These notes are intended only to supply information that a Latin American (and especially Argentine or Uruguayan) reader would have and that would color or determine his or her reading of the stories.
Generally, therefore, the notes cover only Argentine history and culture; I have presumed the reader to possess more or less the range of general or world history or culture that JLB makes constant reference to, or to have access to such reference books and other sources as would supply any need there. There is no intention here to produce an "annotated Borges," but rather only to illuminate certain passages that might remain obscure, or even be misunderstood, without that information.
For these notes, I am deeply indebted to A Dictionary of Borges by Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes (London: Duckworth, 1990). Other dictionaries, encyclopedias, reference books, biographies, and works of criticism have been consulted, but none has been as thorough and immediately useful as the Dictionary of Borges. In many places, and especially where I quote Fishburn and Hughes directly, I cite their contribution, but I have often paraphrased them without direct attribution; I would not want anyone to think, however, that I am unaware or unappreciative of the use I have made of them. Any errors are my own responsibility, of course, and should not be taken to reflect on them or their work in any way.
Another book that has been invaluable is Emir Rodriguez Monegal's Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography(New York: Paragon Press, [paper] 1988), now out of print. In the notes, I have cited this work as "Rodriguez Monegal, p. x."
The names of Arab and Persian figures that appear in the stories are taken, in the case of historical persons, from the English transliterations of Philip K. Hitti in his work History of the Arabs from the Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1951). (JLB himself cites Hitti as an authority in this field.) In the case of fictional characters, the translator has used the system of transliteration implicit in Hitti's historical names in comparison with the same names in Spanish transliteration.— Translator.
Notes to A Universal History of Iniquity
For the peculiarities of the text of the fictions in this volume, the reader is referred to A Note on the Translation.
Preface to the First Edition
* Evaristo Carriego: Carriego (1883-1912) was in fact a popular poet and playwright, and the "particular biography" was the one Borges himself wrote of him (published 1930). Carriego was only a mediocre poet, perhaps, and he left but a single volume (Misas herejes, "Heretical Masses") upon his early death by tuberculosis, but his ties to "old Buenos Aires," and especially to the lower-class (and mostly Italian) suburb of Palermo, made him an important figure for Borges. While it is probably exaggerated to say that much of JLB's fascination with the compadre (see the note to the title of "Man on Pink Corner" below) and the knife fights and tangos that are associated with that "type" can be traced to Carriego, there is no doubt that as an example of the literary possibilities to which such subject matter can be put, Carriego was very important to JLB and JLB's imagination. Carriego was also the first professional writer Borges had ever run across, a man who made his living at writing, and not some "mere" amateur; he held out therefore the possibilities of a true literary "career" to match Borges's clear literary "calling."
Preface to the 1954 Edition
* Baltasar Gradan: Gracián (1601-1658) was a Jesuit priest and a writer (and sometime aesthetician) of the baroque. His name is associated with a treatise called Agudeza yarte de ingenio ("Keenness of Mind and the Art of Wit"), and with the Spanish baroque poets Francisco Quevedo and Luis de Góngora.
The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell
* Pedro Figari: figari (1861-1938) was a Uruguayan painter "who used fauvist techniques [Rodriguez Monegal, p. 194]," (this perhaps explains his success in Paris, where he lived from 1925 to 1933) and who spent an important part of his life in Buenos Aires (1921-1925). Borges knew the painter rather well and wrote an introdution to a book on him; Figari was also feted by the literary group associated with the review Martín Fierro, of which Borges was an important member. His work "was inspired by the life of Negroes and gauchos" (Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Jean Pierre Bernés [Paris: Gallimard, p.1489].
* Vicente Rossi: Rossi (1871-1945) was the author of a volume titled Cosas de negros ("Negro Matters" [1926]), to which this mention surely points, but he also produced the first reference book on the birth and development of Argentine theater and an important book on the gaucho. He was, then, something of a folklorist and literary historian. In Evaristo Carriego, Borges calls Rossi "our best writer of combat prose."
* Antonio ("Falucho") Ruiz: "Falucho"(d.1824) was a black Argentine soldier who fought in the wars of independence. His statue once stood near that of General San Martin near the center of Buenos Aires.
* The stout bayonet charge of the regiment of "Blacks and Tans"... against that famous hill near Montevideo: On the last day of 1812 a troop of soldiers made up of Negroes and mulattoes (the reference to the English military group organized to fight the Irish independence uprising is the translator's, but it is almost inevitable, and the irony of the situation would not be lost on Borges; see the story "Theme of the Hero and Traitor" in Fictions), under the leadership of the Argentine general Miguel Estanislao Soler, defeated the Spanish troops at the Cerrito, a prominent hill overlooking Montevideo.
