The Lesson of the Master

A Memoir and Essays on Borges and His Work

New Edition, Revised and Enlarged

Dedication

To Pamela Griffiths

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Foreword to the First Edition

I

In Memory of Borges

II

Borges and His Interpreters

Borges at Play: The Self and the Selves

Evaristo Carriego: Borges as Biographer

Borges and His Sources: A Universal History of Infamy

Borges and His Autobiography

On Translating Borges

A Translator’s Guide

Backward Glances

Afterword

Appendix: A Footnote to Infamy

About the Author

Praise for The Slaughteryard

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

The roots of this book go back exactly a decade, to when Buenos Aires was plunged into the circus celebrations of the Borges centenary. The affair, designated el año borgeano – the Year of Borges – was arranged to span twelve months.

The festivities began on the twenty-fourth of August 1998, the date of the master’s ninety-ninth birthday, with an evening of ‘anecdotes and testimony’ at Buenos Aires’ San Martín Cultural Centre. Here, Borges was remembered by friends and – most incongruously – by politicians, a breed he held in utter contempt.

Two days later, as reported in the pages of La Nación, a book to herald the Year of Years was launched at the city’s Museum of Decorative Arts. The volume, an illustrated edition of El Aleph, Borges’s best collection of stories, was an extravaganza of bookmaking. Twelve years in production, the tome was limited to twenty-five copies and was on sale for $25,000. The artwork employed, among other techniques, watercolour, etching, lithography, pencil, oil, and acrylic. The enterprise was masterminded by two Argentine magnates – one the founder of a ski resort and the other an ex-industrialist in metals. La Nación went on to describe the book as

unique of its kind because each copy has been painted in an exclusive way, leaf by leaf. No one of the 4,000 pages that make up the edition is like any other.

It was a case of life imitating art. A few years earlier, Borges had devised a Book of Sand, consisting of an infinite number of pages of which none was the first and none the last. The volume bore countless small illustrations two thousand pages apart, but no one of them could be found twice. Borges dubbed his creation monstrous, ‘a nightmarish object, an obscene thing’.

My own book, translated as La lección del maestro, appeared in Buenos Aires in the wake of this yearlong apotheosis. The city, in 2003, was still basking in the heady afterglow of Borges’s deification. Several reviewers therefore angrily rounded on me; to them, my essays laid a heretical claim to my having sat at the right hand of God. That was of course both absurd and impossible. The Borges I had written about was the Borges of several decades earlier, who was then only a god-in-waiting.

I did not fare much better with certain English reviewers, who seemed unable to believe that I could have played the part I described in Borges’s life. The memoir about this, ‘In Memory of Borges’, was written from jottings in notebooks of the period. In their breezy shorthand I wanted to reflect the rush of our lives, of our compressed and packed days. I also wanted to provide examples of the sort of playful irony and humour that Borges and I shared and that were his hallmarks. This somehow rankled. When I wrote, meaning just the opposite, that a certain article in a Buenos Aires weekly was about me and not about Borges, the essay was branded ‘quite transparently a work of aggrieved limelight seeking.’ Unfortunately the reviewer had missed the joke. I’d never had to seek the limelight with Borges because from the outset of my career with him I had been thrust into it.

‘Some Borges aficionados are irritated (to put it mildly)’, wrote another critic, ‘that di Giovanni’s association with Borges developed from the role of passive translator to active collaborator.’ Borges himself had no such qualms. He once told an audience, ‘When we attempt a translation, or re-creation, of my poems or prose in English, we don’t think of ourselves as being two men. We think we are really one mind at work.’ For ‘irritated’, perhaps ‘envious’ would have been the better word choice – again the right-hand-of-God syndrome.

