On Borges' Blindness.1

Whilst still on the subject of blindness, Borges has written something directly on how he felt about it and also on how blindness may have affected Milton. Here is the first of them.

Sobre su ceguera                                            On His Blindness                            瞎眼一二

Al cabo de los años me rodea          At the end of all these years, a stubborn    多年來我籠罩在

una terca neblina luminosa              luminous fog surrounds me                         一頑固的霧光中

que reduce las cosas a una cosa       reducing all things to one thing               它使多事減為一事

sin forma ni color.Casi a una idea.   Without form nor color Almost to an idea. 沒形狀亦沒顏色。機近一概念。

La vasta noche elemental y el dia     The vast elemental night and the day          那浩瀚强勁的夜和那人頭擁擁的

Lleno de gentre son esa neblina        Full of people are this fog           白晝均成那含糊不清且寸步不離的霧光

De luz dudosa y fiel que no declina   of doubtful and faithful light which declines no 它從不衰敗

Y que acecha en el alba. Yo querria  and which lurks in dawn. I would like         在破曉時分埋伏。我有時會樂於 

Ver una cara alguna vez. Ignoro       To see a face sometimes. I am ignorant        看到一些面孔。我不認識

la inexplorada enciclopedia, el goce of the unexplored encyclopedia, the enjoyment 那不能探索的百科全書，那以我手

de libros que mi mano reconoce,       of book which my hand knows,                    認纖各書之樂趣，

las altas aves y las lunas de oro,.        The high flying bird and moons of gold      那些高處的雀鳥和那些金黃的月亮。

A los otros les queda el unverso,         For the others, there remains the universe,  對他人，宇宙仍在，

A mi penumbra, el hábito del verso.    In my penumra, the habit of my verse.       在我的半暗影中，祇遺下詩歌的外套 。

 

The poem describes the hazy world of shadowy shapes, vsgue and blurred outlines, a world where every objects is reduced to a common fog. He lives wthin that fog. He is denied the multifsrious colors on the crowded streets on the numerous Spanish fiestas of the saints: the dresses, the masks, the brightly colored feathers, the deliciously curvaceous shapes of female bodies swinging their youthful vitality under the sun, the sight of all the people crowding the streets on such days in the hurly burly or even on the less dramatic and exciting market days. All variety is reduced to one single dull, monotonous and shapeless haze from dawn to dusk. On special moments, when he feels particularly touched, he would like to see the reaction on the faces of of those near and dear to him . But he could not. He is also denied all the beauties of Nature. He mentions birds and the gold of the moon during the day and upon the fall of night.

Borges wss made the Director of the National Library at Buenos Aires with its 800,000 volumes of all kinds of books in 1955, a post he held until 1973  He became a blindman in possesion of one of the largest book collections in the whole of Argentina. He wss also a professor of English literature at the Univiersity of Buenos Aires and as such, he had numerous books to be read in connection with his profession. He would dearly love to be able to look at its excellent encyclopedias as he used to do in the library of his father, the disorganized "house-library" of his mentor Rafael Cansinos-Assens with books piled up from the floor to ceiling and all those books on the basement of the municipal library of Buenos Aires. For a man who loved books so much and who has devoted his entire life to books and writing, the inability to savor the print and the illustrations on the books first hand must be particularly galling. He expressed his pain not in any exaggerated fashion. He did so calmly. He did so as if it were just a matter of fact. The reversal comes in the last line. He consoled himself with his verses. The tension thereby lurks there with even greater rebounding force, as if mounted upon a tightly pressed spring, paradoxically as a result of that understatement, that repressed and conversional style! The word "habito" in Spanish has a very rich meaning: it may mean the habit of a monk, a profession, or the habit or customary practice or activities a man does with "habit" as in the sentence "he has the habit of arriving late."