gentine as his destiny, Buenos Aires as his locality, but his preoccupations were
wholly metaphysical. Where Neruda in his poems addressed the realities of the.
PER.'ONALHIJTORY
NERUDAAND BORGEJ No tzuoLatin-Anerican writers couldbe moreimportant. No tttso ztsriterscould thefriend and translatorof both? bemorediferent. Hou did theauthorbecorne
BYALA.'TAIRREID
f TuoN I first went to Spain, in country, to Andalusia, to Gibraltar and 1 953.I knew l i ttl e about l'4orocco, to Pornrgal-looking and lisl /l / Y Y thelivingcountryandbarely tening a lot, and I wrote the fust of a sea word of the language.But my senses ries of chronicleson Spain for The New were in good working order, and I was Yorker.Soon after it appeared,I had my instanth' drarvn in by Spain'srhythms Spanishpresscredentialswithdrawn, but and its landscapes-the burned, sun_.- that made little difference,for Spain exstainedearth, the silver-blueclarig,of istedthen on rumor and speculation.LivNlediteranean light, the warm s,rle.nnity ing there felt like belonging to an extenofthe peopie,the spareness ofvillage life. sive whispered conspiracy against the Existencewas honed down to its essen- Franco regime. Spain was at something tials,making the dayslonger,time more of a standstill,still in shockfrom the Civil abundant.So I returnedto Spain,and re- War and the long isolation that followed turned, and eventu'allywent to live there it, threadbarecomparedto the rest of Euin 1956, setting out to learn thg country, rope. Censorship,both moral and politiand slowly absorb the Spanish senseof cal, hung heavy over the press,over the time. Spaniardshavea gift fbr exiranding universities,and overwriters and publishthe present,around a meal or a conver- ers, and the police had sharp antennae sation; and they are mastersof the cos- out for any sign of dissidence.The writmic shrug that shedsall preoccupations ers I knew complainedthat yearsofcenexceptthose immediatelyat hand. But sorship had instilled in Spaniards the living in Spain meant, aboveall, entering habit of censoringthemselves.Newspathe Spanishlanguage,for in those early perswere gray and evasive,written opindaysI felt separatedfrom the spokenlife ion was sparseand guarded,and literature around me, a baffiement hard to bear. was thin and soare. Spanish,at first encounter,is welcoming: Among my friends in Barcelonawas you enter it by way of the market and the a young poet and pubJishernamed Carkitchen, but you soon find yourself los Barral, lean, birdlike, throaty-voiced, strandedon that plateau of daily needs. and given to infectiousenthusiasms.CarThe languagelies still beyond. Living in los's imprint, Seix Barral, published the anotherlanguagemeansgrowing another work of new Spanishwriters and of Euself, and it takes time for that other self ropeanwriters in translation, and conseto becomea familiar. \\4rile I went about quently was always battling the censor. learning the machinery and the music, I Carlos's enthusiasm at that time, howreaJizrdat the sametime that the Soan- ever,was for the writing that was b.gtnish I was acquiringwasasdevoidof con- ning to appear from the countries of text asthat of a young child, for I had no SpanishAmerica.In 1962,he published past in the language.I was lucly, how- Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "La Ciudad ever,in having wise friends, and, follow- y los Perros," later translated as "The ing their counsel,I entereda continuum Time of the Hero." The book was reof readingand listening. ceivedin Spainwith an excitement hardly There is nothing like immersionin an ever generatedby the Spanish novels of unknown-new places,new landscapes, the day, and it led Carlos to proclaim, new preoccupations,new loves, a new with remarkable prescience,that it was language-to sharpenthe edgeof atten- from the countries of Spanish America tion. From Majorca, where I first landed, that we should expect not just the next I moved to Madrid and then to Barce- literary flowering but the renewing of the lona. I travelled all over-to the Basoue Spanishlanguage. f
57 In those days, the attitude of Spaniards toward Spanish America most resembledthe way the English used to regard the United States,with an insufferable condescension.Europe was much more immediateto them than the South American continent, and their knowledge of itwas vague.So was mine. I had in my heada mixture of schoolgeography,Hollywood epics,Carmen Miranda with fruit on her head, peons asleepunder huge
When Mario Vargas Llosa came to Barcelona,Carlos introduced me. Mario had left Peru behind and lived in Paris, working for the French radio network: he broadcastto Latin America at night and wrote by day.He had a kind of flashing intensity to him, and a single,burning ambition: to live by his writing. It was nearlyimpossible,he said,to make a living asa writer in Latin America: editions were small, readerswere sparse,and few
eruption, however,very few writers from Soanish America had earned international attention. Foremost among them were the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Argentine masterJorge Luis Borges. They were, eachin a quite separateway, the forerunnersof the writers ofthe Boom. I had been introduced to Borges's writing a few years earlier, by Pipina Prieto, a vivacious Argentine who had known him in Buenos Aires and who
Neruda in Isla Negra, 1969.Hisfriend v.tassoughtout and shot,and everynthereabout htm Mruda saut Spain broken. The zoarbrougbt about in him a deeppolitical conaersion. sombreros,the bossanova, and the chacha. It may have had something to do with the stasisof Spain at the time, but, through the books and manuscriptsthat Carlos passedon to mrbooks like Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Pdramo" and Alejo Carpentier's "The Lost Steps"-I began to take an impassionedinterest in South America, and to readits turbulent history with some amazement.More than that, I found in the literature a loosening of Spanish from its Castilian restraints,an intenseverbal energy.I noticed the same thing in the few Spanish Americans I came acrossin Barcelona:they had more exuberancethan we were usedto in Spain p and, given the occasion,they turned conQversationonitsear,makingaplayground 3 of the language.
