Friday, August 07, 2020

Around the World in 32 Countries: Argentina and Jorge Luis Borges

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays
Jorge Luis Borges
Transl. Karl August Horst and Gisbert Haefs
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991

"Cuesta del Obispo, Provincia de Salta (Argentina)."
Attributed to eMaringolo, 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0 License

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Argentina in a Nutshell:
Surface area: 2,780,400 km2 (smaller than Brazil, larger than Mexico)
Main country immigrated from historically: “62.5% of the population has full or partial Italian ancestry” Now the country is only 2.4% Amerindian.
Recognized regional languages:
  • Guaraní in Corrientes
  • Quechua in Santiago del Estero
  • Qom, Mocoví, and Wichí in Chaco
  • Welsh in Chubut
(Yes, that Welsh)
Independence from Spain: declared 1816
Driving side: Right
Notable geography: "Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia, at 6,960.8 metres (22,837 ft), and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere."


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Finding Argentine authors was difficult, but perhaps I didn't go about it the right way.

I was thrilled to learn [via Goodreads] that the classic film Blow-Up, by Michael Antonioni, is based on a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Also, because I was interested in Patagonia, my mother found the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane's book Tierra del Fuego in our bookshelves, for me to read as a supplement.

Technically there are many biographies and memoirs one could read. The Pope is Argentine. Ernesto (Che) Guevara was from Argentina and wrote his Motorcycle Diaries about travel in the country. And there are plenty of biographies of Eva Perón, wife of the 1970s president Juan Perón and symbolic heroine of the nation who inspired a film where Madonna acted the title role.

Photograph of the first meeting between the Argentine writers
Borges and Ernesto Sabato.
Published in the Revista Gente, nº 499, Feb. 13, 1975
via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in Argentina


However, our home library doesn't have many books by Argentine authors. The exception is the literary giant and polymath Jorge Luis Borges. He also happens to be a favourite author of a colleague.

We have a German translation of a collection of short stories and essays, and notes by the author, that were published from the early 1930s through to the 1960s: Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays 1935-1936.

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The Universal History of Infamy — the Niedertracht part of the book, originally published as the Historia universal de la infamia in Spanish — is a series of short stories about villains who really lived, in fictionalized form.

The villains: A Chinese pirate who led a fleet of over 20,000 people and rivalled the fleet of Portugal in the early 19th century, John Murell (Lazarus Morell) who pretended that he wanted to free slaves in the southern United States and instead ensured that they were recaptured and murdered, a gang lord in New York, and Billy the Kid, amongst others. Their tales are all gripping, the details that Borges may have added in from other sources were colourful and helped set the scene as thoroughly as any set designer could in a well-financed Hollywood film. The book made me so curious that I looked up all of the real-life stories after reading his fictional versions.

I think that Borges might have considered, but didn't say, if dramatic villainy like this, perpetrated by frowning people who wield firearms and murder people with great publicity, does more harm than everyday villainy. Likely I should read Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil before I write more. But maybe more people are killed by criminal negligence, the guns manufacturing and marketing industry, fake medicines, overwork, etc., than by the kind of first- and second-degree murderers who end up in prison.

Incidentally, I wish that the vocabulary Borges had used for African-American characters were less dehumanizing. 'Negro' and 'mulatto' were considered polite enough terms in the 1930s, I think, but when he talks of 'heaps of negroes' in stories where he no longer seems to be satirizing racist attitudes, it feels as if he genuinely did subconsciously consider Black people to be an incoherent and mindless mass.

Anyway, Borges faithfully lists his sources: Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, etc.
But in Borges's retellings and the source material I think it was mostly the murderers who were, as the dictum has it, the victors who determined how history was written. The victims — life stories, characters, and perspectives — were sidelined in the narratives.

Anyway, after the real-life American, English, Chinese and other villains ran out, Borges begins retelling stories about the Middle East and also Japan.

The Veiled Prophet of Khorasan, who installed himself as a prophet and began warring against the armies of the Caliph, was new to me. So were the fictional stories adapted from the Arabian Nights about Andalusia and elsewhere.

"Pingüinera frente a la caleta Valdés
en la península del mismo nombre, Chubut, Argentina"
Attributed to C. Elias, January 2009
via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

I'd never heard the Tale of the 47 Ronin before, just heard of it. I enjoyed the light irony with which Borges delineated the stages of hara-kiri and honour that lead to dozens of men killing themselves because one man had been rather rude. e.g. "Bevor sie zum Sturm antraten, ließen sie die Nachbarn wissen, daß es sich nicht um einen Überfall handle, sondern um ein militärisches Unternehmen von strikter Gerechtigkeit." (Before they set to attack, they let the neighbours know that this was no mere assault, but a military undertaking of strict justice.) That said, I was worried that sometimes the retellings tipped too near to disrespect of the quirks of other cultures and religions.

I was going to write something mean-spirited about Emanuel Swedenborg's stories that are included in the book, and which are definitely narrow-minded about other religions. But I'll keep my mouth zipped because I'd decided a while ago not to badmouth other people's spiritual views.

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After the short stories, there are the essays.

The first essay, where Jorge Luis Borges ponders what 'eternity' and 'time' mean, according to Plato and others, intermittently made my head feel like an overheated computer from trying but failing to understand. (But the essay is not harder to read than other philosophy.) I also don't think he managed to incorporate the physics of relativity into it well.

But I liked the next two essays, whose subject is literary theory about 'kennings' and metaphor, in Scandinavian sagas and other poetry.

'Kenning' means the use of the term 'swan road' to talk about the ocean, or 'ring-giver' to refer to a king, for example. Borges points out that kennings can be too elaborate and illogical — like 'the steed that runs through the cliffs' for 'wrecked ship'. He argues that poets used kennings to fill the metre of their poems and make verses easier to remember.

The twinned words seem meaningful but aren't. But they do have a poetic quality on their surface, and I liked his lists of them. 'Dew of sorrow' for tears, 'battle geese' for arrows, 'house of the winds' for the air, and 'moon way' for the sky, for example.

In a wise side note — but also a tragic reminder of world developments during the 1930s — Borges dismisses with some amusement movements in Germany toward forging a new, nationalist religion or ideology from Scandinavian sagas. Unfortunately, others didn't dismiss them likewise.

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