From his early poems of the twenties to his later collection Historia de la noche (A History of the Night, 1977), Borges' poetry has traveled a long way. It first moved from a nostalgic rediscovery of his birthplace, Buenos Aires, to a cult of his ancestors and an intimate history of his country: heroes, anti-heroes, counter-heroes. He then found that metaphysical subjects, literary artifacts, and religious myths were not unworthy material for poetry: “The Cyclical Night,” “Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf,” and “The Golem” are samples which illustrate this later period. His perception of poetry in those years could be defined, in T. S. Eliot's dictum, “not as a turning loose of emotions, but as an escape from emotion: not as the expression of personality, but as an escape from personality.” A reflective and ruminative poetry. His ruminations were not about the fortunes or misfortunes of the heart, or existential angst, or the conundrum of life, but about the monuments of the imagination, and particularly those of literature: intellect as passion, culture as the true adventure, knowledge as invention. A rather selfless poetry, a poetry in which the most powerful presence of the self is found in its absence.

A grandson and great-grandson of military heroes, Borges turned his poetry into an epic exploration by evoking everything poetry can possibly evoke other than his own personal drama. In his more recent poetry this drama is defined as a lack of personal drama. Borges muses relentlessly and painfully about his life devoid of heroic violence: “Soy … el que no fue una espada en la guerra” (I am that who did not wield a sword in battle) “¿Yo, que padecí la vergüenza / de no haber sido aquel Fransisco Borges que murió en 1874” (I, who suffered the shame / of not having been that Francisco Borges who died in 1874) (La rosa profunda; hereafter referred to as RP, 83).

Estoy ciego. He cumplido los setenta;
No soy el oriental Francisco Borges
Que murió con dos balas en el pecho,
Entre las agonías de los hombres,
En el hedor de un hospital de sangre …

(RP, 107)

I am blind, and I have lived out seventy years.
I am not Francisco Borges the Uruguayan
who died with a brace of bullets in his breast
among the final agonies of men
in the death-stench of a hospital of blood …

(GT, 79)

Soy también la memoria de una espada

(RP, 13)

I am also the memory of a sword

(The Gold of the Tigers; [hereafter refferred to asGT, 49)

Since he is denied a sword, he turns poetry into a sword; since epic action has been ruled out of his life, he converts poetry into an epic exercise:

Déjame, espada, usar contigo el arte;
Yo, que no he merecido manejarte.

(RP, 45)

Let me, sword, render you in art;
I, who did not deserve to wield you.

How did he accomplish this? By effacing himself from his own poetry, by speaking of everybody but forgetting about himself. Borges has said of Bernard Shaw that “he is the only writer of our time who has imagined and presented heroes to his readers,” and he explains further:

On the whole, modern writers tend to reveal men's weaknesses and seem to delight in their unhappiness; in Shaw's case, however, we have characters who are heroic and whom one can admire. Contemporary literature since Dostoevsky—and even earlier—since Byron—seems to delight in man's guilt and weaknesses. In Shaw's work the greatest human virtues are extolled. For example, that a man can forget his own fate, that a man may not value his own happiness, that he may say like our Almafuerte: “I am not interested in my own life,” because he is interested in something beyond personal circumstances.²

Here we find a first explanation of the seemingly impersonal quality of his poetry; yet what Borges defends is not impersonality but an epic sense of life. The poet disregards his own tribulations to become the singer of virtues, values, people, and literary works dear to him. Haunted by the memories of his ancestors' “romantic death,” Borges celebrates the courage of heroes and knife fighters ready to die in defense of a cause or belief more precious than their own life. Since he is denied an epic destiny on the battlefield, he will turn literature into his own battlefield by refusing to speak about himself, by lending his voice to others. This epic attitude has been deliberate, and it stems from his family background as well as from the fact that, as he put it, “my father's library has been the capital event in my life”:³ books as events, intellection as life, past as present, literature as passion.