* Lazarus Morell: This particular rogue's true name seems to have been John A. Murrell (Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain's America [Boston: Little, Brown, 1932], pp. 16-17 et seq.) or Murell (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, intra. James M. Cox [New York: Penguin, 1984 (orig. pubi, in United States by James R. Osgood in 1883)].) Interestingly, Twain never gives the rogue's first name; it is possible, then, that JLB, needing a name, took "Lazarus" to fit the ironic notion that Morell gave a second life to the slaves he freed.
* "I walked four days.. .my course for Natchez": Here Borges is quoting/translating fairly directly from Twain's Life on the Mississippi, pp. 214-215 (Penguined.cited in the note just above). Throughout this story, JLB inserts a phrase here, a sentence there from Twain, but then, when he says he is quoting, as in the case of the preaching and horse thieving, he is in reality inventing the quotation and imagining a scene that Twain only suggests.
The Widow Ching—Pirate
* Aixa's rebuke to Boabdil: Boabdil isAbu Abdallah, the last Moorish king of Granada (r. 1482-1492); Aixa was his mother. The reproof that supposedly was given Boabdil by Aixa upon the Moors' defeat and expulsion from what had been Islamic Spain is substantially as Borges reports it here, and the words here given Anne Bonney are substantially those given in Gösse's History of Piracy, p. 203. (See the "Index of Sources" p. 64.) p. 21: Rules for pirates: These may actually be found, as quoted, but in a different order, in Gösse's History of Piracy, p.272. (See "Index of Sources," p. 64, for bibliographical information.) * Quotation on peace in the waters of China: Gosse, p.278. Note also that the widow's new name, while indeed given in Gosse, is attributed to another personage who learned a lesson from the emperor. This is but one of countless examples of the way JLB changes things, even dates, to fit his purposes, purposes that one must confess sometimes are enigmatic. Why change the date of Tom Castro's being found guilty from February 26 to February 27? Monk Eastman's death from December 26 to December 25? The spelling of Morell/Murrell/Murell's name? Here the theory of translation must needs be a theory of artistic creativity.
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
* Resigned: Borges uses this curious word, which I have not wanted to "interpret," apparently to indicate the fatedness, or ritual aspect, of this duel. It is as though the word indicated "resigned to fate." This aspect of violence, of duels, can be seen throughout Borges; I would especially refer the reader to the story titled "The Encounter," in the volume Brodie's Report, p. 364.
* Junin: Site of a famous battle in the wars of independence. The Battle of Junin took place in the then department of Peru; on August 6,1824, a cavalry engagement was fought between Simón Bolivar's nationalist forces and the royalist forces under José de Canterac. The tide was turning against the independence forces until the royalist rear was attacked by a force of Peruvian hussars under the command of Isidoro Suárez—one of JLB's forebears and a man who in varying degrees and under varying permutations lends his name to JLB's fictions. The royalists were routed.
* The Death of Monk Eastman: This story is taken, as JLB indicates, from Asbury's The Gangs of New York, generally pp. 274-298, but also, for the quotation about "nicks in his stick," p. xviii. Where JLB has clearly borrowed directly from Asbury and it has been possible to use Asbury's words, the translator has done so; in other cases, the translator has just borrowed the appropriate terminology, such as the "Mikado tuck-ups" and the "stuss" games.
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
* Always coiled and ready to strike: One of the sources that JLB gives for this story is Frederick Watson's A Century of Gunmen, though the truth is, there is not much there that JLB seems actually to have used. With, that is, the possible exception of this phrase, siempre aculebrado in the Spanish, which the translator has rendered conjecturally in this way. "Aculebrado," from the Spanish culebra, "snake," calls to mind in the native Spanish speaker the notion of "coiled, like a snake" and also of "snakelike, slithering." On page 77 of his book, Watson quotes an old western novel, which says this: "It's not the custom to war without fresh offence, openly given. You must not smile and shoot. You must not shoot an unarmed man, and you must not shoot an unwarned man.... The rattlesnake's code, to warn before he strikes, no better, [i.e., there's no better extant code for a man of the West] : a queer, lop-sided, topsy-turvy, jumbled and senseless code—but a code for all that." Thus it seems that JLB may have wanted to paint Billy the Kid as an even worse "varmint" than the rattlesnake, since the rattlesnake at least gives fair warning, unlike Billy, who, as we see in a moment, shoots the Mexican Villagrán before Villagran knows what's happening. Perhaps, in fact, that was what made Billy the Kid so dangerous—so dangerous that his friend Pat Garrison shot him in cold blood. But whatever JLB's motivation for this word, it is a very mysterious one to use here, however related to all the other animal imagery used throughout this volume.