writers were read beyond their own borders, since tariff barriers in many countries madebooks hard to comeby. While the separatecountries of Latin America all had their writers, it made little sense, Mario said,to speakof a "Latin American" literature.As yet,therewasno bodyofwriting that had found its way through translation into other literatures and so achievedinternationalrecognition.\Atthin a decade,that was to changeutterly, with the surgeof memorablenovels,popularly referredto asthe Boom, that appearedin the aftermathof the Cuban Revolutionof 1,959and receivedgreat acclaimin many languages:novelsby Vargas Liosa, Julio CortLzar, Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, Jos6 Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Prior to that
spokeof him with such fervor that when shepressedhis "Ficciones"on me I would not havedared not read it. The effect on an unsuspectingreaderof encounteringa work of Borges'can be alarming enough almost to justi$' a publisher'swarning on the book jacket. His storiesinduce a kind of vertigo in his readers,an eerie aftereffect that can invest small happenings, like breaking a glass or missing a train, with ominous significance.Pipina was a bewitching talker, and could practically perform Borges'sstories.We talked them over,endlessly,and beforelong I kept the halFdozen slenderbooks that contained most of his writing then-poems and essaysas well as stories-always at hand. I had been coming acrossthe poetry of Neruda piecemeal, mostly in the
5B
THENEV YORKER, JUNE24 T"JULY1,1996
houses of friends, for Neruda's books were then proscribed in Spain as Communist literature. There is an extraordinary lift that comes from reading Neruda's ooetrv for the first time: both from its ih..i b."nty on the ear and from its great tumble of images. But I found not one but many Nerudas. I read his fierce elegieson the Spanish Civil War, and his tender, whimsical "Ode to My Socks," his sensual
sensualist,a poet of physicallove, a man of appetites,Borges is an ascetic;where Neruda is rooted in what he has exoerienced,Borgesseemsto havelivedalmost entirelyin literature,in the mind-travel of his reading. Borges acceptedbeing Argentineashis destiny,BuenosAires ashis l o c a l i ty ,b u t hi s preoccupati ons w ere wholly metaphysical.Where Neruda in his poems addressedthe realities of the Latin-American presentand lived on in-
family moved to Europe, where they lived for the next sevenyears-first in Geneva, where Borges studied and read French and German, and then in Spain, where he began to write in earnest.When he returned to Argentina, in 1,921, fired by a new enthusiasmfor his country, he began a literary career-as a poet, an essayist,and a reviewer,in the world of salons,tertu/ias,and small magazinesthat continued all his life.
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Borgesin BuenosAires, 1971. The ffict on an unsuspectingreaderof encounteringa tuork of Borges' can bealarming enoughalmosttajustfy a publisher'sraarning on thejacket. love p o em s , and t he h i g h i n c a n ta tory pitch of his "Heights of Machu Picchu," and I wondered at their accomplished varieqt but had no sense,yet, of who the poet was among so many incarnations. That these two writers should be acclaimed as the quintessentialSpanishAmerican writers of their time was oarticularlyintriguing to me, for the more J read them the more I felt them to be about as different from each other, as writers and as human souls.as it is oossible to be. Borges'swork is ur rp^i. r, Neruda's is ebullient, as dubious and ironic asNeruda'sis passionatelyaffirmative, asreticentasNeruda'sis voluble.\Atrere Neruda is open, evennale, Borgesis oblique and skeptical;where Neruda is a
timate terms with the physicalworld, Borges'swritings often castdoubt on the very existenceof that world, except as a mental projection, a fiction.
