Borges and Joyce Read online

  The Review Sur: Cultural Institution, Feminist Front, and Promoter of European Modernism

  Founded in 1931 by the Argentine critic, writer, and translator Victoria Ocampo, the literary review Sur stands as one of Argentina’s most influential ‘cultural institution[s]’, as John King puts it, which ‘helped to shape the course of Argentine letters in the twentieth century’.2 During its twenty-nine-year existence, Sur embodied the revolutionary principles of twentieth-century feminism, principally in Ocampo’s defiance to patriarchal discourses through the subject position of a woman whose challenging editorial enterprise led her to overturn the power relations of a predominantly chauvinistic society. With its name famously suggested by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset over a transatlantic telephone conversation, Sur had as its main aspiration the creation of a two-way transmission of culture, a principle that was illustrated in its pictogram of a red arrow pointing downwards, representing the diffusion of Western culture to the southernmost country in the world. Ortega y Gasset’s emphasis on the marginality of Argentina contributed towards a conscious repositioning of Argentina as a complex receptacle in which several cultures meet, clash, and intersect. Yet at the same time, in a truly cosmopolitan fashion, the editorial board of Sur was integrated by an outstanding cast of writers from Europe, the United States, and Latin America including: Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Drieu La Rochelle (France), Ortega y Gasset (Spain), Alfonso Reyes (Mexico), Jules Supervielle (French-Uruguayan), Waldo Frank (Unit ed States), Leo Ferrero (Italian) and Ernest Ansermet (Swiss).

  Following the steps of Revista de Occidente which founded a publishing house as a means to provide a financial backdrop for the magazine, in 1933 Ocampo inaugurated Editorial Sur, an ambitious publishing venture which, as well as bringing out the work of several national writers, also produced translations of a vast number of foreign books.3 In effect, Editorial Sur published the first rendering of Joyce’s Stephen Hero into Spanish (1960)4, as well as the first Spanish translation of Exiles (1937).5 ‘Spanish has been particularly attracted to Joyce’s only play’, writes Patrick O’ Neill, ‘which was to find no fewer than three further Spanish translations’.6 He also reports that a ‘version by Osvaldo López-Noguerol appeared, once again in Buenos Aires, in 1961; a version by Javier Fernández de Castro appeared in Barcelona in 1970; and a fourth translation, by Fernando Toda, appeared in Madrid in 1987 — thus giving Spanish more versions of Joyce’s play than exist in any other language’.7 In line with this increased interest in the dramatic dimension of Joyce’s oeuvre, Sur published a translation of Marjorie Barkentin’s theatrical adaptation Ulysses in NightTown (1958) under the title La noche de Ulises (1961).8 In this sense, Editorial Sur’s translation of Stephen Hero, Exiles, and Ulysses in NightTown ought to be understood in relation to Victoria Ocampo’s larger cultural project to disseminate the works of the most significant writers of the twentieth century in translation. As Lojo Rodríguez points out, ‘the works published by the publishing houses Sur and Sudamericana were distributed throughout the whole of South America and Spain’.9

  As previously stated, the other modernist writer who merited the attention of Ocampo was Virginia Woolf. In this sense, the most remarkable aspect of the reception of Woolf in the Hispanic world is its immediate association with two towering figures of Argentine letters: Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges. Just as Borges encountered Joyce through the intercession of Valery Larbaud, Sylvia Beach, and Ricardo Güiraldes, so Ocampo discovered the works of Virginia Woolf via Beach and Adrienne Monnier. ‘When Victoria arrived in Paris that first winter’, writes Doris Meyer, ‘she went to the rue de l’Odéon to see for herself what Güiraldes had told her was one of the landmarks of Paris, “La Maison des Amis des Livres”.’10 It is not surprising that Victoria Ocampo, an advocate of the rights of women in a patriarchal Argentine society, soon established a close friendship with Beach and Monnier. Indeed, Meyer underlines the important fact that: ‘It was Beach who, in 1929, first recommended to Victoria that she read the works of the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, especially a little book published that year entitled A Room of One’s Own.’11 Captivated by the diversity and complexity of Woolf’s work, Ocampo travelled to London in 1934 and was introduced to Woolf by the English novelist Aldous Huxley, whom she had previously met in Paris. In her fascinating biography, Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee wonderfully captures the immediate fascination between these two different, and yet very similar, female icons of the twentieth century: ‘The two women talked avidly, partly in French partly in English, as they stood in the middle of the private view. OCampo [sic] was forty-four. In her youth she had been a famous beauty; she was still, as Virginia said, ‘very ripe & rich ... the colour of an apricot under glass.’12

