Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others) by Jorge Luis Borges
The Maker
This story may be thought of as autobiographical—Homer as an exaltation of myself, his blindness as my blindness, his acceptance of darkness as my acceptance. On the other hand, the departures from autobiography are striking. Blindness came to me as a slow twilight, not as a revelation; no Iliads and no Odysseys ever awaited me. When I first conceived this piece, I hesitated between Homer and Milton. Milton, however, is almost a contemporary, and also—as Dr. Johnson felt—a not very lovable figure. But Homer, as old as Western civilization itself, is a myth and so may quite easily be made into another myth. Eleven years after writing “The Maker,” I seem to have recast my fable—without being aware of it—into a more narrowly autobiographical poem called “In Praise of Darkness.” As for Milton, I have paid due tribute to him in a sonnet entitled “A Rose and Milton.”
An early translator was worried that there was no strict English equivalent for the words “El hacedor,” my Spanish title. I could only inform him that “hacedor” was my own translation of the English “maker,” as used by Dunbar in his “Lament.”
Ever since 1934, the writing of short prose pieces—fables, parables, brief narratives—has given me a certain mysterious satisfaction. I think of such pages as these as I think of coins— small material objects, hard and bright, tokens of something else.
The Intruder
In the fall of 1965, the Buenos Aires bibliophile Gustavo Fillol Day asked me for a short story to be published by him in one of those fine and secret editions meant for the happy few. Around that time I had been rereading Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, and I told Fillol that I had a story in mind. The brevity and straightforwardness of the young Kipling tempted me, since I had always written very involved and many-faceted narratives. A few months later I was ready to get down to work, and at the beginning of 1966 I dictated “The Intruder” to my mother.
Without my suspecting it, the hint for this story—perhaps the best I have ever written—came out of a chance conversation with my friend don Nicolás Paredes sometime back in the late twenties. Commenting on the decadence of tango lyrics, which even then went in for “loud self-pity” among sentimental compadritos betrayed by their wenches, Paredes remarked dryly, “Any man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man—he’s a queer.” Love among such people was obviously ruled out; I knew that their real passion would be friendship. Out of this rather abstract set of ideas I evolved my story. I placed it in an almost nameless town to the south of Buenos Aires more than seventy years ago so that nobody could dispute the details. Really there are only two characters—the two brothers. Of them, we are allowed to hear only what the elder brother says; it is he who takes all the decisions, even the last one. I made them brothers for the sake of likelihood and, of course, to avoid unsavory implications.
I was stuck at the end of the story, unsure of the words
Cristián would say. My mother, who from the outset thoroughly
disliked the tale, at that point gave me the words I needed without a moment’s hesitation.
“The Intruder” was, by the way, the first of my new ventures into straightforward storytelling. From this beginning I went on to write many others, ultimately collecting them under the title El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report).
The Immortals
Blake wrote that were our senses closed—were we made blind, deaf, dumb, and so forth—we should see all things as they are: endless. “The Immortals” came out of that strange idea and also out of Rupert Brooke’s derivative line, “And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.” We acknowledge this first debt by calling one of the characters don Guillermo Blake.
Thrice over I attempted writing the story. First with Marta Mosquera Eastman and later with Alicia Jurado. They may still have copies of those early drafts. The story was to have been called “The Chosen One.” For some reason or other, each of these schemes was dropped. Then, in 1966, I took the story up again with Bioy-Casares. By that time, Bioy and I had invented a new way of telling gruesome and uncanny tales. It lay in understating the grimness and essential horror while playing up certain humorous aspects—a kind of graft between Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers. This not only made for more amusing and less pretentious writing, but at the same time underlined the horror. We developed the technique in our comic detective saga, Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi, and, more openly, in the first of the Two Memorable Fantasies, “The Witness.” In fact, some of the personages in “The Immortals” are taken from the Six Problems, and in the present story are fated to a terrible eternity. Another detail may be pointed out, the circumstance that all the characters—including the very Frankenstein of the story, the maker of monsters Dr. Narbondo—are also blatant fools and indulge in a silly jargon all their own.