The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké
* Rônins: In A. B. Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, which is the source of much of this story, Mitford inevitably uses this word for the "loyal retainers" of the dead noble-man. The word "Rônin" means literally a "wave-man," one who is tossed about hither and thither, as a wave of the sea. It is used "to designate persons of gentle blood, entitled to bear arms, who, having become separated from their feudal lords [or in this case, of course, vice versa], wander about the country in the capacity of knights-errant. Some went into trade, and became simple wardsmen" (Mitford). While Borges himself does not use this word, the word is inevitably used in English reports of the phenomenon, and so the translator has thought it appropriate to translate what the Spanish has as "retainers," "captains," etc., by the technical word. It is possible, of course, that JLB is doing with the Chinese system of loyalties what he did to the world's architecture: remaking it in the likeness of Argentina's. One notes that virtually all the houses that JLB uses in his fictions have long, narrow entrances and interior patios, the very floor plan of the Buenos Aires house of the end of the nineteenth century. Likewise, one senses that JLB may have used the word "captains" in the story to indicate the sort of relationship between the lord and his retainers that was common in the Argentina of caudillos and their captains. Thus the translator recognizes that if JLB was trying, consciously or not, to produce this effect, it may be somewhat risky to go all the way to the source, to"Rônin,"for the "translation." The reader is notified. Likewise, "Chushingura" is the name by which the dramas, poems, and films are inevitably known in English, so the translator has incorporated that inevitable cultural reference. From its absence in the Spanish text, one supposes that in Spanish the word"Chushingura" was not used.
* The source for this story: Much of this story is indeed taken from Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, pp. 3-19. The translator has taken the spelling of the characters' names and several quotations, such as the "Satsumi man's," from there.
Man on Pink Corner
* Title: The title of this story in Spanish is"Hombre de la esquina rosada"; it presents many intriguing possibilities, and therefore many problems, to the translator, not so much for the words as for the cultural assumptions underlying them. This story is in a way a portrait of the compadrito(the tough guy of the slums) or the cuchillero(knife fighter) and his life; as such, many items of that "local color" that Borges deplored in, for example, stories of the "exotic" Orient are found, though casually and unemphatically presented. The first thing that must be dealt with is perhaps that "pink corner." Esquina("corner") is both the actual street corner (as other translations of this story have given it, without the colorful adjective) and the neighborhood general-store-and-bar, generally located on corners, which was the hangout for the lowlife of the barrio. The reader can see this establishment clearly in "Unworthy" (in the volume tided Brodie's Report) and more fleetingly in many other stories. What of the adjective "pink" (rosada) then? The Buenos Aires of JLB's memory and imagination still had high, thick stucco or plastered brick walls lining the streets, such as the reader may see in the colonial cities of the Caribbean and Central and South America even today: Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, etc. Those walls in Buenos Aires were painted generally bright pastel colors; Borges refers to "sky blue" walls more even than to pink ones. Thus Borges was able to evoke in two words (esquina rosada) an old neighborhood of Buenos Aires, populated by toughs and knife fighters, and characterized by bars and bordellos in which that "scandalous" dance the tango was danced. (In its beginnings, the tango was so scandalous that no respectable woman would dance it, and one would see two men— compadritos—dancing together on street corners; nor would the tenement houses, which had moved into the large old houses vacated by the higher classes, allow such goings-on, even though these conventillos, as they were called, might be none too "respectable"—certainly none too "genteel"—themselves.) In evoking that old Buenos Aires, Borges also evoked "the man"—here, the Yardmaster, Rosendo Juárez, and the nameless narrator of the story, all of whom participate in the coldly violent ethos of the orillero, the (to us, today) exaggeratedly macho slum dweller (especially along the banks of the Maldonado [see note below]) who defended his honor against even the most imagined slight. However, certain aspects of this "man" will probably strike the non-Argentine reader as curious—for example, those "boots with high-stacked heels" (in the original Spanish, "women's shoes") and that "red carnation" in the first paragraph of the story "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities," the same sort of carnation that appears in this story. There is also the shawl worn by the gaucholike Yardmaster. These elements, however, were authentic "touches"; the compadrito affected these appearances. Previous translations have apparently tried to give all this "information" by calling the story "Street-corner Man," emphasizing the "tough guy hanging out on the corner" aspect of the story, and one can be sympathetic to that solution. Another intriguing possibility, however, is suggested by Bernésin the first volume of the Gallimard edition of JLB's Oeuvres complètes. I translate the relevant paragraph: "The title of the original publication, which omits the definite article, reminds the reader of the title of a painting given in the catalog of an art exhibit. It stresses the graphic aspect of the scene, whichBorges, in the preface to the 1935 edition, called the 'pictorial intention' of his work. One should think of some title of a piece by Pedro Figari-----[p. 1497] " This "impressionist" tide, then, should perhaps be retained; what one loses in "information" one gains in suggestion.