Until 1964. That year Borges published a sonnet entitled “1964” with which he inaugurated a new theme in his poetry. To what he has called his “habits”—“Buenos Aires, the cult of my ancestors, the study of old Germanic languages, the contradiction of time”⁴—he now adds his broodings over what can be called a vocation for unhappiness. The sonnet opens with the line “Ya no seré feliz. Tal vez no importa” (I shall no longer be happy. Perhaps it doesn’t matter) (El otro, el mismo; [hereafter referred to as OM, 175), a motif that appears and reappears in his last four collections between 1969 and 1976,⁵ and culminates in the 1976 sonnet “Remordimiento” (“Remorse”), included in La moneda de hierro (The Iron Coin):

He cometido el peor de los pecados
Que un hombre puede cometer. No he sido
Feliz. Que los glaciares del olvido
Me arrastren y me pierdan, despiadados.
Mis padres me engendraron para el juego
Arriesgado y hermoso de la vida,
Para la tierra, el agua, el aire, el fuego.
Los defruadé. No fui feliz. Cumplida
No fue su joven voluntad. Mi mente
Se aplicó a las simétricas porfías
Del arte, que entreteje naderías.
Me legaron su valor. No fui valiente.
No me abandona. Siempre está a mi lado
La sombra de haber sido un desdichado.

(El moneda de hierro; [hereafter refrred to as MH, 89)

I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been
Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me and mercilessly let me fall.
My parents bred and bore me for a higher
Faith in the human game of nights and days:
For earth, for air, for water, and for fire.
I let them down. I wasn’t happy. My ways
Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave
My mind to the symmetric stubbornness
Of art, and all its webs of pettiness.
They willed me bravery. I wasn’t brave.
It never leaves my side, since I began:
This shadow of having been a brooding man.

(MEP, 607)

I have dealt with and elaborated on this subject,⁶ and I won’t repeat myself. It will suffice to say that Borges' treatment of this intimate side of his life has little to do with romantic confessionalism, or with yielding to the same weakness he earlier condemned in modern literature. If he now breaks the silence about himself and tells us about his unhappiness, he does so without self-pity, without tears or pathos, simply by acknowledging it as a fact, or rather, as a sin. The poem represents the acceptance of that sin as guilt, and throughout the poem he assumes this sin of unhappiness with the same poise and endurance with which epic heroes accept defeat. He breaks the diffidence of his previous poetry without outcries, almost restating his early selflessness, since his misfortune, his having been unhappy, is not a torment one mourns over but a sin one must accept quietly or even expiate, or perhaps sublimate in the silence of a verse. “One destiny,” he wrote in “The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz,” “is no better than another, but every man must obey the one he carries within him” (A, 85). Such is the spirit of his own acceptance: a heroic stamina that welcomes triumph and adversity with equal courage.

His later collection of poems—Historia de la noche—adds yet new paths into the elusive territory of his intimacy. The accomplished writer, the celebrated poet, the man who welcomes love and death with equal resignation and joy, feels now that decorum could also be an expression of vanity, that modesty in the face of death is but another form of pettiness blocking total reconciliation. The circle of life closes in, unhappiness no longer matters, and a mundane virtue matters even less. Borges seeks oblivion, but since oblivion is a privilege denied to his memory, he backtracks through its meanders, paths, and deep chambers:

A veces me da miedo la memoria.
En sus cóncavas grutas y palacios
(Dijo San Agustin) hay tantas cosas.
El infierno y el cielo están en ellas.

(Historia de la noche;[ hereafter referred to as HN, 87)

Sometimes I fear memory.
In its concave grottoes and palaces
(Said Saint Augustine) there are so many things.
Hell and Heaven lie there.

There is no way out of memory but death:

Soy el que sabe que no es más que un eco,
El que quiere morir enteramente.

(HN, 120)

I am he who knows he is but an echo,
The one who wants to die completely.

