This Craft of Verse

Jorge Luis Borges fascinates me to no end. His short stories are like Hitchcock movies, or, perhaps even better, like The Godfather. You return to them time and time again. Every time you go back, you discover something new, something you hadn’t noticed before. (For my wife, the movie would be Caddyshack.)

Anyway, last week I finished a small book called Borges: This Craft of Verse. I finished it in two days; it was such a quick read I didn’t have time to put it over in the “Current Reads” section. The book is simply the transcription of six lecture Borges gave in the mid-60s in America, one chapter per lecture, each chapter running about fifteen or twenty pages. Obviously, he’s talking about poetry, something which I have only a passing knowledge, but he wanders to discuss all things literary, which interests me greatly.

In addition to being famous for his somewhat bizarre, definitely metaphysical short stories, as well as being a noted essayist on various subjects philosophic and literary, Borges is a respected poet. Though he’s a polyglot and speaks English fluently (his mother, I believe, was English and raised him with an education in her culture), he writes primarily in Spanish. Since I and a large percentage of his audience do not speak Español, this presents a problem as we need to rely on translations. A few years ago I did check out a book containing some of his poems (translated) and was quite moved by some. So, despite this hurdle, I enthusiastically read this book (I also believe he did the lectures in English, relying on his photographic – or auditoric – memory, as he’s blind).

What struck me, stayed with me?

First and foremost, the man loved poetry.* His earliest memories are of being in his father’s library, seeing the books, the bindings, the titles. Vividly does he recall his father reading Keats to him, and the fact that at that moment, at such a young age, he realized he himself was “literary.” One must “drink in” poetry – it’s not a task, but a passion, a joy! One must treasure that first impression, that first experience, when reading a new poem, for it will never return. “Art happens every time we read a poem.”

Also, this sentence prompted something in me to write it down: “Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars.”

A lecture is devoted to the metaphor; Borges feels that of the hundreds or thousands of metaphors in literature, most can be traced back to patterns. Perhaps a dozen or so. For him, the finest metaphor ever devised was the old one about that Chinese philosopher dreaming he was a butterfly …

In another Borges speaks long on the epic, the oldest of all the forms of poetry. The poet, in ages past, was a maker, a teller of tales, epic tales. He recalls that the greatest teachers of mankind were speakers (Christ, Buddha, Pythagoras …) not writers. And laments the state of “modern” literature, with the novel as its centerpiece, “deconstructing” the hero whereas the epic of old held him up as a shining example of what man could become. The closest we come to a modern-day epic, in his opinion, is The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s tales of his time with the Arabs (and one of my favorite movies, btw). The bottom line is that people are hungering and thirsting for the epic. Epic is one of the things men need.

The pitfalls and pinnacles of translation occupy the subject of another lecture. For him, the finest of all English translations is FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He lists good and bad translations of numerous works as if rattling off old acquaintances. And he spends a bit of time on the notion that literal translations were unheard of in times past. In the golden ages, translators were thinking of something far worthier. They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original.

There’s advice for writers sprinkled throughout the book, particularly the final chapter. I already posted on it, here. But, how ’bout this: “Being a writer means simply being true to your imagination. What you write is not something factually true, but true to something deeper. Be loyal to the dream and not to the circumstances. There is no satisfaction is telling a story as it actually happened. When you write, forget all about yourself. Convey only what the dream is. Anything suggested is far more effective than anything laid down . . . When something is merely said or – better still – hinted at, there’s a kind of hospitality in our imagination.”

Perhaps you’ve heard all this before, but it doesn’t hurt coming from the mouth of a master, eh?

Because of this book I am going to read something by Kipling. Something by Mark Twain. Robert Louis Stevenson. Oh, and try my hand (again) at Shakespeare, particularly the Sonnets. So now my reading list is back up past a hundred. Where to find the time!


* Borges died in 1986 in his mid-80s, blind or at least functionally blind for over half of that (forgive me if I’m off on the dates, I’m writing this from my less-than-Borgesian memory). He is one of the select few individuals I would have loved to have had dinner with. Hmmm, there’s the subject of a future post …