Someone else found the book ‘burdened with grudges’ and complained that I had ‘scores to settle with executors, editors, translators and academics, who are accused of being mean-minded, middling, incompetent and obfuscating respectively.’ On one of these counts I do bear a grudge, and why should I not air it? Decades of my work, a significant portion of it also Borges’s, have been consigned to the dustbin. His executor refused to honour Borges’s word; I was informed by the American publisher of his fiction that ‘the estate would not allow us to republish Borges under the old … terms.’ On the spot, my formal contractual agreements of twenty or more years were unilaterally declared null and void.

Nor have I been the only person incensed about this turn of events. Many readers of Borges, some of whom vent their views on the Internet, also feel cheated. Susan Sontag even took the trouble to write to me that

As a fervent Borgesian, I purchased the Viking Penguin three volumes the moment they came out. And it was obvious to me, just reading here and there among old favorites … that the whole enterprise was incoherent and indigne. Contemptible. A travesty.

A word about ‘A Translator’s Guide’. An Argentine reviewer berated me for not naming the errant translators quoted in the text. But my purpose was not to blacken the reputation of any individual, only to draw attention to certain common failings and pitfalls that plague most prose translation. As stated in the piece, I was attempting to throw a lifeline to monolingual publishers’ editors and, possibly, to the apprentice translator.

Readers of ‘Borges and His Autobiography’ must be let in on something that I deliberately omitted the first time round. The Barcelona firm that tried to publish the autobiography without my permission was forced to lock horns with me in a protracted lawsuit. They did not dispute that I owned fifty per cent of the said work but claimed that Borges had made me a gift of it. Of necessity they held that I was not its co-author. (At stake in this distinction – for them – was the matter of my damages.) María Kodama, executor of the Borges Estate, waded in with an affidavit stating that it did not seem to her that I had co-written the essay. Why should it have seemed so to her? When the piece was composed, in 1970, she did not occupy centre-stage in Borges’s life and had no idea what he and I were up to in our daily work sessions.

The publisher’s claims were all the more bizarre when set alongside the introduction to the book by its translator, the Latin-American professor Aníbal González. He pointed out that the autobiography ‘is the product of a collaboration with another writer, the translator di Giovanni. It is, then, not just a text written in another language but also in part, literally, by someone else.’

To close this sordid episode on a sunny note, let me report that the Spanish Supreme Court – thanks to the efforts of my lawyer Alejandro Angulo – eventually found in my favour.

I am often asked to write brief comments or reminiscences about my Borges years. Three such pieces, under the collective title ‘Backward Glances’, have been added here to close this new edition. Their histories are as follows.

‘A Reader’s Life’, commissioned by Erica Wagner as a review of James Woodall’s The Man in the Mirror of the Book, first appeared under the title ‘Trapped inside the house of fame’ in The Times, 11 July 1996.

‘Borges Remembered’, commissioned by Sophy Roberts, first appeared under the title ‘Borges and Me’ in Departures, October 2006.

‘The Other Borges’, commissioned by Khademul Islam, first appeared in the Daily Star, Dhaka, 20 June 2009.

The three were also printed together in the Raconteur, Winter 2010, under the title ‘Backward Glances: Remembering Borges’.

Warm thanks are due to Marcial Souto, to Susan Ashe, and to my son Tom di Giovanni for sage counsel, editorial and otherwise. Finally, for being the Maecenas of this book’s second edition, I want to express my gratitude to Scott Pack, of The Friday Project, an obvious maverick who does not shrink from the company of fellow mavericks.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Keyhaven, Lymington

Hampshire

November 2009

Foreword to the First Edition

The twenty-fourth of August 1999 marked the centenary of the birth of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine’s best known and one of its greatest literary figures.

Some thirty years ago, while he was delivering a series of public addresses at Harvard University, our paths crossed, we began working together on translations of his work into English, and we became friends. Looking back now, I find that the impact of Borges on the course of my life seems to have been only inches short of a miracle. Within a few brief months of our meeting, publishers began to compete for his stories and poems and essays in the new versions of them that we were making. On the eve of his return to Buenos Aires, in April 1968, he invited me to join him in his country, and seven months later I was there, plunged into the thick of his life and into the life of Argentina.