Two elements set Historia de la noche apart from his previous collections: a restrained celebration of love, and a serene acceptance of everything life brings, for better or for worse, including the imminence of death. Not that the old motifs or “habits” are missing here; they are present but in a different way. They are part of his indefatigable memory, and as such they inevitably reappear: tigers, mirrors, books, dreams, time, ancestors, friends, authors, knives, cities, and countries. The manner in which these motifs enter into the poem has changed. “El tigre” (“The Tiger”), for example, is an evocation of the animal that fascinates Borges as an obsession of his childhood, for its beauty, and because it brings reverberations of Blake, Hugo, and Share Kahn. Yet the last line reads: “We thought it was bloody and beautiful. Norah, a girl, said: It is made for love” (HN, 35). This last line makes the difference, and gives the poem an unexpected twist. The recalled anecdote—a visit to the Palermo Zoo—was an old strand in his memory, but only now has its true momentum been recaptured, only now does the tiger's face of love surface and overshadow all previous faces to mirror the author's own. In no other book of poems has Borges allowed himself to deal with love with such freedom and with a distance which ultimately is the condition of love's magic. “Un escolio” (“A Scholium”) offers a second example of this new theme. Borges returns to the world of Homer, and here too, as in previous poems, he chooses Ulysses' homecoming to Ithaca as one of the four stories that, he believes, comprise everything literature could ever tell. It appears in the brief prose piece “Los cuatro ciclos” (“The Four Cycles”) from The Gold of the Tigers, where Borges comments: “Four are the stories. During the time left to us, we’ll keep telling them, transformed” (OT, 130). The story first appears in one of his most successful early poems, “Ars Poetica,” as a metaphor for art:

They say that Ulysses, sated with marvels,
Wept tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca,
Green and humble. Art is that Ithaca
Of green eternity, not of marvels.

(SP, 143)

Four years later, in the collection El otro, el mismo (The Self and the Other, 1964), Borges turned the episode into a sonnet, “Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three,” but the emphasis is now on the unpredictability of fate. In “A Scholium,” on the other hand, the story becomes a love poem. Borges chooses the moment when the queen “saw herself in his eyes, when she felt in her love that she was met by Ulysses' love” (HN, 47). In each of the four versions of the story, one witnesses a switch of emphasis and preference: in the first, the focus is on the notion that literature is “the history of the diverse intonations of a few metaphors” (OI, 8); in the second, Ulysses' return to Ithaca is seen as a metaphor for art; the third captures the idea that “any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is” (A, 83); and in the fourth, the accent is on love as an inviolable common secret. But the last version reveals also that the old metaphor has become Borges' own metaphor, because what the last poem underlines is the nature of love as a secret bond, as an unwritten pact expressing itself through its own code: “Penelope does not dare to recognize him, and to test him she alludes to a secret they alone share: their common thalamus that no mortal can move, because the olive tree from which it was carved ties it down to earth” (HN, 47). Borges chooses allusion as the language of love, but allusion also as the literary language he prefers. In the same prose poem, he adds: “Homer did not ignore that things should be said in an indirect manner. Neither did the Greeks, whose natural language was myth.” What we have here, therefore, is a double metaphor. Penelope resorts to allusion to communicate with Ulysses; Borges, in turn, alludes to Homer's story to communicate his own perception of love. The thalamus as the metaphor for Penelope's love becomes the metaphor Borges conjures up to convey his own feelings about love. It is worth pausing on this aspect of his art. Not only because this example dramatizes an all too well known device of his writing—the Chinese box structure to which he subjects much of his fiction and poetry—but because this last volume of poems further refines that device to the point of perfection. In the epilogue to Historia de la noche, he offers a possible definition of this literary artifice:

Any event—an observation, a farewell, an encounter, one of those curious arabesques in which chance delights—can stir esthetic emotions. The poet's task is to project that emotion, which was intimate, in a fable or in a cadence. The material at his disposal, language, is, as Stevenson remarks, absurdly inadequate. What can we do with worn out words—with Francis Bacon's Idola Fori—, and with a few rhetorical artifices found in the manuals? On first sight, nothing or very little. And yet, a page by Stevenson himself or a line by Seneca is sufficient to prove that the undertaking is not always impossible.

(HN, 139)

Borges, who in his early writings held that “unreality is the necessary condition of art,” knows only too well that literature, and art in general, as Paul Klee once said, “is different from external life, and it must be organized differently.” What Borges restates in the epilogue is his old belief that “since Homer all valid metaphors have been written down,” and the writer's task is not to write new ones but to rewrite the old ones, or rather to translate them into his own language, time, and circumstance, very much in the way the nineteenth-century symbolist writer, Pierre Menard, undertook the rewriting of the Quixote. The creative act lies, then, not so much in the invention of new fables as in their transformation into vehicles of new content, in the conversion of an old language into a new one. Borges retells Ulysses' story of his return to Ithaca, but in each of his four versions a new perception has been conveyed.

