Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 33

I sat thinking. Had I not spent a lifetime, colorless yet strange, in pur- suit of Shakespeare? Was it not fairthat at the end of my labors I find him?

I said, carefully p.r.o.nouncing each word: "I accept Shakespeare's memory."

Something happened; there is no doubt of that. But I did not feel it happen.

Perhaps just a slight sense of fatigue, perhaps imaginary.

I clearly recall that Thorpe did tell me: "The memory has entered your mind, but it must be 'discovered.' It will emerge in dreams or when you are awake, when you turn the pages of a book or turn a corner. Don't be impatient; don'tinvent recollections. Chance in its mysterious workings may help it along, or it may hold it back. As I gradually forget, you will remember. I can't tell you how long the process will take."

We dedicated what remained of the night to a discussion of the charac- ter of Shylock. I refrained from trying to discover whether Shakespeare had had personal dealings with Jews. I did not want Thorpe to imagine that I was putting him to some sort of test. I did discover (whether with relief or uneasiness, I cannot say) that his opinions were as academic and conven- tional as my own.

In spite of that long night without sleep, I hardly slept at all the follow- ing night. I found, as I had so many times before, that I was a coward. Out of fear of disappointment, I could not deliver myself up to openhanded hope. I preferred to think that Thorpe's gift was illusory. But hope did, irre- sistibly, come to prevail. I would possess Shakespeare, and possess him as no one had ever possessed anyone before- not in love, or friendship, or even hatred. I, in some way, wouldbe Shakespeare. Not that I would write the tragedies or the intricate sonnets-but I would recall the instant at which the witches (who are also the Fates) had been revealed to me, the other in- stant at which I had been given the vast lines:

And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-weary flesh.

I would remember Anne Hathaway as I remembered that mature woman who taught me the ways of love in an apartment inLubeck somany years ago. (I tried to recall that woman, but I could only recover the wall- paper, which was yellow, and the light that streamed in through the win- dow. This first failure might have foreshadowed those to come.) I had hypothesized that the images of that wondrous memory would be primarily visual. Such was not the case. Days later, as I was shaving, I spoke into the mirror a string of words that puzzled me; a colleague informed methat they were from Chaucer's"A. B. C."One afternoon, as I was leaving the British Museum, I began whistling a very simple melody that I had never heard before.

The reader will surely have noted the common thread that links these first revelations of the memory: it was, in spite of the splendor of some metaphors, a good deal more auditory than visual.

De Quinceysays that man's brain is a palimpsest. Every new text covers the previous one, and is in turn covered by the text that follows-but all-powerful Memory is able to exhume any impression, no matter how mo- mentary it might have been, if given sufficient stimulus. To judge by the will he left, there had been not a single book in Shakespeare's house, not even the Bible, and yet everyone is familiar with the books he so often repaired to: Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Holinshed'sChronicle, Florio's Montaigne, North's Plutarch. I possessed, at least potentially, the memory that had been Shakespeare's; the reading (which is to say the rereading) of those old volumes would, then, be the stimulus I sought. I also reread the sonnets, which are his work of greatest immediacy. Once in a while I came up with the explication, or with many explications. Good lines demand to be read aloud; after a few days I effortlessly recovered the harshf's and open vowels of the sixteenth century.

In an article I published in theZeitschrift fur germanische Philologie,I wrote that Sonnet 127 referred to the memorable defeat of the Spanish Armada. I had forgotten that Samuel Butler had advanced that same thesis in 1899.

A visit to Stratford-on-Avon was, predictably enough, sterile.

Then came the gradual transformation of my dreams. I was to be granted neither splendid nightmaresa la deQuincey nor pious allegorical visions in the manner of his master Jean Paul*; it was unknown roomsand faces that entered my nights. The first face I identified was Chapman's; later there was Ben Jonson's, and the face of one of the poet's neighbors, a person who does not figure in the biographies but whom Shakespeare often saw.

The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every ill.u.s.tration; he acquires thepossibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things. If that is the case with a concrete, and relatively simple, ent.i.ty (given, I mean, the alphabetical order of its parts, etc.), then what must happen with a thing which is abstract and variable- ondoyant etdivers?A dead man's magical memory, for example?

