Borges and Joyce Read online

  the treasures of your darkness.

  What does our cowardice matter if on this earth

  there is one brave man,

  what does sadness matter if in time past

  somebody thought himself happy,

  what does my lost generation matter,

  that dim mirror,

  if your books justify us?

  I am the others. I am all those

  who have been rescued by your pains and care.

  I am those unknown to you and saved by you.]27

  In a larger way, the mature Borges is invoking here James Joyce’s Modernist legacy, particularly the distinctive ‘cadencias’ of Joyce’s unique music which stood in opposition to the cacophonous discords of other vanguard movements. Thus Borges argues that the glowing fire of his lost avant-garde generation has turned to ash, and that their fervent, cutting-edge poetics have only survived in the curricula of ‘crédulas universidades’. But this ephemeral existence, however, is justified by the long-lasting work of James Joyce, who, unlike the short-lived vanguard trends, has endured the test of time, and therefore enfolds them with the luminosity of his later glory. This becomes particularly apparent in the last three lines of the poem, in which Borges shifts the plural pronoun ‘we’ — used as a choral device that brings in the myriad avant-garde voices — into the singular first person pronoun ‘I’ of Borges the poet, who speaks to Joyce in the present tense and pays homage to his pervasive literary influence. In this final mystical vision, a humble and reverential Borges elevates his blind predecessor as the redeemer and saviour of the literary vagaries of his yesteryears, and as the continuing inspiration of his art. Once the blind and elderly Borges has summoned the ghost of Joyce as his guide and maestro, he is following in the footsteps of Virgil, who also sought the guidance of another blind bard, Homer. He is also following in the footsteps of Dante, who looked upon Virgil as the legendary figure to lead him through the shadowy confines of the Otherworld. In staging an imaginary conversation with Joyce’s phantasm, Borges is also inaugurating a poetic tradition that will be followed by two Poets Laureate from the Caribbean and Ireland respectively, Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. In Book V of Omeros Walcott’s poet-narrator elevates Joyce as ‘our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master/and true tenor of the place’, and has a vision of the ghost of Joyce as it appears at nightfall to walk the streets of his beloved Dublin:

  I leant on the mossed embankment just as if he

  bloomed there every dusk with eye-patch and tilted hat,

  rakish cane on one shoulder.28

  Just as Borges and Walcott paid tribute to their Irish predecessor, so Heaney similarly conjured up an encounter with the spectre of Joyce in Station Island. Amongst the numerous ghosts which Heaney stumbles upon during this physical and spiritual voyage of self-discovery is the looming phantom of Joyce:

  Like a convalescent, I took the hand

  stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

  an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

  to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

  fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

  or to be guided I could not be certain

  for the tall man in step at my side

  seemed blind; though he walked straight as a rush

  upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.29

  Like Borges and Walcott, Heaney is able to capture Joyce’s distinctive silhouette by means of a brief descriptive passage that condenses his archetypal image. The dream vision that follows stages Heaney’s dialogue with the spectre, who advises him on his career and role as a poet: ‘Your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite. / What you do you must do on your own. / The main thing is to write for the joy of it’.30 Ultimately, what Borges, Walcott, and Heaney are saying here is that the haunting phantom of Joyce has become their guide and inspiration in their journeys through literature. The three poets are paying homage to the vast literary tradition encompassed in Joyce’s work, as the elongated shadow of Joyce has also enwrapped the kindred spirits that preceded him: Homer, Virgil, and Dante.31