The same principle can be applied to his other “fables.” He keeps repeating them, as he himself has acknowledged, but it is a repetition of the materials, not of their substance. There is no escape from that “absurdly inadequate” tool—language—yet with those same trite words the poet shapes the uniqueness of his emotion. “Gunnar Thorgilsson” offers a third example of this outlook on literature which sees in the new a derivation from the old: Iceland, which appears and reappears in Borges' poetry, is evoked once more, but now the focus is not on the ship or the sword of the sagas, but on the wake and the wound of love. The poem concludes simply: “I want to remember that kiss / You gave me in Iceland” (HN, 59). “El enamorado” (“The Lover”) and “La espera” (“The Waiting”) are also love poems in which Borges tersely reviews some of his literary habits—moons, roses, numbers, seas, time, tigers, swords—but they are now shadows which vanish to uncover the only presence that truly counts:

Debo fingir que hay otros. Es mentira.
Sólo tú eres. Tú, mi desventura
Y mi ventura, inagotable y pura.

(HN, 95)

I should feign that there are others. It’s a lie.
Only you exist. You, my misfortune
And my fortune, inexhaustible and pure.

If literature is, as Borges once wrote, “essentially a syntactic fact,” it is clear that his latest volume of poetry should be assessed not for whatever is new at the level of theme (love being the thematic novelty), but by how he succeeds in bestowing on old subjects a new intensity and a rekindled poetic strength. The reader of his last collection can find here the vertex of his new achievement.

Those of us who have been closely following Borges' poetry of the last ten years have witnessed several changes in his voice. His earliest poems strove to convey a conversational tone. They were a dialogue with the familiar city, its myths and landscapes, sometimes bearing Whitmanesque overtones. To emphasize that intimate and nostalgic accent, he often used free verse, local words, and Argentine slang. Then when he “went from myths of the outlying slums of the city to games with time and infinity” (A, 152), he opted for more traditional meters and stanzaic forms. This alone conferred a certain stilted inflection on his poetic voice. Rhymes were strong and at times even a bit hammering (Scholem was made to rhyme with Golem). He brought the hendecasyllable and the sonnet to new heights, stimulated undoubtedly by his advanced blindness. In spite of this sculptural perfection, there was still a declamatory falsetto in his voice that was particularly apparent when he read (or rather recited) aloud his own poetry. It goes without saying that this stiffness, however slight, disappeared in his best poems. In 1969, five years after his previous collection El otro, el mismo, he published In Praise of Darkness. With this volume Borges freed his verse from any linguistic slag. The sonnet, the form he has been using most frequently since, bordered on perfection: these sonnets are masterfully carved, with chiseled smoothness and a quiet flow that turns them into verbal music.

Poetry as music has always been to Borges a crystallizing point at which language succeeds in bringing forth its melodic core. This is not a music produced by sound; the poem turns words into a transparent surface which reveals a certain cadence, a harmony buried under the opacities of language, much in the same manner as music rescues a privileged order of sound and silence from a chaotic mass of sounds. In the prologue to the collection El otro, el mismo, he has explained this understanding of poetry:

On occasion, I have been tempted into trying to adapt to Spanish the music of English or of German: had I been able to carry out that perhaps impossible adventure, I would be a great poet, like Garcilaso, who gave us the music of Italy, or like the anonymous Sevillian poet who gave us the music of Rome, or like Dario, who gave us that of Verlaine and Hugo. I never went beyond rough drafts, woven of words of few syllables, which very wisely I destroyed. (SP, 279)

My contention is that Borges, whose “destiny”—as he put it—“is in the Spanish language” (GT, 31), has found in his most recent poetry not the music of English or German or of any other poet, but his own voice, and through it a music the Spanish language did not know before him. Not that Spanish did not produce great poets. It certainly did, and each of them represents an effort to strike a different chord of that musical instrument language becomes at the best moments of its poetry. One has only to think of Jorge Guillén as a definite virtuoso of that instrument, as a poet whose voice has given to Spanish some of the most luminous and joyous movements of its hidden music. Like Borges, Jorge Guillén has sought through his work to touch that musical kernel contained in language very much the way brandy is contained in the residual marc. For Borges, as for Guillén, poetry is a form of linguistic distillation.⁷

