Borges and Joyce Read online

  Ricardo Güiraldes belonged to one of the most illustrious and prosperous landowning families of Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century, his privileged social status and unlimited wealth enabling him to lead an untroubled lifestyle of literature and travels. These journeys involved frequent expeditions to Paris, which in those days was the undisputed Mecca for many well-off Latin Americans. In this respect, we can recognize in Güiraldes a mirror image of Larbaud, who also belonged to an affluent French family, enjoying the benefits of an existence free from financial troubles, and who devoted himself to a successful literary career and frequent expeditions across several European countries. Güiraldes’s first encounter with Larbaud took place in 71 rue du Cardinal Lemoine — Larbaud’s Paris residence — in the autumn of 1919. By the time Larbaud formally met Joyce in December 1920 and was ‘raving mad over Ulysses’ (JJII 499), his relationship with Güiraldes had become fully consolidated. Larbaud’s ensuing promotion of Ulysses coincided with his endorsement of Güiraldes’s work in the Nouvelle Revue Française,13 one of the most prestigious literary reviews in Paris. But the relationship between the two men went much further. Indeed, there was a fundamental Latin American connection between Larbaud and Güiraldes, which would have largely contributed to the rapid development of their personal and literary relationship. Larbaud’s celebrated fictional persona, Archibald Olson Barnabooth, was a young South American multi-millionaire who journeyed across Europe in a quest for self-knowledge. Moreover, Larbaud’s novella Fermina Márquez was based on his adolescent days at the illustrious Sainte-Barbe-des-Champs school, whose renowned educational excellence made it very popular with affluent Latin American families.14 Sylvia Beach pertinently recalled: ‘He [Larbaud] was sent to a school attended by a great many Argentinians, and it was there that he learned to speak Spanish like a native.’15 Güiraldes manifested his gratitude to Valery Larbaud by symbolically naming a character of his gaucho elegy Don Segundo Sombra with a Hispanic variation of his first name, Valerio Lares.

  Meanwhile, in March 1922 the restless Güiraldes embarked on yet another voyage across the Atlantic, arriving in Paris at the precise moment the recently published Ulysses was receiving considerable attention there, as well as raising an intense climate of speculation in the rest of Europe and the United States. In spite of Güiraldes’s brief sojourn in the French capital, that saw him returning to Buenos Aires at the end of the same year, he nonetheless managed to purchase a copy of Ulysses via the intercession of Larbaud and Beach. Yet it remains an irony that the Francophile Güiraldes, although possessing no knowledge of the English language, nevertheless paved the way for the diffusion of a book in a language he ignored. This eccentric impulse, however, can be explained by his desire to present to Argentine intellectual circles the latest episode in French literary affairs and, equally, as a gesture of gratitude and renewed support for Valery Larbaud. In the end, thus, the journey of Ulysses from Paris to Buenos Aires involved a complex process of migration that not only enabled its physical appearance on Argentine soil, but also presupposed the existence of a readership that would guarantee its eventual consumption in the receiving culture. All literary works strive to find their readers; in 1924 Ulysses found its match in the avant-garde, nationalistic expression of Jorge Luis Borges, who was at the time one of the most promising men of letters of the young generation. Borges’s fluency in English, Spanish, French, German, and a solid Latin education, his unique erudition and close association with the introduction of avant-gardism in Argentina made him, for the time being, the ideal reader of Joyce. Borges had brought back from his European excursions the Spanish movement Ultraísmo, of which he had been a dedicated theorist and practitioner, with regular contributions in the Spanish periodicals Grecia, Ultra, and Tableros.16 The purposeful Güiraldes, then, entrusted the book to the accomplished twenty-five-year-old poet. Yet the gift of the book came at a price; Güiraldes asked Borges to undertake the translation of Ulysses, albeit fragmentary, for the review Proa. In a letter of 26 October 1924 to Guillermo de Torre, Borges alludes to Güiraldes’s request and enthusiastically announced his forthcoming translation of the last two pages of ‘Penelope’.17 (We should also bear in mind that Larbaud’s correspondence with Güiraldes included several references to Joyce’s life and works, ranging from his frequent eye operations to all kind of editorial matters related to Ulysses, which would have provided relevant additional information for Borges.)18 At the same time, Borges’s fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ into Spanish coincided with two significant events in the reception of Joyce that were taking place in France and Spain. In 1924 the Spanish poet, critic, and translator Dámaso Alonso, who is known mainly as one of the members of the influential ‘generación del 27’, agreed to undertake the first translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Spanish. Signed under the pseudonym of Alonso Donado, El artista adolescente (retrato) was published in Madrid in 1926 and had the added advantage of claiming a certain degree of collaboration with the author, as Alonso held an epistolary correspondence with Joyce (see Letters III 128–30). Undoubtedly, any attempt to translate Joyce in the mid-twenties ought to have been inspired by the influential translation of A Portrait (1924) into French by Ludmila Savitsky and, above all, by the beginning of the difficult venture headed by Monnier and Beach to publish a French translation of Ulysses. Whilst Larbaud was the favoured recipient for such a vast enterprise, he nevertheless opted to limit his services to supervisor of the edition, with the gargantuan task to be eventually undertaken by Auguste Morel.

