Jorge Luis Borges by Jason Wilson

Author:Jason Wilson [Wilson, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-86189-590-5
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2006-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

Haydée Lange and Borges in 1939, with Borges’s self – mockery as a ‘wounded tapir’.

George Frederick Watts’s The Minotaur, 1885.

The dedication to what many critics consider to be Borges’s first book of stories in 1935, Historia universal de la infamia (‘A Universal History of Iniquity’), was first limited to the initials I. J. Nobody has worked out who the initials stand for. Edwin Williamson forces this into Norah Lange through Ingrid, the heroine of her travel book to Norway, and Julia, a woman two men fight over in one of Borges’s later stories, but she was not English or ‘innumerable’ (perhaps a reference to Tennyson’s ‘Come Down, O Maid’, a lovesong among the ‘murmuring of innumerable bees’). Later in 1954 Borges changed his dedication to the initials S. D., who could have been Sara Diehl. The dedication in English is taken from the sole poems he wrote in English, titled ‘Two English Poems’. In fact, it’s odd that he didn’t write more in English. When he published the actual poems in El otro, el mismo in 1964 (30 years later) he had changed the dedication a third time, now to Beatriz Biblioni Webster de Bullrich. But he’d dated the poems 1934. They are key inner documents that deal with desamor (‘lack of love’), and penned by a desdichado (‘unhappy man’). The first poem is directed to an unknown female reader (he clearly intended the same poem for different women), and is self-revealing. It emerges from a night spent chatting, but ‘you’ have forgotten the words and Borges is left alone ‘in a deserted street corner of my city’. The second poem asks how Borges can catch this dark woman’s attention. It’s structured on a repetition of ‘I offer’. But there is nothing Romantic about what he does offer: bitterness, his patriotic ancestors, his books, his loyalty, the ‘kernel of myself ‘ beyond words and time. Borges believes in some inner, wordless essence. The last long line is ‘I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat’.10 The inner mirror reveals a bitter and proud man, as if defeat was in fact his sole reality.

But there are countless further factors that combine to undermine Borges’s street adventuring. In 1927 Borges had the first of eight operations on his myopic eyes. He knew that his glaucoma would inexorably lead to blindness. The threat of the gradual onset of blindness, of losing the visible world, cuts deep into his feelings from this first operation until his accident in 1938. In 1928, as noted, his close sister Norah married Guillermo de Torre and moved to Spain, abandoning Borges with his ageing parents. A poet friend Francisco López Merino (1904–1928), to whom Borges dedicated two poems, shot himself aged 24. A further factor could be that reviewing was taking over his life. He would later say that he remembered far more what he had read than what he had lived.

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