In Historia de la noche, there is hardly a subject or motif that has not been dealt with in his previous collections, love being the exception. “Ni siquiera soy polvo” (“I Am Not Even Dust”), which deals with the trinity Cervantes-Alonso-Don-Quixote as a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream, is a variation on a theme previously treated in “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote” (Dreamtigers) and in “Alonso Quijano Dreams” (The Unending Rose). “The Mirror” returns to his old obsession with mirrors first recorded in the short piece “The Draped Mirrors” (Dreamtigers), and then meticulously explored in the thirteen quatrains of “The Mirrors” (El otro, el mismo). The same could be said of “Lions” vis à vis “The Other Tiger,” “Dreamtigers,” and “The Gold of the Tigers.” Or “Iceland” as a new avatar of “To Iceland” (The Gold of the Tigers). Or “Milonga del forastero,” which is a sort of Platonic summation of all his other milongas. But precisely because Borges returns to his old subjects (he once stated: “A poet does not write about what he wants but about what he can”), the subject matters less than the voice. Furthermore: the voice is the subject.

In this last collection Borges further refines a device first developed in “Another Poem of Gifts”: the poem as a long list, listing as a poetic exercise. “Metaphors of the Arabian Nights,” “Lions,” “Things That Might Have Been,” “The Lover,” and “The Causes” follow this pattern. The device accentuates the magic character of poetry as a voice speaking in the dark, words reaching out for meanings that are beyond words. What is left is a music that speaks from its innumerable variations, but the variations are not repetitions. They are, as in the art of the fugue, new versions of the same tune, and in each variation the theme is further explored, condensed, and simplified, until it becomes so transparent that one sees the bottom, the poet's deepest voice, a face free of masks, a certain essence that more than saying, sings. It is as if Borges had put behind him his old habits as themes to focus on the tones and inflections of his own voice; and what that voice expresses is a serenity, a calm not heard in the Spanish language since Juan de la Cruz or Luis de León. Borges must have felt that he was nearing that shore of harmony glimpsed by the mystical poets. In the last poem of the collection, “A History of the Night,” he wrote referring to the night: “Luis de León saw it in the country / of his staggered soul.” Yet the soul that surfaces from Borges' last poems is not one pierced by divine emotion, but a fulfilled and resigned soul that can see life as a river of “invulnerable water,” an earthy soul anchored in life and yet unfearful of death, one that can look upon life from a timeless island against whose shores time breaks and recedes like sea waves:

“Adán es tu ceniza”

La espada morirá como el racimo.
El cristal no es más frágil que la roca.
Las cosas son su porvenir de polvo.
El hierro es el orín. La voz, el eco.
Adán, el joven padre, es tu ceniza.
El último jardín será el primero.
El ruiseñor y Píndaro son voces.
La aurora es el reflejo del ocaso.
El micenio, la máscara del oro.
El alto muro, la ultrajada ruina.
Urquiza, lo que dejan los puñales.
El rostro que se mira en el espejo
No es el de ayer. La noche lo ha gastado.
El delicado tiempo nos modela.
Qué dicha ser el agua invulnerable
Que corre en la parábola de Heraclito
O el intrincado fuego, pero ahora,
En este largo día que no pasa,
Me siento duradero y desvalido.

(HN 131)

“Adam Is Your Ash”

The sword will die like the vine.
Crystal is no weaker than rock.
Things are their own future in dust.
Iron is rust, the voice an echo.
Adam, the young father, is your ash.
The last garden will be the first.
The nightingale and Pindar are voices.
Dawn is the reflection of sunset.
The Mycenaean is the gold mask.
The high wall, the plundered ruin.
Urquiza, what daggers leave behind.
The face looking at itself in the mirror
Is not yesterday's. Night has wasted it.
Delicate time is shaping us.
What joy to be the invulnerable water
Flowing in Heraclitus's parable
Or intricate fire, but now, midway
Through this long day that does not end,
I feel enduring and helpless.