No one may capture in a single instant the fullness of his entire past.

That gift was never granted even to Shakespeare, so far as I know, much less to me, who was but his partial heir. A man's memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities. St. Augustine speaks, if I am not mistaken, of the palaces and the caverns of memory. That second metaphor is the more fitting one. It was into those caverns that I descended.

Like our own, Shakespeare's memory included regions, broad regions, of shadow-regions that he willfully rejected. It was not without shock that I remembered how Ben Jonson had made him recite Latin and Greek hexameters, and how his ear-the incomparable ear of Shakespeare- would go astray in many of them, to the hilarity of his fellows.

I knew states of happiness and darkness that transcend common hu- man experience.

Without my realizing it, long and studious solitude had prepared me for the docile reception of the miracle. After some thirty days, the dead man's memory had come to animate me fully. For one curiously happy week, I almost believed myself Shakespeare. His work renewed itself for me. I know that for Shakespeare the moon was less the moon than it was Diana, and less Diana than that dark drawn-out wordmoon. I noted another dis- covery: Shakespeare's apparent instances of inadvertence-those absencesdans l'infiniof which Hugo apologetically speaks-were deliberate. Shake- speare tolerated them-or actually interpolated them-so that his dis- course, destined for the stage, might appear to be spontaneous, and not overly polished and artificial(nicht allzu glatt und gekunstelt).That same goal inspired him to mix his metaphors:

my way of life Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow leaf.

One morning I perceived a sense of guilt deep within his memory. I did not try to define it; Shakespeare himself has done so for all time. Suffice it to say that the offense had nothing in common with perversion.

I realized that the three faculties of the human soul-memory, under- standing, and will-are not some mere Scholastic fiction. Shakespeare's memory was able to reveal to me only the circ.u.mstances ofthe man Shake- speare. Clearly, these circ.u.mstances do not const.i.tute the uniqueness ofthe poet; what matters is the literature the poet produced with that frail material.

I was naive enough to have contemplated a biography, just as Thorpe had. I soon discovered, however, that that literary genre requires a talent for writing that I do not possess. I do not know how to tell a story. I do notknow how to tellmy own story, which is a great deal more extraordinary than Shakespeare's. Besides, such a book would be pointless. Chance, or fate, dealt Shakespeare those trivial terrible things that all men know; it was his gift to be able to trans.m.u.te them into fables, into characters that were much more alive than the gray man who dreamed them, into verses which will never be abandoned, into verbal music. What purpose would it serve to unravel that wondrous fabric, besiege and mine the tower, reduce to the modest proportions of a doc.u.mentary biography or a realistic novel the sound and fury ofMacbeth?

Goethe, as we all know, is Germany's official religion; the worship of Shakespeare, which we profess not without nostalgia, is more private. (In England, the official religion is Shakespeare, who is so unlike the English; England's sacred book, however, is the Bible.) Throughout the first stage of this adventure I felt the joy of being Shake- speare; throughout the last, terror and oppression. At first the waters of the two memories did not mix; in time, the great torrent ofShakespeare threat- ened to flood my own modest stream-and very nearly did so. I noted with some nervousness that I was gradually forgetting the language of my par- ents. Since personal ident.i.ty is based on memory, I feared for my sanity.

My friends would visit me; I was astonished that they could not see that I was in h.e.l.l.

I began not to understand the everyday world around me(diealltag- liche Umwelt).One morning I became lost in a welter of great shapes forged in iron, wood, and gla.s.s. Shrieks and deafening noises a.s.sailed and confused me. It took me some time (it seemed an infinity) to recognize the engines and cars of the Bremen railway station.

As the years pa.s.s, every man is forced to bear the growing burden of his memory. I staggered beneath two (which sometimes mingled)-my own and the incommunicable other's.

The wish of all things, Spinoza says, is to continue to be what they are. The stone wishes to be stone, the tiger, tiger-and I wanted to be HermannSorgelagain.