The story deals in its own way with the problem of immortality. Since our only proof of personal death is statistical, and inasmuch as a new generation of deathless men may be already on its way, I have for years lived in fear of never dying. Such an idea as immortality would, of course, be unbearable. In “The Immortals” we are face to face with people who are only immortal and nothing else, and the prospect, I trust, is appalling. I think that this joint story (I can say this without undue vanity because I wrote it with someone else) is among my very best and that, despite its having been overlooked by Argentine critics, it may yet come into its own.
The Meeting
I seem to be telling the same story over and over again. Obviously, “The Meeting” is at heart the identical tale I have told in another new story of mine, “Juan Muraña.” It is also linked to a fairly recent sonnet called “Allusion to a Shadow of the Nineties,” which is about Muraña’s knife, and to a short prose poem, “The Dagger,” written I think in the late forties. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that when I wrote these things I was quite unaware of repeating myself or of attempting variations. Precisely what takes over my mind in these cases, I do not know.
Spinoza’s doctrine of things having a life of their own, or of wanting to persist in their own being, has struck me as particularly true of those things, such as weapons, meant for quite specific ends. A dagger, for example, has to fulfill a destiny. In the story, the two knives have a will of their own, ruling the hapless young men who are supposed to be wielding them. Duncan and Uriarte are gentlemen, but the knives turn them into gauchos. In order to make this sufficiently clear, I have given Uriarte, who is a coward, the victory.
Back of all this lies my personal—or perhaps Argentine—obsession with knives. In the United States or in England, where men tend to square off with their fists, people think of fighting as something to be done bare-handed. In Western or gangster films, we often see men throw down their arms and resort to their fists. To me this seems highly unnatural and even unconvincing, since there is no earthly reason for a cowboy or a gangster also to be something of a boxer. Among compadritos, if a man struck another he did it with the back of his hand, as a mere provocation, and then the real fighting began. To me there is real intimacy in the knife; in fact, in one of my poems, the last line runs: “and across my throat the intimate knife.” Firearms, of course, stand for marksmanship rather than courage. Fistfighting seems both harmless and undignified to an Argentine, while knife dueling has what Dr. Johnson said of the lives of sailors and seamen—“the dignity of danger.”
A few minor autobiographical elements have found their way into “The Meeting.” Álvaro Melián Lafinur was a childhood idol of mine and really was my cousin. He wore a dagger and a cloak and used to play the guitar, singing the Uruguayan ballads of Elias Regules which I mention, Álvaro was a quite bad poet and, as to be expected, an academician. It is in this latter role that I introduced him into “The Aleph.”
Pedro Salvadores
I think the tale of Pedro Salvadores is summed up fully enough in its last paragraph. I might therefore take this opportunity to say something about the way it was written. At first, I played with the idea of a
Our own time has furnished us with many destinies like that of Pedro Salvadores; Anne Frank’s is perhaps the best known of them.
Rosendo’s Tale
This story is, obviously, a sequel and an antidote to “Streetcorner Man.” The earlier story was mistakenly read as realistic; the present one is a deliberate surmise as to how events might actually have happened on the night Francisco Real was murdered. When I wrote “Streetcorner Man,” I was—as I pointed out at the time—fully aware of its stagy unreality. As the years went by, however, and that story became embarrassingly popular, I wanted people to understand that I was not quite the fool I was being admired for.
I had been rereading my Browning and knew from The Ring and the Book that a story could be told from different points of view. Rosendo Juárez, the seeming coward of the first version, might perhaps be allowed to have his own say. So, instead of the braggart of “Streetcorner Man,” we get a Shavian character who sees through the romantic nonsense and childish vanity of dueling, and finally attains manhood and sanity. In the first telling, Francisco Real is mortally wounded in the chest; sadly and realistically enough, he was really stabbed in the back while fornicating with La Lujanera in a ditch.
In the days when the story took place, toughs and killers were aided and abetted by the authorities, since most of them were official bodyguards of leading political figures. They were also used during elections to intimidate voters, knowing very well that because of police support they could act with impunity. Seldom outlaws, they were simply strong-arm men. I recall an anecdote told me by a priest in Adrogué. He walked up to the polling booth during one election and was politely and firmly informed by the local Rosendo Juárez, “Father, you have already cast your vote.”