* Maldonado: The Maldonado was a creek that at the time of this story (and many others of JLB's stories) marked the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires. The neighborhood around this area was called Palermo, or also Maldonado. This story evokes its atmosphere at one period (perhaps partly legendary); the Maldonado (barrio) was a rough place, and the creek was terribly polluted by the tanneries along its banks.
* Don Nicolas Paredes... Morel: Paredes was a famous knife fighter and ward boss for the conservative party in Palermo; Morel was another famed political boss, or caudillo.
* I couldn't say whether they gutted him: Here and elsewhere in Borges (one thinks, of course, especially of the story tided " The Story from Rosendo Juárez" in the volume Brodie's Report and the story in this volume tided "The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell"), a corpse is gutted, or somebody thinks about gutting it. This, according to folk wisdom, is to keep the body from floating up and revealing the murder before die culprit has had good time to get away. Apparently a gutted body did not produce as much gas, or the gas (obviously) would not be contained in an inner cavity. Thus there is an unacknowledged "piece of information" here that the ruffians of the Maldonado and other such neighborhoods tacitly shared—tacitly because it was so obvious that no one needed to spell it out.
Et cetera
A THEOLOGIAN IN DEATH
* Attribution: The Swedenborg Concordance: A Complete Work of Reference to the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, based on the original Latin writings of the author, compiled, edited, and translated by the Rev. John Faulkner Potts, B. A., 4 vols. (London: Swedenborg Society, 1888). The text quoted here appears in the index (p. 622 of the appropriate volume) under "Melancthon" and is a mixture of the entries indicating two different Swedenborg texts: A Continuation of the Last Judgment and The True Christian Religion. The reader may find the text under "C. J. 47" and "1.797, 1-4." The full entry on Melancthon in the Concordance runs to p. 624.
THE CHAMBER OF STATUES
* Attribution: Freely taken from Sir Richard Burton's Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (New York: Heritage Press, 1934 [1962] ), pp. 1319-1321. The reader is referred to A Note on the Translation for more detailed comment on JLB's and the translator's uses of translations.
THE STORY OF THE TWO DREAMERS
* Attribution: This is freely adapted from a different version of the 1001 Nights, Edward William Lane's The Arabian Nights Entertainments —or The Thousand and One Nights (New York: Tudor Pubi.,1927), p. 1156. There are several other editions of this work, so the reader may find the tale in another place; Lane does not divide his book quite in the way JLB indicates.
THE MIRROR OF INK
* Attribution: One would not want to spoil JLB's little joke, if joke it is, but others before me have pointed out the discrepancy between this attribution and the fact. This story appears nowhere in Burton's Lake Regions and only sketchily in the volume that di Giovanni and many others give as the source: Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1837). Nonetheless, where Borges does seem to be translating (or calquing) the words of the last-named book, I have incorporated Lane's wording and word choices.
MAHOMED'S DOUBLE
* Attribution: Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion, containing the Universal Theology of the New Church, foretold by the Lordm Daniel VII, 13, 14, and in the Apocalypse XXI, 1, 2, translated from the Latin of ES (NewYork: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1886),ÎJ.829-830.
Index of Sources
* Source for "The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro": The source given by Borges here is the PhilipGosse book The History of Piracy; as one can clearly see, it is the same source cited for "The Widow Ching—Pirate," just below it. In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his "plays with sources"; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopcedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, in the article titled "Tichborne Claimant." Here again, where JLB is clearly translating or calquing that source, I have followed it without slavish "transliteration" of JLB's Spanish.
* Source for "The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan": Neither the Walter Noble Burns book nor the Frederick Watson book contains anything remotely approaching the story given by Borges here. Some details are "correct" (if that is the word), such as Billy's long and blasphemous dying, spewing Spanish curses, but little in the larger pattern of the "biography" seems to conform to "life." While Borges claimed in the "Autobiographical Essay" (written with Norman Thomas diGiovanni and published in The Aleph and Other Stories [1970]) that he was "in flagrant contradiction" of his "chosen authorities]," the truth is that he followed the authorities fairly closely for all the characters herein portrayed except that of Billy the Kid. He did, of course, "change and distort" the stories to suit his own purposes, but none is so cut from whole cloth as that of this gunfighter of the Wild West. The lesson in the "Autobiographical Essay" is perhaps that JLB's predilection for the red herring was lifelong.