I have forgotten the date on which I decided to free myself. I hit upon the easiest way: I dialed telephone numbers at random. The voice of a child or a woman would answer; I believed it was my duty to respect their vul- nerable estates. At last a man's refined voice answered.

"Do you," I asked, "want Shakespeare's memory? Consider well: it is a solemn thing I offer, as I can attest."

An incredulous voice replied: "I will take that risk. I accept Shakespeare's memory." I explained the conditions of the gift.

Paradoxically, I felt bothanostal- giefor the book I should have written, and now never would, and a fear that the guest, the specter, would never abandon me.

I hung up the receiver and repeated, like a wish, these resigned words: Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

I had invented exercises to awaken the antique memory; I had now to seek others to erase it. One of many was the study of the mythology of William Blake, that rebellious disciple ofSwedenborg.I found it to be less complex than merely complicated.

That and other paths were futile; all led me to Shakespeare.

I hit at last upon the only solution that gave hope courage: strict, vast music-Bach.

P.S. (1924)-I am now a man among men. In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus HermannSorgel;I putter about the card catalog and compose eru- dite trivialities, but at dawn I sometimes know that the person dreaming is that other man. Every so often in the evening I am unsettled by small, fleeting memories that are perhaps authentic.

A Note on the Translation

The first known English translation of a work of fiction by the Argentine Jorge LuisBorgesappeared in the August 1948 issue ofEllery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but although seven or eight more translations appeared in "little magazines" and anthologies during the fifties, and althoughBorgesclearly had his champions in the literary establishment, it was not until 1962, four- teen years after that first appearance, that a book-length collection of fiction appeared in English.

The two volumes of stories that appeared in theannusmirabilis-one from Grove Press, edited by Anthony Kerrigan, and the other from New Di- rections, edited by DonaldA. Yatesand James E. Irby- caused an impact that was immediate and overwhelming. John Updike, John Barth, Anthony Burgess, and countless other writers and critics have eloquently and emphati- cally attested to the unsettling yet liberating effect that Jorge LuisBorges'work had on their vision of the way literature was thenceforth to be done. Reading those stories, writers and critics encountered a disturbinglyother writer(Borgesseemed, sometimes, to come from a place even more distant than Ar- gentina, another literary planet), transported into their ken by translations, who took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics, who took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction. Even as early as 1933, PierreDrieu La Roch.e.l.le,editor of the influentialNouvelleRevueFrancaise,returning to France after visiting Argentina, is famously reported to have said,"Borges vaut levoyage";now, thirty years later, readers didn't have to make the long, hard(though deliciously exotic) journey into Spanish-Borgeshad been brought to them, and indeed he soon was being paraded through England and the United States like one of those New World indigenes taken back, captives, by Colum- bus or Sir Walter Raleigh, to captivate the Old World's imagination.

But while for many readers of these translationsBorges wasa new writer appearing as though out of nowhere, the truth was that by the time we were readingBorgesfor the first time in English, he had been writing for forty years or more, long enough to have become a self-conscious, self-possessed, andself-critical master of the craft.

The reader of the forewords to the fictions will note thatBorgesis forever commenting on the style of the stories or the entire volume, preparing the reader for what is to come stylistically as well as thematically. More than once he draws our attention to the "plain style" of the pieces, in contrast to his ear- lier "baroque." And he is right:Borges'prose style is characterized by a deter- mined economy of resources in which every word is weighted, every word (every mark of punctuation) "tells." It is a quiet style, whose effects are achieved not with bombast or pomp, but rather with a single exploding word or phrase, dropped almost as though offhandedly into a quiet sentence: "He examined his wounds and saw, without astonishment, that they had healed." This laconic detail ("without astonishment"), coming at the very beginning of "The Circular Ruins," will probably only at the end of the story be recalled by the reader, who will, retrospectively and somewhat abashedly, see that it changeseverything in the story; it is quintessentialBorges.

