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May 2, 2007
Reading the Papers of Borges: Some Interesting Discoveries by Abraham Burickson
RECENTLY I reread the Jorge Luis Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in preparation for a lecture to be given in celebration of a great acquisition—the papers of the great Latin American writers. Borges covers everything, hides nothing. His is a mind at a level of complexity so uncommon that he is not satisfied until he alters reality, recreates it, gets his pen inside it and tinkers with it until it comes out right. This piece he took even further, creating an entire other universe and fusing it with his – all in under six thousand words. Damn.
And that’s really all I could think about it when I was done: damn. I tried to come up with something but drew a blank: no insightful analyses, no deep resonance with the postmodern condition, nothing. Borges shows you and tells you—and he shows and tells everything, leaving nothing to tease out. I thought I might delve into the historical symbolism – to see how the war and the politics of his day may have influenced things, to talk about how that might resonate with the modern day and the contemporary writer. Dull, I thought, middlemind.
So I headed to the library to look at these much ballyhooed papers.
The special collections library was somewhat thrilling, actually. Its massive glass façade, its sandblasted faces and autographs glowed with an aura of wonder and privilege. It was an institution dedicated to the antiquated idea that the original manuscript would hold some mystical sway over all its offspring.
“I’m looking for Jorge Luis Borges – Ficciones.”
It was Sunday morning, the librarian typed something into the computer and frowned. “All I have is a collection of statements from his bank in Geneva.” That was odd. Was all the talk of acquisitions just talk? Had they suspected that no one would ever check?
“You don’t have a file with his checkbook, bar napkins he might have written on, that kind of stuff?”
“We might. Check the cardfile.” She pointed me over to the file, picking up the phone which had been quietly but furiously blinking throughout our conversation. What I found there was one little card, typed out in that shaky 1960s way:
Borges, Jorge Luis
Var. errata 1935-1945
Aq. 1967, MacFarlane Auction House, London, England
I wrote down the call numbers and brought them to the other librarian who impassively disappeared behind the wooden doors at the back of the room, returning a few minutes later with a large cardboard file box and a pair of white gloves.
The contents looked like they hadn’t been touched in ages, as if they had been thrown together in a rush. There was an old notebook with some drawings and a lot of blank pages, a typed letter from some government official inviting Borges to dinner, a ration book, a whole pile of letters from various people I’d never heard from. I dug further down and found one from Borges himself – in an envelope, but unsealed and never sent. It was addressed to Adolfo Bioy Casares in Rio Plata, and dated 12 September, 1936. Although Borges’ penmanship was excellent, reading was slow as it was in Spanish and he is, as you know, not a simple man. When I was finished I took out my cell phone and snapped a few pictures of it so I could translate it later. It read as follows:
My Dear Esteemed Adolfo,
It has been too many months since we last spoke. The Irish toasts you recited over all my meals in June have shown themselves to be the most ideal nutrient…all summer I have been writing, and writing well. I have finished two new stories, both of them, I believe, now reared and ready to survive in the Jaguar Forest, as you so eloquently put it. The first, which I think you know of, is the Garden of Paths that Divide, the second is the Library of Babel. Both, I think, are of a single nature and I believe that both are stories in which you will find some brotherhood.
It is the story I am currently composing which has caused me to raise both eyebrows in consternation. I am thinking I will call it Orbis Tertius, and have enclosed a draft for your surgeon’s eye to examine. The story is a little dry at the moment, but this is not why I am sending it to you. It was born out of a discussion we had in the Hotel Dos Rios. You said that many authors claim their work is not created consciously by them, that it passes through them from some other spring. They do not, however, disclaim the prizes and royalty payments which arrive at their doorstep. Like spoiled children in the family of mind, you said. I laughed, but the following weeks would find me thinking about the conversation more and more frequently.
Whether it began then or I simply began to notice it then I could not say, but my ability to say that I wrote what I wrote became increasingly frail. I began with the idea of two new languages – one composed entirely of verbs and one of adjectives. I have long wished to compose such a language as these and enjoyed my mornings very much. Such pleasure! As the languages developed, my hand developed a preference for their rhythms. Simple Spanish became strange and undignified – crass. I soon recalled that no one knew my new language and it was in Spanish that I should write, and so I returned, but I was not the same. Though my understanding of the rules and the sense of the language had not changed, the language itself was now no longer my first language. The act of writing was difficult, onerous, and dragged out longer and longer until I stopped in the middle of a rainy Tuesday morning. I spent the day in the park, thinking that I had made some mistake, that this would most certainly be trouble. To my surprise I awoke the next morning to find that several pages of the story had been written, and the words were most certainly mine. What a strange occurrence! That day I sat down to continue the story and, after three fruitful hours, discovered that I had been writing in Ursprache, the language I had invented only a week earlier. In that time the language had developed from a stilted pidgin German to a full-fledged language with sensible grammar and a diverse vocabulary. I stopped writing and went immediately to the park to scratch my head and walk. The next morning, again, I found the story written in Spanish, but to my further astonishment it proceeded further than the Ursprache draft had. Elements of plot existed which I had not previously conceived, and all in Spanish, that increasingly strange language. Even now, the language is getting harder and harder to use. Over the next few days I continued writing in the day and waking up to find several pages of my own unmistakable handwriting on the table by the bed.
