Borges Lecturing

LEANING forward from his chair, Jorge Luis Borges focuses his nearly sightless eyes somewhere above the Sanders Theater ceiling. If the word charismatic can describe a man talking about the art of poetry, it describes Borges delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on "this craft of verse." Borges creates a personalized version of the same subtle magic which translates the readers of his "fictions" into a dream-context without their perceiving the change.

He sits intensely motionless. His hands, clasped in the center of the table beside the water he never stops to drink, move only rarely to say something of extreme importance. For 45 minutes there is nothing but Borges' locating the words to articulate what Professor Raimundo Lida called "his fervent and clairvoyant meditations."

The audience realizes it has been under a spell inside Borges' imagination in a suspended moment before the instantaneously enthusiastic, unanimously venerative applause. Even those unfamiliar with his work and reputation experience the Borges magic. One little Cambridge lady, knowing something had happened but unsure what it was, bubbled after the fourth lecture. "Is that the man that was speaking? Is he Swedish or English or what? Oh, he's so wonderful!"

The warmth of the reception astounds Borges. He believes the audience is making some terrible mistake. He tells himself he must have tricked them, and hopes they won't find it out soon. But he's willing to enjoy the applause (writers receive no such recognition in Argentina, he explains), and turned around three times on the way off the stage to respond with grateful abbreviated bows. He tells himself that these people have come to see what a blind foreign poet is like. Borges won't admit (and won't believe) that he's one of the great figures of international literature.

To Borges, the universe is, as he said at a reading of his poetry in December, "an unstable world of the mind, an indefatigable labyrinth, a chaos, a dream." Borges sees himself, the artist, not as a searcher for the exit to the labyrinth but as a man lost along with everyone else, who can perceive and can convey to his fellows flashes of clarity within the windings of the maze. The flashes of clarity within the windings of the maze. The essence of the lectures--especially the two most recent--is the expansion of such insights.

"In a time to come, men will care for beauty, and not for the circumstances of beauty," predicted Borges in his February 28 lecture on the art of translation. When men learn to overcome their reverence for fact, they will see beauty without impingement by biographical-historical "accidents" surrounding it: we will ignore a poet's name, origins, nationality and era.

Only half-playfully Borges suggested, "Perhaps a time will come when we'll need no 'originals' in literature." The creative act will be acknowledged as the act of translation--since, as Borges postulates, the limited number of themes in literature (in life) have all been treated. The artist's job is to reshape, to clarify these themes, to put them into new combinations; and this, in effect, is translation.

No one is more familiar than Borges with the problems of translation (few know as many languages as he). Having rendered numerous works into his native Spanish, he is now working with Norman Thomas diGiovanni to prepare English translations of an upcoming volume of Borges' selected poems. The pair is trying to avoid the "maybe inevitable mistake" made by Borges' previous translators: "Latin words are natural in Spanish, but may be unnatural and far-fetched in English." The problem is to find a natural blend of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words.

In his March 20 lecture on "Word Music," Borges proposed, "Poetry is not trying to take a set of logical coins and work them into magic. Rather, it is bringing words back to their original source. . . . Words began, in a sense, as magic" (at a time when "light" actually flashed, and "night" was darker than now), and later assumed abstract meanings: "Language did not come from libraries," but from fishermen, fields and dawn. "We know men sang before they talked. . . . We feel the last line of the first chapter of Finnegan's Wake could only have been written after centuries of literature. But there was a time when words meant something as beautiful."

"I have suspected many a time," he continued, "that the meaning is something added to the verse." The words have a beauty beyond meaning; we feel the beauty before we think the meaning. "Therefore, we do not have to commit ourselves to a meaning. . . . The idea of words being an algebra comes from dictionaries. I don't want to be unfair to dictionaries . . . but we think that explanations exhaust the words."

WITH deep-rooted memories of Argentina under Peron (who tried to humiliate Borges--then a librarian--by making him a provincial poultry inspector) Borges has a great love for the United States. "After all," he recalls, "it came to me in the best way, through literature--Mark Twain, Hawthorne, Melville. . . . What I find very admirable is that people here have a keen sense of right and wrong."

Borges is enjoying North American audiences (from Texas to Toronto) and says he feels happier now than ever before in 20 years of lecturing because "Here people want to believe, want to agree with you." Still, he constantly worries about his worthiness to appear before them. Two or three days before each lecture he begins to live in the subject he wants to discuss, in walks around the block or along the river. Nothing is written, or even mentally composed. Sentences (except for the first and the last, which he says he forgets by the time he gets to it anyway) aren't attempted. He prepares by convincing himself of his conviction in the validity of his ideas. His career has taught him that with this method, the words follow most truly.

Borges says he has had stage fright in every lecture he's given (in Europe and the Americas) since he began in 1945. 'I feel very miserable. Five minutes before I begin to talk I wonder if I will be able to say a single word. I say the first sentence. Then I keep listening to what I am saying, and somehow I get by."

Awareness of his audience, he explains, is subordinated to his effort to clarify, to himself and in the proper words, his feeling: "I try to talk to myself as honestly as I can. I try to think, and think honestly, not trying to be brilliant."

His lecture structure has depended largely on adroit references to the incomparably wide range of literatures and artists of Borges' experience--from oriental philosophers to Homer, Tacitus, Pope, Mossetti, Gongora, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Baudelaire, Dante, Yeats (all of whom he seems to know intimately. He believes that since literature already contains all possible ideas, he can say anything by allusion to one of his predecessors.

Borges avoids the pendantic bookishness one would expect of a man of his learning. In the lectures--as in his fictions, essays and poetry--his eclecticism distills the literary experience of the past into his own distinctive brand of creativity.

The appropriate finale to the Norton Lecture series will be Borges' discussion of his own art. In the sixth and last lecture April 10, as he said at the end of the fifth, "I shall speak of a lesser poet whom I never read but whom I have to write. I shall speak of myself and you will have to forgive me this quite affectionate anticlimax."