This Craft of Verse

Jorge Luis Borges, Calin-Andrei Mihailescu

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780674252615
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967–1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own "poetic creed, " Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the twentieth century will be long remembered.

1

THE RIDDLE OF POETRY

At the outset, I would like to give you fair warning of what to expect—or rather, of what not to expect—from me. I find that I have made a slip in the very title of my first lecture. The title is, if we are not mistaken, “The Riddle of Poetry,” and the stress of course is on the first word, “riddle.” So you may think the riddle is all-important. Or, what might be still worse, you may think I have deluded myself into believing that I have somehow discovered the true reading of the riddle. The truth is that I have no revelations to offer. I have spent my life reading, analyzing, writing (or trying my hand at writing), and enjoying. I found the last to be the most important thing of all. “Drinking in” poetry, I have come to a final conclusion about it. Indeed, every time I am faced with a blank page, I feel that I have to rediscover literature for myself. But the past is of no avail whatever to me. So, as I have said, I have only my perplexities to offer you. I am nearing seventy. I have given the major part of my life to literature, and I can offer you only doubts.

The great English writer and dreamer Thomas De Quincey wrote—in some of the thousands of pages of his fourteen volumes—that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution to an old one. But I cannot even offer you that; I can offer you only time-honored perplexities. And yet, why need I worry about this? What is a history of philosophy, but a history of the perplexities of the Hindus, of the Chinese, of the Greeks, of the Schoolmen, of Bishop Berkeley, of Hume, of Schopenhauer, and so on? I merely wish to share those perplexities with you.

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. I mean that they were writing about poetry as if poetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passion and a joy. For example, I have read with great respect Benedetto Croce’s book on aesthetics, and I have been handed the definition that poetry and language are an “expression.” Now, if we think of an expression of something, then we land back at the old problem of form and matter; and if we think about the expression of nothing in particular, that gives us really nothing. So we respectfully receive that definition, and then we go on to something else. We go on to poetry; we go on to life. And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is not alien—poetry is, as we shall see, lurking round the corner. It may spring on us at any moment.

Now, we are apt to fall into a common confusion. We think, for example, that if we study Homer, or the Divine Comedy, or Fray Luis de León, or Macbeth, we are studying poetry. But books are only occasions for poetry.

I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library is a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their pages.

Speaking about Bishop Berkeley (who, may I remind you, was a prophet of the greatness of America), I remember he wrote that the taste of the apple is neither in the apple itself—the apple cannot taste itself—nor in the mouth of the eater. It requires a contact between them. The same thing happens to a book or to a collection of books, to a library. For what is a book in itself? A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

I am reminded now of a poem you all know by heart; but you will never have noticed, perhaps, how strange it is. For perfect things in poetry do not seem strange; they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank the writer for his pains. I am thinking of a sonnet written more than a hundred years ago by a young man in London (in Hampstead, I think), a young man who died of lung disease, John Keats, and of his famous and perhaps hackneyed sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” What is strange about that poem—and I thought of this only three or four days ago, when I was pondering this lecture—is the fact that it is a poem written about the poetic experience itself. You know it by heart, yet I would like you to hear once more the surge and thunder of its final lines,

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Here we have the poetic experience itself. We have George Chapman, the friend and rival of Shakespeare, being dead and suddenly coming to life when John Keats read his Iliad or his Odyssey. I think it was of George Chapman (but I cannot be sure, as I am not a Shakespearean scholar) that Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote: “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, / Bound for the prize of all too precious you?”¹

There is a word that seems to me very important: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” This “first” may, I think, prove most helpful to us. At the very moment I was going over those mighty lines of Keats’s, I was thinking that perhaps I was only being loyal to my memory. Perhaps the real thrill I got out of the verses by Keats lay in that distant moment of my childhood in Buenos Aires when I first heard my father reading them aloud. And when the fact that poetry, language, was not only a medium for communication but could also be a passion and a joy—when this was revealed to me, I do not think I understood the words, but I felt that something was happening to me. It was happening not to my mere intelligence but to my whole being, to my flesh and blood.

Going back to the words “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” I wonder if John Keats felt that thrill after he had gone through the many books of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated. But, as I say, it may be mere loyalty, a mere trick of the memory, a mere confusion between our passion and the passion we once felt. Thus, it might be said that poetry is a new experience every time. Every time I read a poem, the experience happens to occur. And that is poetry.

I read once that the American painter Whistler was in a café in Paris, and people were discussing the way in which heredity, the environment, the political state of the times, and so on influence the artist. And then Whistler said, “Art happens.” That is to say, there is something mysterious about art. I would like to take his words in a new sense. I shall say: Art happens every time we read a poem. Now, this may seem to clear away the time-honored notion of the classics, the idea of everlasting books, of books where one may always find beauty. But I hope I am mistaken here.