  Sailing Through Turbulent Waters: Ulysses and the Review Proa

  Borges opened his 1925 review of Ulysses with a boastful declaration: ‘Soy EL PRIMER AVENTURERO32 hispánico que ha arribado al libro de Joyce: país enmarañado y montaraz que Valery Larbaud ha recorrido y cuya contextura ha trazado con impecable precisión cartográfica (N. R. F., XVIII)’ (Inq. 23) [‘I am the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses, a lush wilderness already traversed by Valery Larbaud, who traced its dense texture with the impeccable precision of a mapmaker’] (SNF 12). What is implicit in Borges’s emphatic assertion is not only his belief that he is the first Hispanic explorer of the epic Ulysses, but also the awareness that he was touring Joyce’s geography for the later enlightenment of the Spanish-speaking world. And yet Borges’s proud claim to be Joyce’s first Hispanic critic and translator had been undermined by the Spanish writer Antonio Marichalar who, just two months previously, had published an article on Joyce and fragmentary translations of ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’ in the November 1924 issue of the Spanish review Revista de Occidente [The Western Review].33 Indeed, the youthful, impetuous Borges was unaware of the fact that Marichalar was also competing for the honour to render the first pages of Ulysses into Spanish. But as far as Borges had been able to see, his only predecessor in charting a path through Joyce’s terra incognita was Larbaud, to whom he refers to as a rigorous mapmaker. Undoubtedly, he is also alluding to the schemata of Homeric and symbolic correspondences that Joyce had lent to Larbaud in order to help him with the preparation of his public lecture. It is well known that the diagram of correspondences proposes a system of parallels between the eighteen episodes of Ulysses, by assigning a specific hour, scene, organ, art, colour, symbol and technique to each Homeric title. Joyce had lent the schemata to several critics and writers, including Larbaud, Carlo Linati, and Stuart Gilbert, amongst others. Regarding the Homeric parallels Borges duly stated: ‘Joyce pinta una jornada contemporánea y agolpa en su decurso una variedad de episodios que son la equivalencia espiritual de los que informan la Odisea (Inq. 27) [‘Joyce portrays a day in modern life and accumulates a variety of episodes in its course which equal in spirit those events that inform the Odyssey’] (SNF 14). Borges also sketched a biographical profile of Joyce with material collated from Larbaud’s 1921 Paris lecture (although the emphasis on Joyce’s faultless Latin is definitely Borges’s):

  [Joyce] nació el ochenta y dos en Dublín, hijo de una familia prócer y piadosamente católica. Lo han educado los jesuitas; sabemos que posee una cultura clásica, que no comete erróneas cantidades en la dicción de frases latinas, que ha frecuentado el escolasticismo, que ha repartido sus andanzas por diversas tierras de Europa y que sus hijos han nacido en Italia

  (Inq. 24–25).

  [He [Joyce] was born in Dublin in 1882, into an eminent and piously Catholic family. He was educated by the Jesuits. We know that he possesses a classical culture, that he is not unfamiliar with scholasticism, that there are no errors of diction in his Latin phrases, that he has wandered the various countries of Europe, and that his children were born in Italy (SNF 13).]

  But for all of Borges’s initial arrogance and the grandiosity of his claim to be the first Hispanic reader of Ulysses, he soon laid bare his aesthetics of compression that stood in opposition to the grand epic scale of Joyce’s Ulysses, and described his reading as ‘[lo] inestudioso y transitorio de mi estadía en sus confines’ (Inq. 23) [‘[my] visit within its borders has been inattentive and transient’] (SNF 12). In a broad sense — and looking ahead to Borges’s subsequent development as a writer — what Joyce rendered on the vast and open canvas of the novelistic genre, Borges later contracted within the tight confines of the short story. Hence, a tongue-in-cheek Borges openly and unreservedly confessed to not having read Ulysses in its entirety: ‘Confieso no haber desbrozado las setecientas pági
nas que lo integran, confieso haberlo practicado solamente a retazos’ (Inq. 23) [‘I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces’] (SNF 12). Borges justified this claim, however, by arguing that notwithstanding his incomplete reading, he still professed to know the book with ‘esa aventurera y legítima certidumbre que hay en nosotros, al afirmar nuestro conocimiento de la ciudad, sin adjudicarnos por ello la intimidad de cuantas calles incluye’ (Inq. 23) [‘with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever laying claim to the intimacy of all the many streets it includes’] (SNF 12). Apart from conveying Borges’s fragmentary reading of Ulysses, this statement reveals an even more significant aspect of his understanding of Joyce, as Borges uses the image of the city for his own purposes. In a larger way, what Joyce had done for Dublin, the young Borges aimed to do for his native Buenos Aires. ‘Joyce, in his exile in Trieste,’ writes Jason Wilson, ‘in his myopic dedication to writing, had turned his beloved Dublin into the site of a new myth. Borges had hoped to do the same with Buenos Aires.’34 The youthful Borges may have wandered around the labyrinthine streets of Ulysses much in the way that has been described by Colin MacCabe: ‘Ulysses is a voyage through meaning: a voyage through all the discourses available in English in 1904. As Bloom and Stephen move through Dublin so the writing moves through the city of words that is English.’35 The Joycean aesthetic that Borges consciously pursued in the 1920s is clearly discernible in his aspiration to chart a literary mythology of Buenos Aires. It is also surely relevant to note that their first books of fiction and poetry respectively are entitled with the names of their native cities: Dubliners (1914) and Fervour of Buenos Aires (1923). In these collections of stories and poems the writers undertake the task of elevating Dublin and Buenos Aires respectively to worldwide recognition by mapping a spatial and cultural landscape of their metropolis. This intersection is furthered from a biographical standpoint, since Borges and Joyce are writing from the perspective of young, aspiring writers, inasmuch as Joyce completed Dubliners at the age of twenty-five and Borges was about to turn the same age when Fervour of Buenos Aires was released. Borges alluded in the review to Joyce’s biographical trajectory, including his birth in Dublin, in 1882, and his voluntary exile in Europe, as well as the important fact that Joyce ‘ha compuesto canciones, cuentos breves y una novela de catedralicio grandor’ (Inq. 24–25) [‘He has composed lyrics, short stories, and a novel of cathedral-like grandeur’] (SNF 13).