Quietness, subtlety, a laconic terseness-these are the marks...o...b..rges'style. It is a style that has often been called intellectual, and indeed it is dense with allusion-to literature, to philosophy, to religion or theology, to myth, to the culture and history of Buenos Aires and Argentina and the Southern Cone of South America, to the other contexts in which his words may have ap- peared. But it is also a simple style:Borges'sentences are almost invariably cla.s.sical in their symmetry, in their balance.Borgeslikes parallelism, chias- mus, subtle repet.i.tions-with-variations; his only indulgence in "shocking" the reader (an effect he repudiated) may be the "Miltonian displacement of adjec- tives" to which he alludes in his foreword toThe Maker.

Another clear mark ofBorges'prose is its employment of certain words with, or for, their etymological value. Again, this is an adjectival device, and it is perhaps the technique that is most unsettling to the reader. One of the most famous opening lines in Spanish literature is this:Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unanime noche:"Noone saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night." What an odd adjective, "unanimous." It is so odd, in fact, that other translations have not allowed it. But it is just as odd in Spanish, and it clearly responds toBorges'intention, explicitly expressed in such fictions as "The Im- mortal," to let the Latin root govern the Spanish (and, by extension, English) usage. There is, for instance, a "splendid" woman: Her red hair glows. If the translator strives for similarity of effect in the translation (as I have), then heor she cannot, I think, avoid using this technique-which is a technique thatBorges'beloved Emerson andde Quinceyand Sir Thomas Browne also used with great virtuosity.

Borgeshimself was a translator of some note, and in addition to the transla- tions persethat he left to Spanish culture-a number of German lyrics, Faulkner,Woolf,Whitman, Melville, Carlyle,Swedenborg,and others-he left at least three essays on the act of translation itself. Two of these, I have found, are extraordinarily liberating to the translator. In "Versions of Homer"

("Lasversiones homericas,"1932),Borgesmakes it unmistakably clear that every translation is a "version"

-notthe translation of Homer (or any other author) buta translation, one in a never-ending series, at least an infinitepossible series. The very idea ofthe (definitive) translation is misguided,Borgestells us; there are only drafts, approximations-versions,as he insists on calling them. He chides us: "The concept of definitive text' is appealed to only by re- ligion, or by weariness."Borgesmakes the point even more emphatically in his later essay "The Translators of the 1001 Nights"("Los traductoresde las 1001Noches"1935).

If my count is correct, at least seventeen translators have preceded me in translating one or more of the fictions of Jorge LuisBorges. Inmost transla- tor's notes, the translator would feel obliged to justify his or her new transla- tion of a cla.s.sic, to tell the potential reader of this newversion that the shortcomings and errors of those seventeen or so prior translations have been met and conquered, as though they were enemies.Borgeshas tried in his es- says to teach us, however, that we should not translate "against" our predeces- sors; a new translation is always justified by the new voice given the old work, by the new life in a new land that the translation confers on it, by the "shock of the new" that both old and new readers will experience from this inevitably new (or renewed) work. WhatBorgesteaches is that we should simply com- mend the translation to the reader, with the hope that the reader will find in it a literary experience that is rich and moving. I have listened toBorges'advice as I have listened toBorges'fictions, and I-like the translators who have pre- ceded me-have renderedBorges inthe style that I hear when I listen to him. I think that the reader of my version will hear something of the genius of his storytelling and his style. For those who wish to readBorgesasBorgeswroteBorges,there is alwayslevoyagea l'espagnol.

The text that theBorgesestate specified to be used for this new translation is the three-volumeObrascompletas,published byEmece Editoresin 1989.