Adolfo, I do not wish to give up authorship of my work, but I think I have no choice. When I write in Spanish what was my own subjective thought seems to enter into the realm of the universal. What I am writing now bears little relation to my mind, except for the fact that it and I occupy the same space here in my study. The only thing which remains in the realm of my unique psychological experience is Ursprache, and that, sadly, is a language which does not exist. I fear for my life. Over the length of this letter it has become entirely clear that your help is needed, as you are the most important character in the story; now I understand that this is why I am writing to you. Please look the story over and tell me if my fears are warranted.
Yours ever in friendship,
JLB
I poked through the envelope again but there was no manuscript Why hadn’t he mailed the letter? Does anybody know about this? I thought, Should I tell someone? I dug deeper into the box: more government letters, a newspaper article showing a young Borges frowning at an elephant, a list of words in English. Then I discovered a small, yellowed clipping from the New York Times. It showed an older Borges extending a hand full of coins toward the members of the UN General Assembly. THESE COINS ARE REAL AND UNIQUE! read the caption, then, Jorge Luis Borges, self-proclaimed author, objected today to the conclusions of the General Assembly I noted that the name-plates of the various countries represented were conspicuously absent.
Beneath this lay a handful of black and white photos – two of Borges at the ocean, one of him sitting at a computer typing, and one photo of him on the steps of the University of Texas plaza looking up at the clock tower and pointing towards the camera with his cane. Next to him a bearded, pony-tailed graduate student was smoking a cigarette. In the student’s free hand was a large black book. Stuck to the back of the photograph was a square of paper cut out from an encyclopedia. It was beautifully typeset in deep, black letters, and was written entirely in Ursprache. Between the lines somebody had hand-written a translation. Xprnn, it said, any erroneous idea derived from an artificially objective perspective such as: fatherhood, any relationship between creator and created, and the idea of a flowing, linear time. These can easily be disproved by experimenting with…Here the entry was cut off.
Then I found a folded pile of papers on the same stock as the letter and discovered that they were, in fact, the incomplete manuscript he had planned to send to Casares. It began in part two with Borges’ discussion of the doctrine of materialism. Reading the original in his longhand was indeed a lyrical pleasure, and I spent a good hour plowing through his draft and trying to remember the translation I had read (the librarians do not allow you to bring books into the reading room. For what reason, I can’t say. It seemed to be that the magical nature of the collection was tenuous at best, that it relied upon an unspoken code rigid enough to keep the temperature and humidity at reasonable levels. That nearly perfect little room began to seem oppressive to me after so many hours. It began to take on the overly still nature of so many institutions. I could feel my toes twitching but stayed nonetheless). I continued reading until discovering that the last few pages had been written entirely in Ursprache. Here the writing and the narrative changed considerably. The story remained essentially the same but the telling was stilted, troubled, amateurish. People talk of looking at early drafts of great works to discover the humility and hard work of the author, and this was the experience I had hoped to encounter. But these pages were covered with drivel of the worst possible kind! If not for the paper and the handwriting, I would not have believed them written by the same man, and though the translation into Spanish was slow and painstaking, I felt that I had to read the entire draft.
By the end it was simply too much. Whether the Ursprache had ruined his Latinate mind or he had just gone old and his blindness had progressed to the point where he didn’t know what he was writing, I couldn’t say. I began to wonder whether he really had authored any of his works and suddenly my responsibility became clear. I took out my pen and began to translate and rewrite the last several pages Soon I tossed his pages entirely and rewrote them blind – vaguely remembering the original text I had read. I filled my pipe many times that night and when the sun began to rise outside the story was nearly complete.
Then, I wrote, English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. The world will be Tlön. I take no notice. I go on revising, in the quiet days in the hotel Dos Rios, a tentative translation into English, in the style of Burickson, which I do not intend to see published, of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones.
I walked out of the library to find the wind off the river more than brisk. It was still early in the morning and on the corner I could see the newspaperman unpacking the morning paper. I bought one and sat down at a nearby café. The university students were just beginning to walk the streets, stopping in small packs to smoke at the foot of the statue of Simon Bolivar. I feared one of them might recognize me, interrupt this quiet morning. Instead it was Adolfo who approached me, tapping my cane with his foot to get my attention. Bioy, I said, I have an idea for a story that I would like to discuss with you.
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Posted by Overlord at May 2, 2007 6:34 PM
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Comments
My favorite aspect of this story is the transition from one voice to another--and a completely different temporal feeling by the end of the story.
Posted by: Overlord at May 19, 2007 10:39 AM