  Yet Borges’s voyage — or shortcut — through the labyrinth of Ulysses suggested an additional, larger metaphor, which amalgamated his pioneering reception of Joyce with his role as editor and founder of Proa. This dual impulse is conveyed in the self-conscious statement: ‘Joyce es audaz como una proa y universal como la rosa de los vientos’ (TR1 28) [‘Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner’s compass’] (SNF 14). Therefore in 1925 Borges applied to the newly discovered Ulysses the symbolism of the futuristic journal caption taken from navigational terminology. The result of this insightful fusion is the suggestion that Ulysses shared with Proa the same bold and perilous enterprise of pointing towards new directions. ‘The image of the prow’, argues Beatriz Vegh, ‘represented for the editors a visual reality symbolizing what the journal valued and wished to enhance in the literary and artistic horizons and productions of their country: audacity, analytical approach, directional newness, fervour, dissatisfaction with conventional norms and intellectual unrest.’36 The ideological foundations of Proa — especially as they had been laid out in the 1924 anti-bourgeois manifesto of the review — are also reflected in Borges’s profound conviction of the power of Ulysses as a revolutionary book, its ultimate all-inclusiveness, as well as the relevance of its ontological enquiries:

  En las páginas del Ulises bulle con alborotos de picadero la realidad total. No la mediocre realidad de quienes solo advierten en el mundo las abstraídas operaciones del alma y su miedo ambicioso de no sobreponerse a la muerte, ni esa otra realidad que entra por los sentidos y en que conviven nuestra carne y la acera, la luna y el aljibe. La dualidad de la existencia está en él: esa inquietación ontológica que no se asombra meramente de ser, sino de ser en este mundo preciso, donde hay zaguanes y palabras y naipes y escrituras eléctricas en la limpidez de las noches

  (Inq. 26).

  [A total reality teems vociferously in the pages of Ulysses, and not the mediocre reality of those who notice in the world only the abstract operations of the mind and its ambitious fear of not being able to overcome death, nor that other reality that enters only our senses, juxtaposing our flesh and the streets, the moon and the well. The duality of existence dwells within this book, an ontological anxiety that is amazed not merely at being, but at being in this particular world where there are entranceways and words and playing cards and electric writing upon the translucence of the night (SNF 13–14).]

  For Borges, then, the metaphor of the prow served various purposes simultaneously. It transmitted the cutting-edge principles of the review (they were, so to speak, navigating on the tempestuous currents of literature, language, and culture), it described Joyce’s audacious mapping of previously uncharted territories, and it illustrated, additionally, Homer’s myth of the seafaring Ulysses. Such a suggestive tableau of nautical imagery recalls, to a further extent, Joyce’s comment to Arthur Power that ‘the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously.’37 Borges also extended the marine imagery of ‘prow’ with the cartographical symbol of the ‘rose of winds’. Like the rosa ventorum that showed the directions of the eight winds and served as a central diagram to maps and charts, Joyce’s Ulysses became a universal literary compass with which to navigate the vast sea of literature. This analogy acquires added relevance in relation to the manifesto that opened the magazine, in which Borges et al. referred to the audacity of the prow symbol and declared: ‘Creemos que por lo menos podemos ostentar la brújula del viajero’ (TR1 189) [We believe we can at least display a traveller’s compass]. Such an array of prows, compasses, and seafaring devices equally addresses the naturalistic impulses that characterized Joyce’s writing of Ulysses. In this vein, Frank Budgen described Joyce’s making of Ulysses to that of ‘an engineer at work with compass and slide-rule, a surveyor with theodolite and measuring chain or, more Ulyssean perhaps, a ship’s officer taking the sun, reading the log and calculating current drift and leeway.’38