Incidentally, the reference to the young man dressed in black, who wrote Paredes’ letter for him, is to the poet Evaristo Carriego.
* * *
A Universal History of Infamy
Preface to the 1954 Edition
Preface to the First Edition
A Universal History of Infamy
The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell
Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor
The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
Etcetera
A Theologian in Death
The Chamber of Statues
Tale of the Two Dreamers
The Wizard Postponed
The Mirror of Ink
A Double for Mohammed
The Generous Enemy
Of Exactitude in Science
Preface to the 1954 Edition
I should define as baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody. It was in vain that Andrew Lang, back in the eighteen-eighties, attempted a burlesque of Pope’s Odyssey; that work was already its own parody, and the would-be parodist was unable to go beyond the original text. ‘Baroque’ is the name of one of the forms of the syllogism; the eighteenth century applied it to certain excesses in the architecture and painting of the century before. I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has stated that all intellectual labour is essentially humorous. Such humour is not deliberate in the work of Baltasar Gracian, but is deliberate, or self-conscious, in John Donne’s.
The very tide of these pages flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to destroying them; that is why I now prefer to invoke the pronounce-ment ‘What I have written I have written’ (John 19:22) and to reprint them, twenty year later, as they stand. They are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any aesthetic justification whatever) the tales of others. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the laboured composition of a straightforward story ‘Streetcorner Man’ which he signed with the name of one of his great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos, and which has enjoyed an unusual and somewhat mystifying success.
In that story, which is about life on the outer edge of old-time Buenos Aires, it will be noted that I have introduced a few cultivated words ‘intestines’, ‘involutions’, and so forth. I did so because the hoodlum aspires to refinement, or (this reason invalidates the other but is perhaps the true one) because hoodlums are individuals and do not always speak like The Hoodlum, who is a platonic type.
The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness. Insofar as they refer to that particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right. Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury there is nothing. The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable. Its author was a somewhat unhappy man, but he amused himself writing it; may some echo of that pleasure reach the reader.
In the ‘Etcetera’ section, I have added three new pieces.
j. l. b.
Preface to the First Edition
The exercises in narrative prose that make up this book were written in 1933 and 1934. They stem, I believe, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, and also from Sternberg’s early films, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego. They overly exploit certain tricks: random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man’s whole life to two or three scenes. (A similar concern with visual aims gives shape to the story “Streetcorner Man”) They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.
As for the examples of magic that close the volume, I have no other rights to them than those of translator and reader. Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers. Will anyone deny that the pieces attributed by Valery to his pluperfect Edmond Teste are, on the whole, less admirable than those of Teste’s wife and friends? Reading, obviously, is an activity which comes after that of writing; it is more modest, more unobtrusive, more intellectual.
Buenos Aires, 27 May 1935
j. l. b
A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY
The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell
The Remote Cause
In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines. To this odd philanthropic twist we owe, all up and down the Americas, endless things W. C. Handy’s blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy; King Vid
And, further, the great and blameworthy life of the nefarious redeemer Lazarus Morell.
The Place
The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the largest river in the world, was the worthy theatre of this peerless scoundrel. (Alvarez de Pineda discovered the river, and its earliest explorer was Captain Hernando de Soto, the old conqueror of Peru, who helped while away the Inca chief Atahualpa’s months of prison, teaching him the game of chess. When de Soto died, he was given the Mississippi’s waters for a grave.)
The Mississippi is a broad-bosomed river, an immense, dim brother of the Paraná, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of muddy waters; each year, disgorged by it, over four hundred million tons of silt profane the Gulf of Mexico. From time immemorial, so much muck has built up a delta, where gigantic swamp cypresses grow out of the debris of a continent in perpetual dissolution, and where labyrinths of mud and rushes and dead fish extend the bounds and the peace of this foul-smelling alluvial domain. Upstream, between the Arkansas and the Ohio, is another stretch of lowlands. Living there is a sallow race of squalid men, prone to fever, who avidly gape at stone and iron, for in their environs there is little but sand, timber, and muddy water.