  Jorge Luis Borges: Translator of Woolf

  If Güiraldes had previously encouraged Borges to translate extracts from Joyce’s Ulysses for Proa, so Ocampo entrusted to Borges the translation of the works of her esteemed acquaintance Virginia Woolf. Thus, on Ocampo’s special request, Borges undertook the translation of one of the seminal landmarks of twentieth-century feminism, A Room of One’s Own (1937), as well as Orlando (1937).13 For the metaphysical and erudite Borges the exercise of translation opened a door to the exploration of female subjectivities, whether Molly Bloom’s eroticized and unpunctuated soliloquy — albeit filtered through the perception of Joyce’s male authorship — or the clearly defined feminist stance of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and the more complex, ambivalent gender positioning of Orlando.14 Regarding the immediate reception of Borges’s translation of Orlando, Lojo Rodríguez points out that: ‘Orlando was well received by South American intellectuals: Laura Ayerza (1991, 398) has described how Gabriel García Márquez took Woolf’s novel as an inspiration for his Cien años de soledad’.15 To read One Hundred Years of Solitude — the watershed of the boom generation and one of the most influential novels of Latin American literature — refracted through Borges’s idiosyncratic Spanish translation of Orlando is, undoubtedly, a testament to the ambitious cultural project of Sur. According to John King, ‘Ocampo disseminated Woolf’s work in Latin America at a very early date and thus helped to place on the agenda the problems of women in general (Argentine women still did not have the vote) and women writers in particular’.16 Yet another example of Borges’s interest in Woolf is afforded by his concise biography ‘Virginia Woolf’ that appeared in the October 1936 number of El Hogar (see OC4 215–16). Woolf embodied for Borges not only a distinctive female voice but also a passageway to Joyce’s prominent orchestration of styles in Ulysses. Therefore he mentions in his biographical sketch that Mrs Dalloway followed Joyce’s novelistic tradition of the one-day novel, as well as his exploration of the human psyche with the innovative technique of interior monologue.

  Southerly Winds: Joycean Airs Reach Argentine Shores

  The grand cultural project of Sur had cast its net wide, sweeping ambitiously between both sides of the Atlantic, creating a multifaceted canvas on which Argentines would be able to observe both their national creativities, as well as the artistic and literary trends currently taking place in the rest of the world. Ocampo was certainly aware that of the most significant European literary influences, James Joyce held pride of place, and therefore she set herself the task to disseminate in Argentina key critical studies of his life and works. In this sense, Editorial Sur’s Spanish translations of Joyce did not appear in isolation, but rather emerged in the company of a range of studies by national writers, well-known figures in Joycean scholarship, and French poets and intellectuals. In chronological order, and spanning a period of sixteen years, these papers included:

  — Charles Duff’s 1932 study James Joyce and the Plain Reader, translated as, ‘Ulises y otros trabajos de James Joyce’ (translator unknown). See Sur, 2 (1932), 86–127.

  — Preview of A. Jiménez Fraud’s translation of Exiles, Desterrados. See Sur, 35 (1937), 68–86.

  — A review of Finnegans Wake �
��Joyce y los neologismos’ [Joyce and the Neologisms] by Jorge Luis Borges. See Sur, 63 (1939), 59–61.