  If during his lifetime Güiraldes served as the central, yet unacknowledged link in the promotion of Joyce in Latin America, after his untimely death from cancer in Paris in 1927 a series of circumstances strengthened his posthumous association with the Irish writer. Just as in 1922 he purchased copy n47 of the first edition of Ulysses, so the first numbered copy of the 1929 translation of Ulysses into French was specially printed for Güiraldes’s widow, Adelina del Carril de Güiraldes. This unique N.1 copy, part of a limited edition of twenty-five copies on Hollande van Gelder paper, displays the following typescripted dedicatory: ‘Exemplaire imprimé pour Madame Adeline del Carril de Güiraldes’.19 By dedicating the first number of this edition to Güiraldes’s widow, Monnier and Larbaud paid their respects to Güiraldes and presented it as homage to the surviving wife of their deceased friend.20 Last, but not least, Güiraldes died in Paris in 1927 in an apartment located in 7 rue Edmond Valentin. Coincidentally, Joyce resided there in the years 1934–39, which amounts to a record number of five years, without a doubt, an unusually long period for his customarily nomadic lifestyle. The flat belonged to Güiraldes’s friend, the Argentine Alfredo González Garaño.21

  'Fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres' (D 32): Ulysses in Argentina

  In the effervescent climate of Argentina in the 1920s, an avant-garde manifesto did not come exempt from the customary challenge to social, linguistic, and cultural conventions. Therefore, in 1924 the founders of Proa, Güiraldes, Borges, Brandán Caraffa, and Pablo Rojas Paz proclaimed thus: ‘Trabajamos en el sitio más libre y más duro del barco, mientras en los camarotes duermen los burgueses de la literatura. Por la posición que hemos elegido, ellos forzosamente han de pasar detrás nuestro en el honor del camino’22 [While we work in the forefront and most difficult place of the ship, the bourgeois men of letters are sleeping in their cabins. Due to our chosen position, they shall be forced to go behind us in this honourable journey]. The underlying sense of defiance at stake here has been magnificently captured by the Buenos Aires avant-garde painter, writer, mystic, and inventor of languages, Xul Solar, who, according to Borges was ‘our [Argentine] William Blake’ (A 41). In 1923 Solar produced an imposing watercolour painting depicting three figures with disproportionately long necks and elongated arms with daggers (most surely representing three of the founders) aboard the ship Proa. In the tempestuous sea of the picture are three monstrous oceanic creatures emerging from the water and engaging i
n a fierce battle with the three sailors, who boldly encounter their hideous opponents with unbending courage and resolution.23 In this way, Borges, Güiraldes et al. carefully branded the futuristic Proa as an innovative, rebellious periodical for a new literary generation. In the joint preface that launched the second phase of the journal, its members declared that, among other things: ‘Proa aspira a revelar en sus páginas la inquietud integral de los espíritus fecundos que viven esta hora’ (TR1 190) [[Proa] aspires to disclose in its pages the fundamental concerns of the creative spirits of this time]. In his autobiographical essay, Borges reflected that their contributions to Proa were aimed at ‘renewing both prose and poetry’ (A 41), particularly through their attempt to create new metaphors and striking poetical images. As editors of an avant-garde journal, the young founders of Proa aimed to introduce Argentine audiences to the latest literary and artistic innovations from both home and abroad. Thus, the January 1925 issue of Proa perfectly illustrated the overall aims of the review, bringing together an exceptional issue that contained, amongst other things, Borges’s pioneering review of Ulysses and fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’; a full-page portrait of Joyce; articles on Neo-dadaism and Surrealism by the Spanish poet and critic Guillermo de Torre; two illustrations by Borges’s sister, Norah; a first-hand account of Parisian literary life by Güiraldes; and two poems by Leopoldo Marechal, who, twenty-four years later, would publish the experimental city novel Adán Buenosayres, which Robin William Fiddian has aptly defined as ‘the first “Argentinian Ulysses” ’.24

