He always dressed in a grey suit of a decidedly out-of-date cut. His necktie, which he referred to as ‘a trick tie’, was one of those ready-made affairs that he could clip together himself under his collar and not have to bother to knot. His stiffness and his old-fashioned clothes lent him an air of formality that he would not have been aware of. At the same time, unable to see or gauge his audience, he exuded unworldliness, vulnerability, and perhaps a hint of pathos. Everyone seemed to be aware that they were about to be addressed by a lone blind man. As he sat waiting while a technician tested and adjusted a microphone, Borges would cradle one of his hands in front of him into the palm of the other.
Then he would begin. His spoken English was very good. He might stutter occasionally out of nerves and he had a bit of a Scottish burr which required getting used to. He did not have a loud register and was not good at projecting his voice, but this only made people listen more attentively. Out of fear of missing a word, his audiences kept exceptionally quiet.
When his nerves settled he would toss out the odd crowd-pleaser so as to get his listeners to warm to him.‘Of course, I’m decidedly old-fashioned,’ he would say, and they would howl with delight. Here was a writer worshipped for being the last word in avant-garde and he was claiming just the opposite. He would mention and quote from writers nobody read any more – De Quincey, Wells, Stevenson, Chesterton – suddenly giving them, in his audience’s view, a new allure, a new promise. His reading had stopped around 1930 and he knew little or nothing of contemporary writers. This was another aspect of his appealing old-fashionedness – he made the past new, revisitable, and alive again.
It was uncanny how his tricks worked. His talks were simple, quite personal, and peppered with anecdotes (‘My memory carries me back to a certain evening some sixty years ago, to my father’s library in Buenos Aires’) and idiosyncrasies. He frequently went off on asides – etymologies were one of his favourites. On days when he felt unsure of himself or of his audience he laid on the self-deprecation and, tongue in cheek, would belittle his own literary creation, which he spoke of as ‘my so-called work’. Self-effacement was another of his tools. When he spoke of his life in writing, he would add, ‘or trying my hand at writing’. He was never relaxed behind his table, and the public saw this, which put them on his side.
He could charm with his bookishness and his harmless ‘out-of-the-way learning’, as he called it. He quoted Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth seemingly at will and would flatter his listeners with his undisguised partisanship. He relished speaking of ‘Literature – that is, English literature.’ He fascinated his audience with his keen interest in remote subjects like Old English and Old Norse.
At the same time, his talks were not without their flaws. He misquoted, sometimes over-indulged in the self-effacement department, and often jumped from one subject to another without providing adequate transitions. The public never noticed or seemed to care. They were in the presence of Borges.
The truth is that audiences flocked to his lectures. Whether at Harvard, or the Poetry Center of New York’s YM-YWHA, or countless classrooms across America, or the lowliest ill-lit, draughty, dilapidated auditorium of lost towns of his native pampa, Borges always packed them in. So many unexpected listeners turned up for his inaugural Norton lecture that the venue had to be shifted from the Fogg Museum and across Harvard Yard to the Sanders Theatre in rambling Memorial Hall.
Borges’s first talk at Harvard, entitled ‘The Riddle of Poetry’, was given on 24 October 1967. The series of six he called This Craft of Verse.
5. Meeting Borges and Setting Out with a Master
In the late autumn of 1967, while Borges was mentally preparing his third lecture and Georgie and Elsa were nursing their marital bliss, I innocently entered their lives.
It was all a matter of accidents, coincidences, and luck. I’d been reading bits of Latin American poets, got hooked on Borges, and decided to repair to Schoenhof’s foreign bookshop, in Harvard Square, for a copy of his collected poems in Spanish. When the clerk handed me the book he casually announced that Borges would be speaking there at Harvard the next week. I had no inkling Borges might be anywhere but in his own country.
I was in Memorial Hall that next week – it was 15 November – to hear his second Norton Lecture, a talk on ‘The Metaphor’. Borges’s spoken English immediately struck me, as did his views on his chosen subject. A week passed, and I sat down and wrote to him. My letter said that I was interested in producing a volume of his poems in English translation along the lines of the fifty poems from Jorge Guillén’s Cántico that I had published two years before. It was all a stab in the dark. I had no idea of the regard in which Borges held Guillén, nor had I any idea that Guillén’s daughter Teresa and wife Irene were attending Borges’s classes on Argentine writers.
Within a week I had a reply from John Murchison, Borges’s Harvard secretary, to tell me that Borges was pleased with my suggestion and ‘would be delighted to have you phone him at his home …’
A few days later I phoned. A woman answered, it was Elsa, but as I was unused to Argentine Spanish I thought hers was an Italian voice. She seemed to be speaking Italian when she called out, ‘Georgie’. This was my introduction to the accent and intonation of rapid-fire porteño Spanish.
Borges answered, I identified myself, and he was at once lively and interested. He spoke in a clipped voice, with an English accent, and asked me right off what edition of the poems I had. When I told him, he said, ‘Well, that’s not the latest.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘That’s of no consequence,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if the new edition is even in print yet. I have added a few new poems – all short ones. I have them all memorized.’
Then he asked would I come today. What time? Six o’clock. He gave me the address and repeated the apartment number twice. Eagerly, he also asked me to bring some of the translations. I told him he had misunderstood; I hadn’t any translations yet but would be commissioning them.
‘Well, come and we’ll talk,’ he said, his enthusiasm undiminished.
It did not occur to me then that Borges would have asked Teresa Gilman, or perhaps even Guillén himself, about me. I know in their loyalty they would have given me a warm report. Elsa would have invested this train of events with prophetic significance, calling it fate. But predetermination is not one of my beliefs; what was taking place at breakneck speed I knew to be just dumb luck.
That evening, for a couple of hours, Borges and I sat at a wooden table opposite each other on the benches of the flat’s old-fashioned built-in breakfast nook. We discussed the planned volume in general terms and then went over some specific lines in a couple of poems I had been tinkering with in English translation.
The present book – the story I am trying to tell here – is about Georgie and Elsa. I want it to be a book about two married people, one of whom happens only incidentally to be a famous writer. My interest is strictly in them, not in literary criticism. And yet it was the work that Borges and I were embarking on that was the glue that held the three of us together. Perhaps, then – as an aside – the briefest, pedantry-free description of our daily enterprise would not be out of place.
I first read through his poems – they dated from 1923 to 1967 – and then joined him to hammer out a suitable broad selection. I brought notes, and while Borges would volunteer information about this or that poem I would scribble down jottings that might later prove useful to a prospective translator. Our views of what to include or exclude in a volume of a hundred poems rarely failed to coincide. Next I would take to our meetings a literal line-by-line handwritten draft of the poems, each of which we discussed at length. As Borges was blind, I read him one line at a time and added changes and corrections as he guided me.
There was a long history of visual