Neruda had his beginningsin 1904, in Paral, in the rainy south of Chile, where his father worked on the railroad, on the frontier of the sreat forests. He has recreatedhis solitary,awestruckchildhood, was in born 1899, in the Buehis discoveryof the secretlife of words, flonces nos Aires suburbof Palermo,into in a number of enchantedooems. Luck l-l a middle-classprofessionalfamily: his fa- seemedto attendhim earlv.His first oother was a lawyer and a teacherof psy- emswerebrought to the anentionofihe chology with literary aspirations, his Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, and she mother a descendantof military heroes helped him gain a scholarship to study and Argentine patriots. From an early French in Santiagowhen he was sevenage, the son was seen by the family as teen. In the capital, he moved from the destinedto becomea writer, fulfilling the absorbedsolitude of adolescenceinto an ambitionsof his father,whoseliterary ca- artist's underworld of close friendships, reer had been stayed by encroaching nightlong conversations,sexuallove, and fl blindness-a hereditaryblindness,which the ooemsof Rimbaud and Baudelaire.It -i was to descendon Borgesgraduallyfrom was a heady transformation.Neruda's# his late twenties. In 1914. the whole "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of *
ALAJTAIR REID Despair," published in 7924 (written in that flush of late adolescence),became. and still are. a kind of touchstone for fust love, learned by heart everywhere in the Spanish-speakingworld. "I have been marking the blank chart of your body," Neruda writes in one of them, "with crossesof fire / My mouth was a spider that scuttlesinto hiding / In you, behind you, tremulous and thirsty." These poems are remarkable in their erotic intensity, in their startling sensual directness. Such early fame led to Neruda's being appointed, in that most enlightened of Latin-American traditions, to the Chilean Consular Service,and between the ages of twenty-three and twentyeight he was posted in turn to Rangoon, Ceylon, Java, and Singapore. The five years Neruda was away from Chile were a difficult time for him, separatedfrom his languageand his roots;yet out ofhis lonelinessand alienationcame the cumulative volumes of "Residenciaen la Tierra" ("Sojoum on Earth"Fhallucinatory poems in which, deprived of his own countv, he createswildly surreal landscapes out of his own private obsessions,with a poetic density quite stardingly new to poetry in Spanish.When he retumed to Chile, his fame as a poet had spreadso widely that, posted to Spain in 1934,he was acclaimed by the community of Spanish poets, Federico Garcia Lorca and Miguel Hemdndez among them. But these were the last euphoric days of the Republic.When the CivilWarbroke out, Neruda remained in Spain, but the experience marked him forever. His friend Garcia Lorca was sought out and shot, and everywhereabout him Neruda saw Spain broken. The war brought about in him a deep political conversion.He was askedto resign his consulshipbecauseof his outspoken sympathy for the Republic. The Doemshe wrote at that time are bitter in their anger. Generals, traitors, lookat mv deadhouse. lookat brokenSoain: outof everydeadhousecomesbuming insteadof flowers, outofeverycraterin Spain DPalnreappears, child comesa rifle 'rrt;,ttt#r:tad everycrimebreedsbullets that-will. onedayfindtheirway to yourneart.
