Borges' El Ciego. 2 波赫爾之瞎子. 2

In my earlier blog, I said that Borges wrote a number of poems on blindness because of his perculiar personal condition, a congenital conditon which affected his grandfather, his father and himself. But although his blindness began in the 1950s and he was nearly blind towards the last decades of his life (1899-1986), he never learned Braille.  I already translated one of them. To my knowledge, there are about four to five of them which in one way or another touch on this subject. The following is the second. I shall continue to translate the others in later blogs. 

El Ciego                                                 The Blindman                                                            瞎子

Lo han despojado del diverso mundo,   They have looted the diverse world          他們從這多面世界掠奪       

De los rostros, que son lo que eran antes, Of all faces, what they were before,      那些面孔，從前有的  ，

De las cercanas calles, hoy distantes,   Of all the streets nearby, distant today,     那附近的街道，如今已遙遠，

Y del concavo azul, ayer profundo.      And of the blue vault, deep yesterday,     那蒼穹，深遽的昨天，

De los libros le queda lo que deja           Of books as they leave them                   那些書本，猶若當天留下的模樣 

La memoria, esa forma del olvido         Memory, that form of forgetfulness       記憶，那被遺忘的形式

Que retiene el formato, no el sentido,   That keeps the format, not the meaning.徒具版式，不具意義 

Y que los meros titulos refleja.              And which merely reflects its titles.         祗反映部部書名。

El desnivel acecha. Cada paso               Unevenness lurks. Each step                 崎嶇暗伏。一步

Puede ser la caida. Soy el lento              Can be a fall. I am the slow                  意味一跌。我是夢幻

Prisoniero de un tiempo soñoaliento     Prisoner of a dreaming time                  時光遲緩的俘虜

Que no marca su aurora ni su ocaso.  Which marks neither its dawn nor its decline.它不分黎明與其衰微。

Es de noche. No hay otros. Con el verso It’s nighttime. There weren’t anyone.      夜了。悄無一人。

Debo labrar mi insipido universo.   Got to work on my insipid universe with verse. 須開工詩化這乏味的世界了。   

In this poem, the poet describes how his blindness leaves him time to remininisce on a happier time when he was not yet so blind . He talks of those faces which he could still see, the streets upon which he previously could walk with such ease, the sky which he could see to its furthermost limits but his yesterday seem so distant now,  psychologically . He could no longer read his books which now exist only as titles in his memory, in the form in which the others leave them the last time he could still see.  Now he has to hobble along. Each step risks a potential fall. The visible world is now a memory which he could only recall with much difficulties. All that is left for him to do is to record the traces of it in his memory of what and how this world looked like. All its colours and shapes are now gone. His world has now become as he said "insipido.". It has already lost all its former stimualting taste! The day and the night no longer has its former meaning: it's all now a uniform world of dull grey or of darkness. What could he do? What is left for him to do? Nothing but write his poetry!

Borges's style is very converstional. He writes in the same way he talks and he talks in more or less the way he writes. His poems are almost like silent paintings. His pen is his tongue and his tongue his pen and he can write and revise everywhere he goes, even whilst walking in the street or taking a bus! .This is the way he was described by Willis Barnestone his translator: "Whether spoofing, or grave, laughing or weary, Borges spoke literature....unfailingly he spoke to each unseen person with intimacy and with an elevating sssumption of confidence, whether the unknwon speaker was a journalist, a doorman, a student, a writer, a clerk." His poetry has been translated into English by a number of excellent translators like Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand, John Hollander, John Updike, Alastair Reid, and Richard Howard. For the first two decades of his writing career, he wrote mainly poetry but he is better known for his prose writing, short novels  and literary criticism.  His first poetry collection is called Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923)