(trans. Willis Barnstone)

A restatement of his famous line “Time is the substance I am made of. It is a river that carries me away, but I am the river” (OI, 197). Now, however, the same idea flows without the lapidary sententiousness of the essay; simply, with ease and resolution, unconcerned with rejections or acceptances, free of outcomes or outcries, a meditative voice reconciled with life, accepting its gifts and losses with the same acquiescent gesture.

In the poem “The Causes,” Borges goes through an inventory of mementoes from history, literature, and life. The list encompasses some of the most memorable moments of his own poetry and becomes a sort of miniature of his poetic oeuvre. The poem closes with two equally compressed lines: “All those things were needed / so that our hands could meet” (HN, 128), a masterful coda that renders his tight survey of motifs into a love poem. This is the surface, however impeccable, of the text, its outer meaning. But what the text also says, between the lines, is that its laconic eloquence, terse to the point of diaphaneity, is sustained by sixty long years of poetic creation, the understated notion being: all those poems were needed so that this one could be written. The idea appears at the end of one of his most relaxed and subtly personal short stories, “Averroes' Search” (1947): “I felt, on the last page, that my narration was a symbol of the man I was as I wrote it and that, in order to compose that narration, I had to be that man and, in order to be that man, I had to compose that narration, and so on to infinity” (Labyrinths; [hereafter referred to as L, 155). Literature, as well as life, as an inexorable concatenation of causes and effects; each poem as a stepping stone toward the poem; the poem as a symbol of the poet: in order to write this poem I had to write all the others; in order to write this poem I had to be the man I was. But this last poem does not form a circle with the others, it is rather the answer to the others, a sort of prism that reintegrates the dispersed shades of his poetry into one text, and this text gleams like a single beam of white light with a radiant simplicity that none of the individual texts had. With Historia de la noche Borges' poetry has found an equilibrium that undoubtedly conveys his own inner serenity; but this serenity, being a linguistic externalization, is also a song through which the Spanish language voices a music unheard before: an austere, poised, dignified, and quiet music:

Soy el que no conoce otro consuelo
Que recordar el tiempo de la dicha.
Soy a veces la dicha inmerecida.
Soy el que sabe que no es más que un eco,
El que quiere morir enteramente.

(HN, 119–20)

I am one who knows no other consolation
Than remembering the time of joy,
I am at times unmerited joy,
I am one who knows he is only an echo,
One who wants to die totally.

(trans. Willis Barnstone)

The young poet who once delighted in the exhilaration of his own performance has been left far behind. The voice we hear now is that of a consummate musician who has achieved total mastery over his medium. The music we hear now is that of the Spanish language attuned to its own registers, and that of a poet skillfully true to his own perceptions.

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, La rosa profunda (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1975), p. 53; The Gold of the Tigers; Selected Later Poems, trans. A. Reid (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), p. 63. When English translations have been available, I have indicated the source; when unavailable, I have provided my own.

2. Rita Guibert, Seven Voices (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 98.

3. J. L. B., Epilogue to Historia de la noche, p. 140.

4. J. L. B., Selected Poems, p. 278.

5. They are Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness), 1969; El oro de los tigres (The Gold of the Tigers) 1972; La rosa profunda (The Unending Rose), 1975; and La moneda de hierro (The Iron Coin), 1976.

6. In my essay “Borges o el dificil oficio de la intimidad: reflexiones sobre su poesía más reciente”, Revista Iberoamericana XLIII, 100–101 (julio-diciembre 1977), pp. 449–463.

7. Borges has written on this subject:

   Pater wrote that all arts aspire to the condition of music, perhaps because in music meaning is form, since we are unable to recount a melody the way we can recount the plot of a story. Poetry, if we accept this statement, would be a hybrid art—the reduction of a set of abstract symbols, language, to musical ends. Dictionaries are to blame for this erroneous idea, for, as we seem to forget, they are artificial repositories, evolved long after the languages they explain. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. The Dane who uttered the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor did not know whether these words stood for the gods of thunder or for the noise that follows the lightning. Poetry tries to recapture that ancient magic. Without set rules, it works in a hesitant, daring manner, as if advancing in darkness.

   (SP, 279–80).