In producing this translation, it has not been our intention to produce anannotated or scholarly edition ofBorges,but rather a "reader's edition." Thus, bibliographical information (which is often confused or terribly complex even in the most reliable of cases) has not been included except in a couple of clear instances, nor have we taken variants into account in any way; theBorgesFoundation is reported to be working on a fully annotated, biblio-graphically reasoned variorum, and scholars of course can go to the several bibliographies and many other references that now exist. I have, however, tried to provide the Anglophone reader with at least a modic.u.m of the gen- eral knowledge of the history, literature, and culture of Argentina and the Southern Cone of South America thata Hispanophonereader of the fictions, growing up in that culture, would inevitably have. To that end, asterisks have been inserted into the text of the fictions, tied to corresponding notes at the back of the book. (The notes often cite sources where interested readers can find further information.) One particularly th.o.r.n.y translation decision that had to be made in- volvedA Universal History of Iniquity. This volume is purportedly a series of biographies of reprehensible evildoers, and as biography, the book might be expected to rely greatly upon "sources" of one sort or another-as indeedBorges'"Index of Sources" seems to imply. In his preface to the 1954 reprint- ing of the volume, however,Borgesacknowledges the"fictive"nature of his stories: This is a case, he says, of "changing and distorting (sometimes with- out aesthetic justification) the stories of other men" to produce a work singu- larly his own. Thissuigeneris use of sources, most of which were in English, presents the translator with something of a challenge: to translateBorgeseven whileBorgesis cribbing from, translating, and "changing and distorting" other writers' stories. The method I have chosen to employ is to go to the sourcesBorgesnames, to see the ground upon which those changes and dis- tortions were wrought; whereBorgesis clearly translating phrases, sentences, or even larger pieces of text, I have used the English of the original source. Thus, the New York gangsters in "Monk Eastman" speak as Asbury quotes them, not as I might have translatedBorges'Spanish into English had I been translating in the usual sense of the word; back-translatingBorges'translation did not seem to make much sense. But even while returning to the sources, I have made no attempt, either in the text or in my notes, to "correct"Borges;he has changed names (or their spellings), dates, numbers, locations, etc., as his literary vision led him to, but the tracing of those "deviations" is a matter which the editors and I have decided should be left to critics and scholarly publications.

More often than one would imagine,Borges'characters are murderers, knife fighters, throat slitters, liars, evil or casually violent men and women-and of course many of them "live" in a time different from our own. They sometimes use language that is strong, and that today may well be offensive- words denoting membership in ethnic and racial groups, for example. In the Hispanic culture, however, some of these expressions can be, and often are, used as terms of endearment-negro/negraandchino/china comeat once to mind. (I am not claiming that Argentina is free of bigotry;Borgeschronicles that, too.) All this is to explain a decision as to my translation of certain terms-specificallyrustio(literally "little Russian," but with the force of "Jew," "sheeny"),pardo/parda(literally "dark mulatto," "black-skinned"), andgringo (meaning Italian immigrants: "wops," etc.)-thatBorgesuses in his fictions. I have chosen to use the word "sheeny" forrusito and the word "wop" forgringo because in the stories in which these words appear, there is an intention to be offensive-acharacter's intention, notBorges'.I have also chosen to use the word "n.i.g.g.e.r" forpardo/parda.This decision is taken not without consider- able soul-searching, but I feel there is historical justification for it. In the May 20, 1996, edition ofThe New Yorker magazine, p. 63, the respected historian and cultural critic Jonathan Raban noted the existence of a nineteenth-century "n.i.g.g.e.r Bob's saloon," where, out on the Western frontier, husbands would await the arrival of the train bringing their wives from the East. Thus, when a character in one ofBorges'stories says, "I knew I could count on you, old n.i.g.g.e.r," one can almost hear the slight tenderness, or respect, in the voice, even if, at the same time, one winces. In my view, it is not the transla- tor's place to (asBorgesput it) "soften or mitigate" these words. Therefore, I have translated the epithets with the words I believe would have been used in English-in the United States, say-at the time the stories take place.The footnotes that appear throughout the text of the stories in theCol- lected Fictions areBorges'own, even when they say "Ed."

This translation commemorates the centenary ofBorges'birth in 1899; I wish it also to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first appearance ofBorges inEn- glish, in 1948. It is to all translators, then,Borgesincluded, that this translation is-unanimously-dedicated.

Andrew Hurley San Juan, Puerto Rico June 1998

Acknowledgments.

I am indebted to the University of Puerto Rico atRio Piedrasfor a sabbatical leave that enabled me to begin this project. My thanks to the administration, and to the College of Humanities and the Department of English, for their constant support of my work not only on this project but throughout my twenty-odd years at UPR.