All that is a story yet to be told. Back then, while these events were unfolding, everything was hectic and crowded, and I was offered no leisure for reflection. Yet never once was I unaware of how rich and marvellous was life alongside Borges. So rich and indelible were those days of our close association, in fact, that even now, over a decade after his death, he still inhabits most of my working hours and occasionally, at night, even my dreams.

The little memoir and the essays collected here are in the nature of a homage and a contribution to the celebration of Borges’s life and work. The book is no attempt to deliver the final word on him or on any aspect of what he wrote. Offering simple guidance and a commonsensical approach to reading him, the pieces are more tentative and modest. In most ways, these pages are the close-up view, the record, of someone who worked on a daily basis with Borges at a distinctive and critical period of his life, when he overcame various adversities and experienced a rich late flowering.

The Lesson of the Master has had a singular genesis. At the outset of our association, when Borges and I were working on an English edition of his selected poems, he described me in a letter to his Buenos Aires publisher, the late Carlos Frías, as the volume’s ‘onlie begetter’. It was a term that both men, teachers of English literature, savoured.

Originally, I wanted to publish the memoir that opens the present volume as a tailpiece to Borges’s ‘Autobiographical Essay’, a 20,000-word text that he and I composed together in English, in 1970. The Borges Estate, however, did not look kindly on the idea. No explanation, no reasons, were given for their decision, but somehow my work of 1988 was not deemed worthy of appearing alongside my work with Borges of 1970. An Argentine editor came along, however, and said that he would undertake to publish the two essays separately.

Working with Borges, one had come to appreciate the fact that less was more, but my thirty-odd-page essay, I thought to myself, was about to become the slimmest book on record. Marcial Souto, my mentor in these matters and himself a minimalist in literary creation, was also apprehensive. (It was he who had brought the original project to the Argentine editor’s attention.) Souto suggested that I couple with the memoir some other related piece or pieces of mine. I sent him a further essay, twenty pages long, and he approved. For a month or two after, I was haunted by the melancholy notion that – when all I wanted was to bring out a volume worthy of the master – I was about to become holder of the even less distinguished record of producing the second slimmest book in publishing history. This would not do. Ransacking my papers, I began to turn up the material that eventually made its way into the present pages. It is in this roundabout way, then, that the Borges Estate is the ‘onlie begetter’ of these essays. To the Estate and to Mr Souto, my thanks.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni

October 1999

In Memory of Borges

There is an article, really a piece of photojournalism, in one of those Argentine weekly magazines, in which I can be seen walking down a Buenos Aires street with Borges leaning on my arm. Was the magazine Siete Días or Gente? That I no longer remember, but all the other details I am fairly clear about. It was 1969; we were walking east along Belgrano Avenue, crossing Santiago del Estero or more likely Salta, a block or two from the small flat where Borges was still living with his first wife. I am wearing my brown herringbone tweed suit and a tie, concessions to the demands of sober, formal Buenos Aires. We are crossing or about to cross Salta, Borges clutching my right arm in his somewhat frantic blind man’s vice, and the large photograph in the magazine is a picture of me with him on my arm and definitely not the other way round – it is not a photograph of Borges being led along by some anonymous younger man, a foreigner, an American.

That year, on the dot of four every afternoon, five days a week, I picked Borges up from the Belgrano flat and, his arm firmly gripping mine, we walked the ten slow blocks east to the National Library, in Mexico Street, where our early evening’s work awaited us. By this time, he had been Director of the Argentine National Library for fourteen years. The post, of course, was a sinecure. Borges was not a librarian, much less an administrator, and a loyal assistant director, José Edmundo Clemente, did the real work. Once or twice a month perhaps, like a ritual, a secretary came into the big office where Borges and I sat across from each other at a solid long mahogany table, and she would stand over a thick sheaf of papers, turning a corner of each page for him to initial. Whatever the bulk of paperwork, it never proved much of an interruption. Most of the time he initialled away while carrying on his discussion with me; but if things were going particularly well and he was in one of his playful moods, which were frequent, he might indulge in a bit of good-natured ribbing, poking fun at her to me in English or at me to her in Spanish.

