On my poetry bookshelf: Jorge Luis Borges

 

Many of my poetry books came to me on a whim. I found a Surrealist Anthology in the trash after a session at BU ended. A roommate left a book of Symbolists when he moved away. Some ancient texts were discovered in used book carrels and have survived several relocations.

Jorge Luis Borges's place in this little library is different. His books are remarkably complete and stand together proudly. Borges himself was avidly comprehensive in his knowledge and letters, so the elongated space his work takes up in my small library makes sense.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Encyclopedia. He was frail and clinically myopic as a child. Yet he avidly explored the worlds of letters. He read and wrote as if the mantle of a Boethius, Voltaire, Humboldt or [Thomas] Young was upon him - as if he was the last man to know everything.

When his genetic myopia led to blindness in the 1950s, Borges focused on poetry. He not only wrote it but also lectured on his method, which was as much tango as method. He created a clear map for navigating his art, which served to disarm scavenger critics in his wake.

He had roots in surrealism, and blurred the lines between historic fact and fiction, fabricating rich but invented bibliographies and fictional footnotes in his stories  -- this and other aspects of story telling seem to migrate easily from his short stories and essays to his poems. It’s fair to say metaphysics and time are his constant lode star.

For me, my small poetry library is an enchanted place with spirits that can be conjured whether a book is open or closed … I’d like to think Borges would peruse it with stuttered chuckles. The vision or dream of the library is very important to Borges. The Labyrinth, which riffs on the Library of Alexandria, refurbishing it as a nightmare of infinite knowledge, has become a part and parcel of Internet criticism.

Emerson, one of Borges's many muses, calls a home library a "magical chamber." Borges knew, but did not endorse, Emerson’s take. But, like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and others, Borges saw composition as magical, an act of discovery – it requires openness to what is ready there for the picking. In his lectures, he said: 

"When I write something I have the sensation that it existed before. I start from a general conception. I know more or less the beginning and the end and then I discover the intervening parts but I do not have the sensation of having invented them... The things are as they are but they are hidden and my task as a poet is to find them.”

Afterword: Most of my poetry books came to me on kinds of whim. There’s the Surrealist Anthology I found in the trash as sessions came to an end at BU. And the book of the Symbolists a roommate left as he moved away. Texts of ancient origin found in used book carrels that in their turn made it through a few re-locations. These books are found at yard sales, but have been touched by a fickle finger of fate. [An fickle intersection we think we had with a Thomas Pynchon cabin library is described elsewhere: In footnote to poem.]

Here is but one sample poem:

Footnote 1: This piece was influenced by gifting by artist neighbor of Companion book on Borges.

Footnote 2: A sampling of titles of his nonfictions from 1946 to 1955 forms a shorthand for exhibiting his erudition:

The Paradox of Apollinaire 

On Oscar Wilde 

A new refutation of time

Bithanatos

From allegories to novel

From somebody to nobody

The wall and the books

Personality and the Buddha

Pascal’s sphere

The innocence of Layamon

The cult of books

Kafka and his precursors

The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald

Coleridge’s dream

History of the tango

The history of the echoes of a name 

The wide erudition can form a trap for the would be critic.

Condensed highlights:

Jorge Luis Borges lived from 1899 to 1986.

He was frail and clinically myopic as a child. Yet he avidly explored the worlds of letters.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Encyclopedia.

He read and wrote as if the mantle of a Boethius, Voltaire, Humboldt or [Thomas] Young was upon him - as if he was the last man to know everything.

He wrote Short Stories, Criticism, Poetry.  It’s fair to say metaphysics and time are his constant lode star.

In his early days he became associated with Surrealists, and other experimentalists.

QUOTE: "When I write something I have the sensation that it existed before. I start from a general conception. I know more or less the beginning and the end and then I discover the intervening parts but I do not have the sensation of having invented them... The things are as they are but they are hidden and my task as a poet is to find them.”

When his genetic myopia led to blindness in the 1950s, Borges focused more on poetry. He not only wrote it but also lectured on his method. His lectures are like waltzes, or maybe better, tangos. He created a clear map for navigating his art, which served to disarm critics in his wake.

Considered one of the big fails of the Nobel Committee: Borges never got the medal.