The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Spanish and Por- tuguese, and its director, Madeline Sutherland-Maier, were most gracious in welcoming the stranger among them. The department sponsored me as a Vis- iting Scholar with access to all the libraries atUTduring my three years in Austin, where most of this translation was produced. My sincerest grat.i.tude is also owed those libraries and their staffs, especially thePerry-Castaneda,the Benson Latin American Collection, and the Humanities Research Center (HRC). Most of the staff, I must abashedly confess, were nameless to me, but one person, Cathy Henderson, has been especially important, as the manu- scripts for this project have been incorporated into the Translator Archives in the HRC.

For many reasons this project has been more than usually complex. At Viking Penguin, my editors, Kathryn Court and Michael Millman, have been steadfast, stalwart, and (probably more often than they would have liked) in- spired in seeing it through. One could not possibly have had more supportive colleagues, or co-conspirators, who stuck by one with any greater solidarity.

Many, many people have given me advice, answered questions, and of- fered support of all kinds-they know who they are, and will forgive me, I know, for not mentioning them all personally; I have been asked to keep these acknowledgments brief. But two people, Carter Wheelock and Margaret SayersPeden,have contributed in an especially important and intimate way, and my grat.i.tude to them cannot go unexpressed here. Carter Wheelock readword by word through an "early-final" draft of the translation, comparing it against the Spanish for omissions, misperceptions and mistranslations, and errors of fact. This translation is the cleaner and more honest for his efforts. Margaret SayersPeden (a.k.a.Fetch), one of the finest translators from Span- ish working in the world today, was engaged by the publisher to be an outside editor for this volume. Fetch read through the late stages of the translation, comparing it with the Spanish, suggesting changes that ranged from punctua- tion to "readings."

Translators want to translate,love to translate; for a transla- tor at the height of her powers to read a translation in this painstaking way and yet, while suggesting changes and improvements, to respect the other translator's work, his approach, his thought processes and creativity-even to applaud the other translator's (very) occasional strokes of brilliance-is to engage in an act of selflessness that is almost superhuman. She made the usual somewhat tedious editing process a joy.

I would never invoke Carter Wheelock's and Fetch Peden's readings of the ma.n.u.scripts of this translation-or those of Michael Millman and the other readers at Viking Penguin-as giving it any authority or credentials or infalli- bility beyond its fair deserts, but I must say that those readings have given me a security in this translation that I almost surely would not have felt so strongly without them. I am deeply and humbly indebted.

First, last, always, and in number of words inversely proportional to my grat.i.tude-I thank my wife, Isabel Garayta.

Andrew HurleySan Juan, Puerto Rico June 1998

Notesto the Fictions

These notes are intended only to supply information that a Latin American (and especially Argentine or Uruguayan) reader would have and that would color or determine his or her reading of the stories.

Generally, therefore, the notes cover only Argentine history and culture; I have presumed the reader to possess more or less the range of general or world history or culture that JLB makes constant reference to, or to have access to such reference books and other sources as would supply any need there. There is no intention here to produce an "annotatedBorges,"but rather only to illuminate certain pa.s.sages that might remain obscure, or even be misunderstood, without that information.

For these notes, I am deeply indebted toA Dictionary ofBorgesby Evelyn Fishburn andPsicheHughes (London: Duckworth, 1990). Other dictionaries, encyclopedias, reference books, biographies, and works of criticism have been consulted, but none has been as thorough and immediately useful as theDic - tionary ofBorges.Inmany places, and especially where I quote Fishburn and Hughes directly, I cite their contribution, but I have often paraphrased them without direct attribution; I would not want anyone to think, however, that I am unaware or unappreciative of the use I have made of them. Any errors are my own responsibility, of course, and should not be taken to reflect on them or their work in any way.

Another book that has been invaluable is Emir Rod- riguez Monegal'sJorge LuisBorges:A Literary Biography(New York: Paragon Press, [paper] 1988), now out of print. In the notes, I have cited this work as "Rodriguez Monegal, p. x."

The names of Arab and Persian figures that appear in the stories are taken, in the case of historical persons, from the English transliterations of Philip K. Hitti in his workHistory of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1951). (JLB himself cites. .h.i.tti as an authority in this field.) In the case of fictional characters, the translator has used the system oftransliteration implicit in Hitti's historical names in comparison with the same names in Spanish transliteration.-Translator.

