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Sunday, 25
January 2009 Israel 1969,
Jorge Luis Borges Israel 1969
- 40 years ago "Borges
was anti-totalitarian, philosemitic and a Zionist", Raphaël Lellouche "You
shall be an Israeli, a soldier, You shall
build a country on wasteland, making it
rise out of deserts." I feared
that in Israel there might be lurking, sweetly and
insidiously, the
nostalgia gathered like some sad treasure during the
centuries of dispersion in cities of
the unbeliever, in ghettoes, in the
sunset of the steppes, in dreams, the
nostalgia of those who longed for you, Jerusalem,
beside the waters of Babylon. What else
were you, Israel, but that wistfulness, that will to
save amid the
shifting shapes of time your old
magical book, your ceremonies, your
loneliness with God? Not so. The
most ancient of nations is also the
youngest. You have not
tempted men with gardens or gold, and the
emptiness of gold but with the
hard work, beleaguered land. Without
words Israel has told them: Forget who
you are Forget who
you have been Forget the
man you were in those countries which gave
you their mornings and evenings and to which
you must not look back in yearning. You will
forget your father's tongue and learn
the tongue of Paradise. You shall be
an Israeli, a soldier, You shall
build a country on wasteland, making it
rise out of deserts. Your
brother, whose face you've never seen, will work by
your side. One thing
only we promise you: your place
in the battle. Borges’ “In Praise of Darkness”A few days ago I cited the Prologue to “In Praise of Darkness,” and here’s the title poem from that work: IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS Although this poem stands on its own, it is much more poignant if you know that Borges, like his father, gradually went blind in his 50’s and 60’s. Borges equates this loss of vision with old age, and “the animal has died, or almost,” physical desires no longer dominate a man’s, or woman’s, life but the “spirit” remains. Many would be devastated by this loss of eyesight, but the line ” In my life there were always too many things.” would suggest that the loss of eyesight may be a blessing, a way of making the poet see what is important in life. With the loss of sight comes greater insight: “Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think; Time has been my Democritus.” Much of what we see draws us away from our own thoughts. It’s easy to get so caught up reading what’s “new” that you can’t find the time to sit down and simply think your own thoughts. Without this distraction, the narrator suggests that he will have time to reflect on “the ones that I keep reading in my memory.” I’ve certainly felt that way at times; I’m so busy reading poets that I’ve never read before that I don’t take the time to go back and re-read the poets, or authors, that have most impressed me in the past. More to the point, the poet feels that shutting all these distractions out will help him reach his center, his algebra, his key, his mirror. Soon he will know who he is. I suspect anyone who has spent much time meditating can identify with this. It’s amazing how good it feels to spend time alone in the darkness, free of other’s thoughts, simply feeling at one with yourself and with the darkness.
August
11, 1974 By
WILLIS BARNSTONE
"Poetry is no less a mystery than
anything else on earth," he writes ambiguously in his introduction, and
so
he includes among the poems some forms of prose, asking us to read the
volume
as a volume of poems. In itself the book is nothing, a thing among
things; and
the esthetic act, he says, occurs only when it is written or read. The
reader
controls the latter. Borges likes to shift from one perplexity to
another, to
what he calls "his mysterious habit," to what "we call
metaphysics." In "In Praise of Darkness" (Elogio del la
sombra) the blind Argentine master of historical spoof, exotic
violence, of
mirrors, labyrinths and the circular ruins that lead us to the border
of
knowledge, has again taken us to the instant of recognition--where he
stops,
stationing us in mystery, in order to save us from false knowledge. As
in all
Borges, the events outside are a whimsical journey to the paradox of
self-discovery. In speaking of the Gauchos, he writes: They lived out their
lives as in a dream, without knowing who they were or what they were. Maybe the case is the
same for us all. This latest book by Borges is unified
and dominated by darkness and sight, with often an ecclesiastic note as
he
recreates Heraclitus or the Apostle John or fragments from an
apocryphal gospel.
Borges is blind and therefore sees everywhere. Yet his is not an
Isaiahan
vision of heaven and destruction, and when he speaks through biblical
figures
it is as if he were talking to an old Argentine friend over a cup of maté.