  — An obituary ‘Fragmento sobre Joyce’ [A Fragment on Joyce] by Jorge Luis Borges. See Sur, 77 (1941), 60–62.

  — A study by the avant-garde French writer Armand Petitjean ‘El tratamiento del lenguaje en Joyce’ [Joyce’s Use of Language]. See Sur, 78 (1941), 42–59.

  — A testimony of Joyce’s years in Paris and final days in Zurich by the French poet Louis Guillet. See Sur, 87 (1941), 28–42.

  — The Argentine poet César Fernández Moreno reviews a translation of C. G. Jung’s study of Ulysses, ¿Quién es Ulises? [Who is Ulysses?] originally published in 1932. See Sur, 120 (1944), 79–82.

  — An essay by Stuart Gilbert ‘El fondo latino en el arte de James Joyce’ [The Latin Background in the Art of James Joyce]. See Sur, 122 (1944), 11–24.

  — A study by the Córdoba (Argentina) poet, critic and translator Enrique Luis Revol, ‘Joyce, la literatura y el lenguaje’ [Joyce, Literature and Language].17 See Sur, 159 (1948), 75–86.

  What this revealing catalogue makes particularly evident is that the diffusion of James Joyce championed by Sur was largely conditioned, although by no means exclusively, by three determining and interrelated factors: the early European reception of Joyce’s works; Joyce’s untimely death in Zurich 1941; and the publication of the complete Spanish translation of Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat in Buenos Aires, in 1945. To begin with, Joseph Brooker has persuasively demonstrated that the publication of Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses (1930) marked ‘the beginning of a gradual process of intensified textual scrutiny [...] [Gilbert] heralds a long-term trend toward completeness and totality in the understanding of Joyce, the belief that his work not only bears but demands exhaustive explication.’18 In this sense, we can say that Charles Duff’s 1932 study follows the hermeneutical trend initiated by Gilbert, but more intently catered for the baffled, non-academic, supposed ‘plain reader’ of Joyce. In this respect, Jean-Michel Rabaté observes that: ‘The book handsomely manages to present the whole scope of Joyce’s writings in some fifty pages, while avoiding many traps and keeping the same urbane and balanced tone.’19 The promise of a James Joyce reference book for dummies made Duff particularly attractive to the inquisitive readers of Sur whose limited knowledge of Joyce would have been derived from fragmentary Spanish translations of Ulysses (such as Borges’s in Proa or Marichalar’s in Revista de Occidente) or the more recent 1929 French Ulysse. Indeed, if the ‘plain reader’ is at the heart of Duff’s project — his study was light-heartedly ‘DEDICATED WITHOUT MALICE TO THE PLAIN READER’20 — this is partly because he was deliberately distancing himself from the overall erudite and affected tone of Gilbert’s study: ‘We may well leave it for learned commentators to amuse themselves with, and assume that the plain reader need not worry too much about it [the Odyssey]. If he cannot appreciate the book without it, he will never do so with it.’21 Moreover, Duff also resorted to Gilbert as ‘the best substitute for the original [Ulysses]’,22 and, in this way, he advised the ‘plain reader who does not happen to possess or have access to a full text of Ulysses’23 to irrevocably and unashamedly turn to Gilbert. The extensive quotations from Ulysses interwoven into the texture of Gilbert’s critical analysis certainly offered a valid substitution for a book that had been prohibited in Europe and America. For all its insistence on the substitutional quality of Gilbert’s study, Duff’s strong assertion largely resonated in Borges’s essay ‘Narrative Art and Magic’ (1932) which was also published in Sur, 2 (1932). (Borges would have accessed James Joyce and the Plain Reader before its release). Thus, Borges took on board the idea of a ‘surrogate Ulysses’24 implicit in Duff’s claim, but gave it a twist as he ironically retorted that the reader who did not happen to possess a copy of Gilbert’s study should instead turn to Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Pero la ilustración más cabal de un orbe autónomo de corroboraciones, de presagios, de monumentos, es el predestinado Ulises de Joyce. Basta el examen del libro expositivo de Gilbert o, en su defecto, de la vertiginosa novela’ (OC1 232) [‘But the most perfect illustration of an autonomous orb of omens, confirmations, and monuments is Joyce’s preordained Ulysses. One need only examine Stuart Gilbert’s study or, in its absence, the vertiginous novel itself’] (SNF 81).25 This evidence underlines the important fact that Borges’s pronouncements on Joyce from 1925 to the 1930s onwards were not produced ex nihilo but, instead, the overall pattern that has emerged so far gestures outward and onward, especially in relation to the Joyce critical scenario which gravitated around the figures of Sylvia Beach, Valery Larbaud, Stuart Gilbert and, in this particular case, the British writer and critic, Charles Duff.