  What were the cultural repercussions, then, of publishing a review and a translation of Ulysses in the Buenos Aires of the early twenties? If we consider that Ulysses had become outlawed in the United States, a legal procedure thereafter replicated in England, Ireland, and most English-speaking countries, this was, without a doubt, an act of great editorial audacity. Furthermore, the United States ban had come into place as the direct result of the serialization of several episodes in the avant-garde Chicago monthly, The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. As previously stated in the Introduction, Borges translated one of the so-called ‘obscene’ fragments from Molly’s eroticized soliloquy. Proa’s editorial decision acquires further significance if viewed in relation to a pertinent parallel drawn by Valery Larbaud. In 1925 he perceptively identified an analogy between Proa and The Little Review, both periodicals of the Americas, North and South, and representative of the latest European avant-garde sects and, hence, eager to endorse the dissemination of the most noteworthy events in the literary world. Larbaud unveiled this parallel in a tribute to Proa on its untimely closure: ‘Nous apprenons avec chagrin la disparition de la revue d’avant-garde Proa’ [We have learned with great sadness of the disappearance of the avant-garde magazine Proa], emphasizing that, ‘C’est là qu’ont paru la plupart des études et des notes réunies par J. L. Borges en “Inquisiciones” ’ [in this magazine appeared most of the studies and notes compiled by Jorge Luis Borges in Inquisiciones].25 His note concluded with a positive parallel between Proa and The Little Review: ‘Cependant Proa n’aura pas été inutile; elle aura donné à l’Amérique du Sud une revue littéraire comparable à celles des États-Unis: The Dial et surtout The Little Review’ [Proa, however, has not been in vain, it has conferred on South America a literary magazine which may be compared to others in the United States: The Dial and, above all, the Little Review].26 For Larbaud, Proa’s editorial decision to translate fragments from ‘Penelope’ and to introduce the work of James Joyce mirrored The Little Review’s previous serialization of Ulysses, particularly their controversial publication of ‘Nausicaa’. However, unlike The Little Review, the fragmentary translation of Ulysses published in Proa did not fall prey to overzealous censorship, and heralded instead the beginning of Latin America’s enduring love affair with Joyce.

  More generally, the decisive point in Borges’s participation in the Proa cultural project and his relationship with the avant-garde is clearly expressed in his 1969 poem-tribute ‘Invocation to Joyce’. Here a blind and elderly Borges looks back to his ultraista forays from the wider perspective of the numerous avant-garde trends that flourished during this innovative period in the first few decades of the twentieth-century. Due to its importance, the poem is included below:

  Dispersos en dispersas capitales,

  solitarios y muchos,

  jugábamos a ser el primer Adán

  que dio nombre a las cosas.

  Por los vastos declives de la noche

  Que lindan con la aurora,

  Buscamos (lo recuerdo aún) las palabras

  de la luna, de la muerte, de la mañana

  y de los otros hábitos del hombre.

  Fuimos el imagismo, el cubismo,

  los conventículos y las sectas

  que las crédulas universidades veneran.

  Inventamos la falta de puntuación,

  la omisión de mayúsculas,

  las estrofas en forma de paloma

  de los bibliotecarios de Alejandría.

  Ceniza, la labor de nuestras manos

  y un fuego ardiente nuestra fe.

  Tú, mientras tanto, forjabas

  en las ciudades del destierro,

  en aquel destierro que fue

  tu aborrecido y elegido instrumento,

  el arma de tu arte,

  erigías tus arduos laberintos,

  infinitesimales e infinitos,

  admirablemente mezquinos,

  más populosos que la historia.

  Habremos muerto sin haber divisado

  la biforme fiera o la rosa

  que son el centro de tu dédalo,

  pero la memoria tiene sus talismanes,

  sus ecos de Virgilio,

  y así en las calles de la noche perduran

  tus infiernos espléndidos,

  tantas cadencias y metáforas tuyas,

  los oros de tu sombra.

  Qué importa nuestra cobardía si hay en la tierra

  un solo hombre valiente

  qué importa la tristeza si hubo en el tiempo

  alguien que se dijo feliz,

  qué importa mi perdida generación,

  ese vago espejo,

  si tus libros la justifican.

  Yo soy los otros. Yo soy todos aquellos

  que ha rescatado tu obstinado rigor.

  Soy los que no conoces y los que salvas.

  (OC2 382–83)

  [Scattered over scattered cities

  alone and many

  we played at being that Adam

  who gave names to all living things.

  Down the long slopes of night

  that border on the dawn

  we sought (I still remember) words

  for the moon, for death, for the morning,

  and for man’s other habits.

  We were imagism, cubism,

  the conventicles and sects

  respected now by credulous universities.

  We invented the omission of punctuation

  and capital letters,

  stanzas in the shape of a dove

  from the librarians of Alexandria.

  Ashes, the labor of our hands,

  and a burning fire our faith.

  You, all the while,

  in cities of exile,

  in that exile that was

  your detested and chosen instrument,

  the weapon of your craft,

  erected your pathless labyrinths,

  infinitesimal and infinite,

  wondrously paltry,

  more populous than history.

  We shall die without sighting

  the twofold beast or the rose

  that are the center of your maze,

  but memory holds its talismans,

  its echoes of Virgil,

  and so in the streets of night

  your splendid hells survive,

  so many of your cadences and metaphors,