‘You see, di Giovanni, how mercilessly she makes me work.’ Often the woman would be halfway out of the room before Borges would remember himself and, for form’s sake, think to ask exactly what it was he had just signed.

‘Only the usual accounts, Señor Borges,’ she would say assuringly, the epitome of correctness and respect.

‘Ah, yes,’ he would rejoin, as if suddenly reminded of some immutable truth.

It was a game. The secretaries, one or two in the morning, a different one or two in the afternoon, hated troubling Borges about anything, especially when he was working, and to this day I am sure that even after it had been explained to him Borges never had the foggiest notion what he was signing.

‘Borges,’ I’d quip when the mood came over me, ‘I can see from here that that sheaf you’re putting your John Hancock to grants the whole library staff an extra two-week holiday with pay.’

And he would do a comic double-take, feigning astonishment, stop scribbling, look up trying to locate the secretary’s face, and repeat to her my remark in Spanish.

‘No, jamás nunca, Señor Borges; le juro.’ And with her oaths to the contrary and not-on-your-lifes, he let himself be readily convinced every time.

This is not to suggest that Borges did not take the job in earnest. He did. But at the same time he knew he was a figurehead – a mere figurehead, he would have phrased it – and, never pompous about anything, he allowed himself to be ironic about the post. Deep down, he was proud of the library, of the position, and grateful for it too. Almost in the manner of a credulous child, he would recite for visitors that the library contained 800,000 volumes. Or later, 900,000. It was one of the few facts Borges ever had at his fingertips. To him facts were the antithesis of the essence of truth, and he found them meaningless. This was the only fact I can remember his spouting that required – unlike the year of his birth, say – frequent updating. The job was the perfect symbol for him, and he was the perfect symbol for the job. Indeed, what library in the world would not have rejoiced at having a Borges as its titular head? He performed the office like a master – as if he had been born to it, or, better, because he had been born to it.

Those evenings of ours were devoted to the translation of stories, poems, and essays of his into English. ‘My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project,’ Borges was to write a year later, when he was seventy-one. ‘For nearly the past three years, I have been lucky to have my own translator at my side, and together we are bringing out some ten or twelve volumes of my work in English, a language I am unworthy to handle, a language I often wish had been my birthright.’

As the young man from Siete Días or Gente knew, all this made a good story: the American from Boston who had suddenly popped up and was shepherding the legendary Borges along the streets of Buenos Aires and working with him at the National Library. In fact, the story had a bit of everything – the exotic and the homely. Here was the lofty National Treasure, for whom New York publishers were competing, whom they had sent one of their own to the ends of the earth to watch over. It proved Borges really was a world figure and not just an oddball local, an Anglophile with a passion for books; it meant that Buenos Aires and Argentina counted in the world for something more than excellent steaks and crack football players. It was a fine tonic for the constant doubt about his identity that assails the porteño at the best of times. These were not the best of times. ‘Nationalism is creeping in all the time,’ Borges sneered. It was the military dictatorship of General Onganía; soon grim-faced Federal police, more of them every week, would be appearing on street corners wearing jack-boots and wielding stubby submachine guns; soon the faithful flock would be bleating for the return of Perón. With the horizon fast shading from leaden to black, enter the young American in the tweed suit who had something in common with half the population of Buenos Aires – a comforting Italian surname. Which was why the story was about me, why the pictures were of me with the National Treasure on my arm and not of Borges with me on his.