Notes toA Universal History of Iniquity, pp. 1-64 For the peculiarities of the text of the fictions in this volume, the reader is re- ferred to A Note on the Translation.

Preface to the First Edition p. 3:Evaristo Carriego:Carriego(1883-1912) was in fact a popular poet and play- wright, and the "particular biography"

was the oneBorgeshimself wrote of him (pub- lished 1930).Carriegowas only a mediocre poet, perhaps, and he left but a single volume(Misas herejes,"Heretical Ma.s.ses") upon his early death by tuberculosis, but his ties to "old Buenos Aires," and especially to the lower-cla.s.s (and mostly Italian) suburb of Palermo, made him an important figure forBorges.While it is probably ex- aggerated to say that much of JLB's fascination with thecompadre(see the note to the t.i.tle of "Man on Pink Corner" below) and the knife fights and tangos that are a.s.soci- ated with that "type" can be traced toCarriego,there is no doubt that as an example of the literary possibilities to which such subject matter can be put,Carriegowas very important to JLB and JLB's imagination.Carriegowas also the firstprofessional writerBorgeshad ever run across, a man who made his living at writing, and not some "mere" amateur; he held out therefore the possibilities of a true literary "career" to match Borges's clear literary "calling."

Preface to the 1954 Edition p. 4:Baltasar Gradan:Gracian(1601-1658) was a Jesuit priest and a writer (and sometime aesthetician) of the baroque.

His name is a.s.sociated with a treatise calledAgudeza yarte de ingenio("Keenness of Mind and the Art of Wit"), and with the Spanish baroque poets Francisco Quevedo andLuis de Gongora.

The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell p. 6: PedroFigari: figari(1861-1938) was a Uruguayan painter "who used fauvist techniques [Rodriguez Monegal, p.

194]," (this perhaps explains his success in Paris, where he lived from 1925 to 1933) and who spent an important partof his life in Buenos Aires (1921-1925).Borgesknew the painter rather well and wrote an introduc- tion to a book on him;Figariwas also feted by the literary group a.s.sociated with the reviewMartin Fierro,of whichBorges wasan important member. His work "was in- spired by the life of Negroes andgauchos"(Oeuvrescompletes,vol.I, ed.

JeanPierreBernes[Paris:Gallimard, p.1489].

p. 6: Vicente Rossi:Rossi (1871-1945) was the author of a volume t.i.tledCosas de negros("NegroMatters" [1926]), to which this mention surely points, but he also produced the first reference book on the birth and development of Argentine theater and an important book on thegaucho.He was, then, something of a folklorist and literary historian. In Evaristo Carriego,Borgescalls Rossi "our best writer of combat prose."

p. 6: Antonio("Falucho")Ruiz:"Falucho"(d.1824) was a black Argentine soldier who fought in the wars of independence. His statue once stood near that of General San Martin near the center of Buenos Aires.

p. 6: The stout bayonet charge of the regiment of "Blacks and Tans"... against that famous hill near Montevideo:On the last day of 1812 a troop of soldiers made up of Ne- groes and mulattoes (the reference to the English military group organized to fight the Irish independence uprising is the translator's, but it is almost inevitable, and the irony of the situation would not be lost onBorges;see the story "Theme of the Hero and Traitor" inFictions), under the leadership of the Argentine general MiguelEs- tanislaoSoler,defeated the Spanish troops at the Cerrito, a prominent hill overlooking Montevideo.

p. 6: Lazarus Morell:This particular rogue's true name seems to have been John A. Murrell (BernardDe Voto,Mark Twain's America[Boston: Little, Brown, 1932], pp. 16-17et seq.)or Murell (Mark Twain,Life on the Mississippi, intra.James M. c.o.x [New York: Penguin, 1984 (orig.pubi,in United States by James R. Osgood in 1883)].) Interestingly, Twain never gives the rogue's first name; it is possible, then, that JLB, needing a name, took "Lazarus" to fit the ironic notion that Morell gave a second life to the slaves he freed.