Borges was born in Buenos Aires, Argentinamoved to Geneva, Switzerland in 1914, where he was educated and received a BA at the Collège de Geneve. But after WWI, his family moved to Spain where he was a member of the avant garde Ultaist literary group. He contributed to the avant garde revew Martin Fierro and co-founded the journal Proa (1924-1926) and contributed to another literary journal called Sur, the leading Argentian literary magazine founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. He wss literary adviser to a publisher Emecé Editores, and literary editor of The Saturday Color Magazine of the tabloid newspaper Crìtica and wrote weekly literary columns for El Hogar 1936-39.  All his life, Borges loved books and words.  He once said that, books "mean everything to me."  Borges' father has a fantastic library where he would spend most of his time as a child, learning French, Latin, German and English. He has an English mother, a professional English translator.  He himself has translated De Quincey's Opium Eater, Marcus Aurelius Meditations Goethe and also Dostoevski and the Arabian Nights, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Henri Michaux's A Barbarian in Asia and Herman Melvilles's Bartleby the Scrivener and also William Faulkner's The Wild Palms.  . He is familiar with the literary works of Poe, Stevenson, Kirpling, Shaw, Chesterton, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Twain. All his life, he tried to be a Jew and he tried to learn Hebrew. Having translated Kafka's Metamorphosis and his Parables, he confessed to being his "sedulous ape". He was professor of English literature at the U of Buenos Aires 1955-1970. In 1955, he was director of National Library by which time, he was almost completely blind. He wrote: "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness." He resigned as such in 1973 when Juan Perón was elected president.

He is a good friend of Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, the leader of the literary group whose home he frequented. Cansino-Asséns himself had a very good collection of books . Borges later compared his whole house to a library, where the books were piled one on top of another for lack of shelf space from floor to ceiling. He could well be describing my own flat except that in my case, in addition to books, I got a huge collection of CDs and DVD's!  But Borges would meet his literary friends usually at the Café Colonial, where the literary salon of mostly experimental writers would begin at around mid-night and lasted until morning.

For about 9 years, Borges was a cataloguer at the Miguel Cane branch of the Buenos Aires ( where he was born) Municipal Library, the work of which could be done within an hour . He spent the rest of time reading all kinds of books there, including those of Kafka, my favourite writer and Schopenhauer, Milton, Walt Whitman.  But unlike me, he has a fantastic memory. So his blindness did not affect his style very much. However he is extremely shy and finds meeting women an ordeal and has a mortal fear of sex.  His father, fearing his inablity about sex, introduced him to a prostitute but he failed miserably and this marked him for life. But he could only overcome this difficulty with the help of psychotherapist.He married twice, the first time in 1967 when he married his old friend Elsa Asteta Millán, whom he first met when he was 17 but only  after she was widowed. But they separated after only three years, when he moved back to live with his mother.  He did not marry again until very late. Hi second wife was his personal assitant Maria Kodama whom he marreid on 22 April 1986 shortly before he died. She too got a Ph D at the U of Buenos Aires. After she died, he continued to live with her mother who herself only died at 99!  His poetic style is desribed by his mentor Cansinos Assens as "ultraismo", a cross between Dada and Surrealism.

Borges' principal novelistic output includes El Jardin de Senderos que se Bifurgan (1941) Ficciones (1944), El Aleph (1949), El Hacedor (1960) , El Libros los Seres Imaginarios (1967), El Informe de Brodie (1970) and El Libro de Arena (1975).y . In 1961, she shared the Prix Fomentor with Samuel Beckett. but never got a Nobel. He moved permanently to Geneva in 1985 where he died of liver cancer on 14th June, the following year.

According Petri Liukkonen, "Borges' fictional universe was born from his vast and esoteric radings in literature, philosophy and theology. He sees man's search for meaning in an infinite universe as fruitless search. In the universe of energy, mass and speed of light, Borges considers the central riddle of time, not space. He believes in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, covergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked and then broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all posibiliities of time." He saw an engraving of a circular labyrinth as a child and wrote: "Almost instantly, I understood: the garden of forking paths" was the chaotic novel, . In all his novels, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others but in the fiction of The Forking Paths, Tsui Pen, he chooses simulaneously all of them.  Is that the meaning of my dream the other night even before I came upon this material I just read today?

Another recurrent image in Borges is the mirror, which reflects different identities. In his story "Borges y yo", his double was looking for him, "So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away--and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion or into the hands of the other man.".