Perhaps I may give a brief survey of the history of books. So far as I can remember, the Greeks had no great use for books. It is a fact, indeed, that most of the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates, the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates, even as the four evangelists were the dramatists who invented Jesus. This may be going too far, but there is a certain truth in it. In one of the dialogues of Plato, he speaks about books in a rather disparaging way: “What is a book? A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; and yet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then we see that it is dead.”² In order to make the book into a living thing, he invented—happily for us—the Platonic dialogue, which forestalls the reader’s doubts and questions.

But we might say also that Plato was wistful about Socrates. After Socrates’ death, he would say to himself, “Now, what would Socrates have said about this particular doubt of mine?” And then, in order to hear once again the voice of the master he loved, he wrote the dialogues. In some of these dialogues, Socrates stands for the truth. In others, Plato has dramatized his many moods. And some of those dialogues come to no conclusion whatever, because Plato was thinking as he wrote them; he did not know the last page when he wrote the first. He was letting his mind wander, and he was dramatizing that mind into many people. I suppose his chief aim was the illusion that, despite the fact that Socrates had drunk the hemlock, Socrates was still with him. I feel this to be true because I have had many masters in my life. I am proud to be a disciple—a good disciple, I hope. And when I think of my father, when I think of the great Jewish-Spanish author Rafael Cansinos-Asséns,³ when I think of Macedonio Fernández,⁴ I would also like to hear their voices. And sometimes I train my voice into a trick of imitating their voices, in order that I may think as they would have thought. They are always around me.

There is another sentence, in one of the Fathers of the Church. He said that it was as dangerous to put a book into the hands of an ignorant man as to put a sword into the hands of children. So books, to the ancients, were mere makeshifts. In one of his many letters, Seneca wrote against large libraries; and long afterwards, Schopenhauer wrote that many people mistook the buying of a book for the buying of the contents of the book. Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”

After the ancients, from the East there came a different idea of the book. There came the idea of Holy Writ, of books written by the Holy Ghost; there came Korans, Bibles, and so on. Following the example of Spengler in his Untergang des Abendlandes—The Decline of the West—I would like to take the Koran as an example. If I am not mistaken, Muslim theologians think of it as being prior to the creation of the world. The Koran is written in Arabic, yet Muslims think of it as being prior to the language. Indeed, I have read that they think of the Koran not as a work of God but as an attribute of God, even as His justice, His mercy, and His whole wisdom are.

And thus there came into Europe the idea of Holy Writ—an idea that is, I think, not wholly mistaken. Bernard Shaw (to whom I am always going back) was asked once whether he really thought the Bible was the work of the Holy Ghost. And he said, “I think the Holy Ghost has written not only the Bible, but all books.” This is rather hard on the Holy Ghost, of course—but all books are worth re-reading, I suppose. This, I think, is what Homer meant when he spoke to the muse. And this is what the Hebrews and what Milton meant when they talked of the Holy Ghost whose temple is the upright and pure heart of men. And in our less beautiful mythology, we speak of the “subliminal self,” of the “subconscious.” Of course, these words are rather uncouth when we compare them to the muses or to the Holy Ghost. Still, we have to put up with the mythology of our time. For the words mean essentially the same thing.

We come now to the notion of the “classics.” I must confess that I think a book is really not an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshiped, but rather an occasion for beauty. And it has to be so, for language is shifting all the time. I am very fond of etymologies and would like to recall to you (for I am sure you know much more about these things than I do) some rather curious etymologies.

For example, we have in English the verb “to tease”—a mischievous word. It means a kind of joke. Yet in Old English tesan meant “to wound with a sword,” even as in French navrer meant “to thrust a sword through somebody.” Then, to take a different Old English word, þreat, you may find out from the very first verses of Beowulf that it meant “an angry crowd”—that is to say, the cause of the “threat.” And thus we might go on endlessly.

But now let us consider some particular verses. I take my examples from English, since I have a particular love for English literature—though my knowledge of it is, of course, limited. There are cases where poetry creates itself. For example, I don’t think the words “quietus” and “bodkin” are especially beautiful; indeed, I would say they are rather uncouth. But if we think of “When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin,” we are reminded of the great speech by Hamlet.⁵ And thus the context creates poetry for those words—words that no one would ever dare to use nowadays, because they would be mere quotations.

Then there are other examples, and perhaps simpler ones. Let us take the title of one of the most famous books in the world, Historia del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. The word hidalgo has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cervantes wrote it, the word hidalgo meant “a country gentleman.” As for the name “Quixote,” it was meant to be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of many of the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller, Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Quilp, and so on. And then you have “de la Mancha,” which now sounds noble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote it down, he intended it to sound perhaps (I ask the apology of any resident of that city who may be here) as if he had written “Don Quixote of Kansas City.” You see how those words have changed, how they have been ennobled. You see a strange fact: that because the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mild fun at La Mancha, now “La Mancha” is one of the everlasting words of literature.

Let us take another example of verses that have changed. I am thinking of a sonnet by Rossetti, a sonnet that labors under the not-too-beautiful name “Inclusiveness.” The sonnet begins thus:

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep to brood,

How that face sh...