Indeed, he slips through historical and imaginary time periods in such
a way as
to prove that man is always man, always alone, caught in the beast of
his body,
the labyrinth, while living out the dream or illusion of a vision
beyond the
labyrinth. In the poem "May 20, 1928," he takes us into the eyes of
the young poet Francisco López Merino, about to commit suicide, as he
looks at
his double in the mirror and tries to reach and to understand the other
side of
darkness: He will go down to
the lavatory. There, on the chessboard-patterned floor tiles, water
will wash
the blood away quite soon. The mirror awaits him. He will smooth back
his hair, adjust his tie (as fits a young poet, he was always a bit of
a dandy)
and try to imagine that the other man--the one in the mirror--performs
the
actions and that he, the double, repeats them. His hand will not falter
at the
end. Obediently, magically, he will have pressed the weapon to his
head. It was in this way, I
suppose, that things happened.
Borges's sight extends even into what
he calls las cosas, plain things. All the things we remember or
forget,
"a file, an atlas, doorways, nails, the glass/from which we
drink--serve
us like silent slaves." Because these things are sightless "they will
live on/familiar, blind, not knowing we have gone." Clearly the elegiac
theme pervades the volume. So in the manner of Simonides, he writes
poems of
historical praise for Israel, tracing the Jew from Eden through the
Book of the
cabalists, the death chambers and the battlefield. He praises his
native city
of Buenos Aires with the morbidity of a Palatine epigrammist: It 's a certain
corner of Jeru Street, where Julio César Dabove told us that the worst
sin a
man can commit is to father a son and sentence him to this unbearable
life. And above all, as in the earlier famous
"The Maker," where he roams through the vision of the blind poet
Homer, he sees old age as a time of happiness, a coin shining under
rain, and
possibility. This is not resignation or silly euphoria but rather the
last
steps toward his search. Like Constantine Cavafy in "Ithaka," he
tells us in his apocryphal gospel to seek the pleasure of seeking, not
of
finding. The title poem "In Praise of Darkness" brings us to the
edge: Old
age (this is the name that others give it) Old age has led men to write impossibly
conflicting documents. In "De Senectute: Cicero argued tediously and
proved the value of old age because a Roman senator himself carries the
distinction of senex (old man) in his title Yeats raged as a
deprived
sensualist while Cavafy simply erased age's sterility by re-creating in
poems a
real or imaginary past. Vicente Aleixandre speaks with the bitter
authority of
a poet whose word and vision acquire sharper pathos as he confronts
oblivion.
Borges speaks with several voices. His blindness, as he states in many
earlier
works, has prepared him for the vision of darkness, for the uncertainty
of
waking to dream or of dreaming of nothing. Death may be violent in the
act, but
it holds no terror for him. He affirms that he (or we) know nothing
certain
while we are alive. Possibility of knowledge lies only where there is
no where
and when there is no when. He has lived with Emerson and snow, and so many things. This last verse in the volume is
Borges's one line of prophecy. For the reader who wants to overhear
secrets,
the poet is again elusive, like the ultimate knowledge he seeks; he
does not
have it yet, and, moreover, when he does it will belong to him alone,
for he
will be dead. Although Borges has again escaped, giving us "a symbol of
something we are about to understand, but never quite do," we are
convinced,
at last, that his elogio (praise) is real, and that one day we
will be
the speaker in the poem. The translation of the book is by
Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author (except for
one poem
translated by John Updike). As in other skillful translations by this
team, one
cannot really speak of loss but of transformation. Borges's fiction and
poems
work equally well in Spanish and English, and the reader need not fear
disparities. In some cases, Borges tells us, he has modified the
Spanish original
as a result of the kind of reading demanded by the act of translation.
The last
two poems, including the title poem, were translated back into Spanish
from the
English draft. Borges is a clever metaphysician who
has given us an enormous and varied literature, ranging from
re-creations of an
ancient Chinese "Book Guardian" to the characteristics of imaginary
beasts. His influence on younger generations, in many countries, is
pervasive.
Although the Royal Swedish Academy failed to give its award to the
blind Homer,
and failed again in the case of Cervantes (though here Borges has
carefully
preserved the maimed author of the "Quijote"), there is no reason for
further delay in regard to the sightless Argentine. Let the Academy
awake and
redeem itself. |
