the exportation of a notoriously expensive and controversial commodity, but also the shifting of history, literature, and language across geographical boundaries, and the complex ways in which these cultural forces were received in Argentina.

  Valery Larbaud, Promoter of Joyce (and Latin America)

  Not insignificantly, Richard Ellmann begins the second chapter of the ‘Paris period of his biography, James Joyce, with an unreserved tribute to Larbaud:

  Valery Larbaud, among the principal French writers of the 1920s, had the distinction of being the most receptive to the achievements of others. The excellence of his own work in poetry and the novel lent authority to his generous recognition of fellow talents. Besides his creative understanding of the literature in his own language, he was well versed in Italian and English literature. He was to make available to a French audience such writers as Coleridge and Landor. Most recently he had translated Samuel Butler. Though a man of subtlety and refi
nement, he had a most winning simplicity and directness.

  (JJII 499)

  Ellmann summarizes the creative, critical, and philological skills that earned Larbaud a prominent place in French literary circles and which, most of all, contributed to his successful diffusion of Ulysses. Notwithstanding Ellmann’s endeavour to pay full justice to the wide-ranging literary pursuits and polyglot abilities of Joyce’s devoted campaigner, he fails to mention that, as well as English and Italian, Larbaud was equally proficient in Spanish, and had been deeply involved in the promotion of works from Spain and Latin America.8 What are the consequences of this omission? Or more precisely, how can Larbaud’s simultaneous interest in the Hispanic world be recovered and reintegrated into the main critical narrative of his role as the publicist of Joyce? To begin with, John L. Brown draws attention to Larbaud’s deep involvement with Spanish and Latin American literature during the early 1920s, a crucial period that may be read in conjunction with Larbaud’s timely meeting with Joyce and his subsequent promotion of Ulysses: ‘On his return from Alicante in 1919, Larbaud increasingly devoted himself to Spanish literature and somewhat later, because of his friendship with the Argentinian, Ricardo Güiraldes, and the Mexican, Alfonso Reyes, to Latin American writing’.9 Further, Brown claims that Larbaud’s encounter with Güiraldes ‘contributed to Larbaud’s interest in Latin American literature, which was to be one of his major areas of critical activity during the 1920s’, as well as asserting that ‘through Güiraldes, Larbaud came to know two other Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges and the novelist Manuel Gálvez’.10 More recently, the decisive influence of Valery Larbaud within the wider European spectrum has become the recurrent narrative thread interweaving many of the outstanding essays of The Reception of James Joyce in Europe.11 What this wide-ranging collection makes evident is the crucial fact that for many European writers and critics unacquainted with Ulysses, Larbaud’s early reviews and fragmentary translations proved essential in the early dissemination of Joyce in their respective countries. For example, in a review of The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, Fritz Senn points out that ‘the most referred-to author [of the compilation] is Valery Larbaud. I count some thirty entries in the index; T. S. Eliot gets twenty-four. His lecture at Adrienne Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, on 7 December 1921, was often reprinted and quoted and may well have been the point of departure for reviewers who did not always rely on first-hand impressions’.12