  The publication of Finnegans Wake in 1939 and Joyce’s untimely death in Zurich in 1941 constituted two major events in the world of letters that no serious literary publication could have ignored, hence accounting for Sur’s editorial decision to incorporate Borges’s review and obituary, and notes by the French writers Guillet and Petitjean commemorating Joyce’s life and works. What this implies, moreover, is that in the late 1930s Borges would have been keen to demonstrate that he was able to take further his pioneering reception of Joyce’s work, and to follow up his 1925 review and translation of Ulysses with an ensuing discussion — albeit not so enthusiastic — of Finnegans Wake upon its release. It is important to remember, however, that the review of the Wake which appeared in Sur was an enlarged version of an earlier review previously published in El Hogar (both reviews will be jointly discussed in the next section devoted to El Hogar).

  Upon Joyce’s death in Zurich, 13 January 1941, the review Sur promptly announced the publication of an obituary article entitled ‘James Joyce’ by Jorge Luis Borges in its forthcoming February issue.26 But in a typical Borgesian fashion, the totality (James Joyce) is reduced to a fragment (‘A Fragment on Joyce’). This follows in the footsteps of his 1925 shortcut through the labyrinth of Ulysses whereby he developed an episodic reading that celebrated the part over the whole, and which unveiled a fragmentary translation of ‘Penelope’ that strove towards the creation of a decontextualized recreation of the episode. And even his obituary stands midway between ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ and ‘A Fragment on Funes’, since a tongue-in-cheek Borges incorporated within the note an early draft of ‘Funes the Memorious’ and open-handedly awarded it a textual space occupying nearly half of the journalistic column. To some extent the inclusion of Funes at the beginning of ‘A Fragment on Joyce’ cancels a feature common to all obituaries, namely a biographical summary of the late writer. By eschewing some — but by no means all — of Joyce’s biographic details and replacing them with the fictional life and memorizing attributes of his Uruguayan gaucho, Borges disregards the conventions of the obituary and challenges the distinctive eulogizing features of most necrological notes. In spite of this, the Funes digression functions as a textual analogue which is employed as a strategy to allude to Joyce indirectly incorporating, then, a parallel discussion, or alternative fictional angle, from which to subsequently examine the work of James Joyce. In this unconventional obituary, Borges also pays an ironic homage to Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses and Charles Duff’s James Joyce and the Plain Reader with the overt declaration:

  Nadie ignora que para los lectores desprevenidos, la vasta novela de Joyce es indescifrablemente caótica. Nadie tampoco ignora que su intérprete oficial, Stuart Gilbert, ha propalado que cada uno de los dieciocho capítulos corresponde a una hora del día, a un órgano corporal, a un arte, a un símbolo, a un color, a una técnica literaria y a una de las aventuras de Ulises hijo de Laertes, de la simiente de Zeus

  (Sur 168).

  Everyone knows that Joyce’s book is indecipherably chaotic to the unprepared reader. Everyone knows that Stuart Gilbert, its official interpreter, has revealed that each of the novel’s eighteen chapters corresponds to an hour of the day, a bodily organ, an art, a symbol, a color, a literary technique, and one of the adventures of Ulysses
, son of Laertes, of the seed of Zeus