  Nevertheless, for all his energetic exploration of Joyce’s epic geography, the ultraist adventurer ended his journey through the currents of Ulysses emphasizing, once more, his reluctance to read the book in its entirety, along with the impossibility of him carrying the hefty volume to Neuquén, a province located in the West of Argentina, ‘en la imposibilidad de llevarme el Ulises al Neuquén y de estud iarlo en su pausada quietud’ (Inq. 28) [‘I have not the ambition to take Ulysses to Neuquen and study it in quiet repose’] (SNF 14). But in a final, unexpected twist, he added as a closing quotation the not entirely innocent remark made by the Spanish Golden Age playwright, Lope de Vega, in his attempt at deciphering the baroque experiments of Góngora: ‘Quiero hacer mías las decentes palabras que confesó Lope de Vega acerca de Góngora: Sea lo que fuere, yo he de estimar y amar el divino genio deste Cavallero, tomando del lo que entendiere con humildad y admirando con veneración lo que no alcanzare a entender’ (Inq. 28) [‘I wish to make mine Lope de Vega’s respectful words regarding Góngora: Be what it may, I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand’] (SNF 15).39 The anticlimactic closure of the review with a comparative reading of Joyce and Góngora ambivalently refracted through the perception of Lope de Vega’s hesitant stance, takes us to the heart of Borges’s conflictual relationship with Jo
yce. As the passionate, avant-gardist Borges gave way to the emergence of the mature, self-composed author of the utterly compact and metaphysical ficción, so the gulf between Joyce’s aesthetics of expansion and Borges’s aesthetics of compression became even greater. Furthermore, this statement also invalidates critical claims that highlighted the ‘unconditional, celebratory reverence’ of Borges’s review,40 but instead reveals a more complex, hybrid texture that marks the beginning of Borges’s admiration but also serious reservations towards Joyce.

  Jorge Luis Borges, Translator of Ulysses

  If Valery Larbaud has been unanimously recognized as the European promoter of Ulysses, then Jorge Luis Borges fulfils a similar role in the Hispanic world.41 Just as Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier considered Larbaud the most suitable candidate for the French translation of Ulysses, the Uruguayan Natalio Botana (the owner of the Argentine newspaper Crítica) similarly commissioned Borges to undertake the difficult task of translating Ulysses into Spanish. As stated in the intro duction, Borges gave an unequivocal ‘Yes’ and Botana promptly telegraphed London, only to find out that the Joyce estate had already awarded the translation rights to fellow Argentine J. Salas Subirat, whose complete translation of Ulysses finally appeared in 1945.42 How much different would the reception of James Joyce have been in the Hispanic world had we had a complete translation of Ulysses by a writer of the stature of Jorge Luis Borges? Whilst it is tempting to be allured by the attractiveness of envisaging a fusion between two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century, we should not be fooled here by Borges’s impetuous agreement to undertake a project of such magnitude. Undoubtedly, it remains highly questionable whether Borges, for all his repeated adherence to an aesthetic of brevity, his encapsulation of infinity in a small iridescent sphere known as the Aleph, and his tongue-in-cheek habit of providing commentaries and summaries of real and imaginary books, would have been able to tackle the epic proportions of Joyce’s modernist novel. Indeed, Borges’s aesthetics of brevity can only produce an abridged rendering of Ulysses, a miniaturized version of Joyce’s epic proportions filtered through his own economical impulses. One plausible conclusion we may extract from this is that Borges is only capable of providing us with an abridged translation of Ulysses. Like ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ who opted for rewriting selected paragraphs from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Borges confined himself to a fragmentary translation of Joyce. But we should recognize that if Cervantes was the subject of Borges’s humorous exercise, it was Joyce who was very much in the background of Borges’s reflections on reading and translation. Borges’s celebrated technique of ‘anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones erróneas’ (OC1: 450) [deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions], prides itself in eschewing literary chronologies and challenging stable notions of authorship. This might validate the claim that Joyce’s Ulysses precedes Homer’s Odyssey, inasmuch as the Hispanic reader is now prompted to read ‘Penelope’ refracted through the idiosyncratic prism of Borges. Consequently, since Borges neither translated a complete version of Ulysses, nor acted as supervisor (like Larbaud in France) of the unabridged rendering into Spanish, his role as translator of Joyce will be examined mainly through his fragmentary version of ‘Penelope’, as well as in relation to his reception of Salas Subirat’s translation in the Buenos Aires press.43