I often joked with him about this. As we moved through Florida Street, a pedestrian precinct on the way to his mother’s, people would open a way, turn round, gape, point. ‘It never ceases to amaze me the way strangers seem to recognize me,’ I would tell him, deadpan. ‘“Look,” they say, “there’s di Giovanni – there, with the old man on his arm.”’ It made Borges laugh every time. The passers-by never failed to greet him; some even held their children up for him to touch. He always asked people their names, where they were from. Ah, yes. He had a friend there. A lawyer and a fine poet named Fernández Ordóñez. Borges was a living monument, and the Argentines revered him.

At the library we shuffled through the revolving door and up the grand marble staircase, entering first the outer office with the scruffy, bare, wooden floor, where the secretaries huddled at a tiny table in the corner by the window. Except by that window, the room was lightless, bleak, and spartan. A small wire wastebasket stood beside the table. There was one telephone – big, clumsy, black, its cord frayed. It didn’t matter. The phones, like the secretaries, only worked part-time. The building dated from 1901 and had been, as Borges was fond of telling visitors, the seat of the national lottery. The inner sanctum, Borges’s office, had an extraordinarily high ceiling, green wallpaper printed with bamboo-like fronds, polished mahogany panelling, and a parquet floor. We worked at the old-fashioned conference table in the centre of the room. At the far end was the desk that Paul Groussac, a distinguished predecessor, had had built to his own design. It was U-shaped. If you sat behind it, as Borges never did, it surrounded you. It had strange drawers and odd compartments. Borges later described it briefly at the end of his story ‘There Are More Things’.

The room’s other furnishings were a couple of revolving bookshelves and a tall set of drawers into which Borges slipped the drafts of poems he dictated in the morning to a secretary. Two pairs of doors led off the room straight onto a corridor. These we used only when trying to give the slip to someone who might be waiting in the outer office or when we went to the vast, stark loo that was used only by us. Next door was the room Groussac had died in, a detail Borges took ghoulish delight in recounting. For once upon a time the director had lived on the premises. There were traces of a kitchen that proved it. But Elsa, the new Mrs Borges, whom Borges had married at sixty-eight (she was some ten or twelve years younger), would have none of it. She was right, of course. The library was a gloomy place, and I thought I too would go blind there. There was a dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, whose paper and binding Borges and I were fond of smelling, on the main table. The one place in all Buenos Aires where my tweed suit was no match for the winter was in the dank cavern of Borges’s office. But there was a large, ornate fireplace at my back, where a fire of eucalyptus logs would glow – not burn but glow. If I backed up to it now and again, the icy chill was momentarily dispelled. Still, one was thankful for small mercies.

What the photographs in the magazine article do not show is the crablike walk I had developed, much to the detriment of my lower back muscles. Buenos Aires pavements are narrow, and to negotiate them with Borges on my right arm I had to learn to master the art of walking with my left hip and left arm leading the way. To make matters worse, my extended left hand always carried a briefcase bulging with papers and books. There I was with the National Treasure on my arm, keeping him safe from the murderous traffic, the ubiquitous excavations, and the broken tiles of the city’s pavements, steering him round open pits or dodging beau traps. And all the while the squat buses inched along in step with us, throbbing and belching thick black exhaust over the Treasure; over my herringbone tweed; over his monologue about Victoria Ocampo, whom he dubbed Queen Victoria for her imperial ways, or Ernesto Sabato, dubbed the Dostoyevsky of Santos Lugares for his bouts of melancholia; over an example of the word music of Dunbar, Coleridge, or the Bard himself, whose ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’, capped with ‘making the green one red’, never failed to rouse and thrill Borges – potholes, pitfalls, grime, soot, lethal traffic, and sputtering buses be damned.

Once, fourteen years later and forty miles away across the river in Uruguay, in the town of Colonia, where I was helping make a BBC film about Borges, I stumbled across a half-open gateway that gave a glimpse of a picturesque garden with a big fig tree ripening in the middle of it. I couldn’t resist. In I strolled, utterly captivated. Immediately a man dashed out of a house, a stern look on his face, to halt me in my tracks.