You will ask why don't his poems teli us of dreams, of leaves, of the great volcanoes of his homelandt Come and see the blood in the sffeets. come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streetsl
Back in Chile, Neruda, still haunted by his Spanish experience,joined the Chilean Communist Parw. and in 7945 was electedto the Chilean Senate,plunging into an active political life. After he published, in 1947, an open letter criticizing President Gabriel Gonzitlez Yidela,he was forced into hiding for an extended period to avoid arrest, and was sheltered in different houses until he could escapeover the Andes to Argentina. Out of that came his "Canto Genera),," an enormoushymn to Latin America-its exotic geography, its cruel history, its brutal politics, and its present human wrongs-in a sprawling massof poems.The boo[ publishedin 1950,had an immense impact, more political than poetic. Besidesthe overtly political poems, however,it containeda sequenceof visionary cantos he called "Alturas de Macchu Picchu" ("The Heights of Machu Picchu"). He had visited the Inca shrinein 1943, andtheseimpassionedinvocationscontain Neruda'spoetic creed. He seesMachu Picchu as built on the bones of centuriesof oppressedIndians, and he vows to become a voice for all things that haveno voice,to speakout for the oppressedofthe past and againstthe oppressionsof the present.In this new writing, Neruda abandoned the surreal extravaganceof his earlier work, and thenceforthdeliberatelysimplifiedhis poetry, to make it accessibleto the people of Chile who gave him shelter in their housesasa fugitive. In Chile, he was now a nationalpossession. /\t-oNcstoa sucha crowdedexistence, .FL Borges'slife appearssingularly static. On his return to Buenos Aires from Europe, he set about rediscovering his native city, first in poemsand then in a seriesof incisive essayson Argentine themes. His world was a purely literary one; he regularlyreviewedforeign literature, and translatedworks of Virginia Woo$ Kafka, Joyce, and Faulkner into Spanish.But his brief literary essayswere often oblique and unconventional:with
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60 time, a certainplafn elementshoweditselF-in quotations ascribedto nonexistent originals, citations of imaginary authors. Although Borgeswas not writing fiction, he began to intrude fictional elements into his other writings. He usedto saythat he consideredscholarshipmerely a branch of fantastic literature. He told me once that asa young man he had contemplated writing a long dynastic novel encompassingthe history of Argentina sinceindependence,until he realizedthat he could write, in the spanof a few pages, a descriptivereview of iust such a work bv an inventedauthor.addine his reflectionson the genre.It was not until 1939, following first the death of his father and then a long convalescenceafter a nearfat'alaccident,that he began to write the disquieting storiesthat were published in 1,944as "Ficciones"-1hs storiesthat brought him fame far beyond Argentina. It is somewhat deceptiveto talk of Borges as a storyteller,as a poet, or as an essayist,however,for he blurred thesedivisions by exploring the same p'aradoxes in the varying forms of story, poem, and essay.To him they are all "fictions"words on apage, constructsof the mind. Borges concludeshis epilogue to "El Hacedor," a collection he published in 1960, with the following:
THE NEV YORKER, JUNE24 6 JULYI,1996
dictions, even divinities. However "perfect" these{ictions might be, reality defies them by remaining chaotic and unpredictable.Yet the making of fictions is essentialto our nature: literature,Borges insists,is our solace. In 7967, Borgessharedwith Samuel Beckett the Prix Internationaldes Editeurs,which led to immediate translation of his storiesinto the main Eurooeanlanguxges.Anthony Kerrigan,who was editing "Ficciones"in English,askedme to translate the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Bv then. I had come to know and appreciateBorges'suncharacteristicorose stvle-a srylethat is spare,restrained, and carefirllvformal. and uses something like understatement, not exacdya characteri sti c of w ri tten S pani sh. rvVhileI worked I had the curiousfeeling that I was retranslatingsomething back into English that had previouslybeen translatedinto Spanish.Most crucial to me was to catch the tone-tentative, wary uncertain-in which Borgeswrites, a manner that constantlyquestionswhat it is telling, sometimesby tone alone. 'Tlcin, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" begins with Borges's discovery, through a chanceremark by a friend, of an item in a corrupt encyclopedia about an enigmatic region calledUqbar. The region is apparently fictitious. "Reading it over," Borges sayscharacteristically,"we disA man setshimselfthe taskof drawing covered,beneath the superficia-lauthortheworld. .As the yearspass,he fillsthe,empry,spaceity of the prose, a fundamentalvaguew l tn l m agesot pr ov t n c easn d K l n g d o ms , ness."Sometime later, in a remote hotel, mountainlbays,ships,islands, fish,-houses, instruments, stars,horses, and people.|ust chance puts into Borges's hands a volbeforehe dies,he discovers thai the patient ume of another encyclopedia,devotedto of linestracesthe image-ofhis a vast olanet called Tlon. A trail of *lt*l furthei clues reveals that a group of Such fictions are Borges'strademark. seventeenth-centurysagesoriginally From the sixties on, Borges'sreputation conceivedthe idea ofcreating an entirely spreadwith the speedof a virus through rational planet-one that would be the reading world, infecting it with a sly, wholly comprehensibleto its inhabithumorous skepticism about language, ants-and of disseminating knowledge about all mattersliterary. His writings are of it by way of a secretencyclopedia.A deeply subversive-by implication, they postscript to the story, set at a future call into question all linguistic versionsof date, describeshow the human race everything.In whateverBorgeswrites he eventually embracesthe world ofTl