Notes to Fictions ("The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Artifices")
* Title: First published as Ficciones(1935-1944) by Editorial Sur in1944, this book was made up of two volumes: El jardín de senderosque sebifurcan("The Garden of Forking Paths"), which had originally been published in 1941-1942, and Artificios("Artifices"), dated 1944 and never before published as a book. Each volume in the 1944 edition had its own title page and its own preface. (In that edition, and in all successive editions, The Garden of Forking Paths included the story"El acercamientoa Al-motasim" (The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"), collected first in Historia de la eternidad("History of Eternity"), 1936, and reprinted in each successive edition of that volume until 1953; this story now appears in the Obras Completas in Historia de la eternidad, but it is included here as a "fiction" rather than an "essay") In 1956 Emecé published a volume titled Ficciones, which was identical to the 1944 Editorial Sur edition except for the inclusion in Artifices of three new stories ("The End," "The Cult of the Phoenix," and "The South") and a "Postscript" to the 1944 preface to Artifices. It is this edition of Fictions, plus "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," that is translated for this book.
THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS
Foreword
* The eight stories: The eighth story, here printed as the second, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," was included in all editions subsequent to the 1941-1942 original edition. It had originally been published (1936) in Historia de la eternidad("A History of Eternity"). Ordinals and cardinals used in the Foreword have been adjusted to reflect the presence of this story.
* Sur: "[T]he most influential literary publication in Latin America" (Rodriguez Monegal, p. 233), it was started by Victoria Ocampo, with the aid of the Argentine novelist Eduardo Malica and the American novelist Waldo Frank. Borges was one of the journal's first contributors, certainly one of its most notable (though Sur published or discussed virtually every major poet, writer, and essayist of the New or Old World) and he acted for three decades as one of its "guardian angels." Many of JLB's fictions, some of his poetry, and many critical essays and reviews appeared for the first time in the pages of Sur.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
* Ramos Mejia: "A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony. It is now an industrial suburb" (Hughes and Fishburn).
* Bioy Casares: Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914- ): Argentine novelist, JLB's closest friend and collaborator with JLB on numerous projects, including some signed with joint pseudonyms. In their joint productions, the two men were interested in detective stories, innovative narrative techniques (as the text here hints), and tales of a somewhat "fantastic" nature. Unfortunately rather eclipsed by Borges, especially in the English-speaking world, Bioy Casares is a major literary figure with a distinguished body of work; a description of the reciprocal influence of the two writers would require (at least) its own book-length study.
* Volume XLVI: The Obras completas, on which this translation is based, has "Volume XXVI," which the translator takes to be a typographical error, the second X slipped in for the correct L
* Johannes Valentinus Andrea in the writings of Thomas de Quincey: It is perhaps significant that de Quincey credits Andrea (1586-1654) with "inventing" the Rosicrucian order by writing satirical works (and one especially: Fama Fraternitatis of the meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross, addressed to the learned in general and the Governors of Europe) describing an absurd mystico-Christian secret society engaged not only in general beneficence and the improvement of mankind but also in alchemy and gold making. The public did not perceive Andrea's satirical intent, and many rushed to "join" this society, though they could never find anyone to admit them. At last, according to de Quincey, a group of "Paracelsists" decided that if nobody else would admit to being a Rosicrucian, they would take over the name and "be" the society.
* Carlos Mastronardi: Mastronardi (1901-1976) was "a poet, essayist, and journalist [in Buenos Aires], a member of the group of writers identified with the avant-garde literary magazine Martín Fierro" (Fishburn and Hughes). Balderston (The Literary Universe of JLB: An Index... [New York: Greenwood Press], 1986) gives some of his titles: Luz de Provincia, Tierra amanecida, Conocimiento de la noche. Mastronardi was one of JLB's closest friends throughout the thirties and forties (Borgestoo was closely associated with Martín Fierro), and Rodríguez Monegal reported in his biography of JLB that Borges was still seeing Mastronardi as the biography (pubi.1978) was written; it seems safe to say, therefore, that Borges and Mastronardi were friends until Mastronardi's death.
* Capangas: Overseers or foremen of gangs of workers, usually either slaves or indentured semislaves, in rural areas, for cutting timber, etc., though not on ranches, where the foreman is known as a capataz. This word is of Guaraníor perhaps African origin and came into Spanish, as JLB indicates, from the area of Brazil.
* Néstor Ibarra:(b. 1908) "Born in France of an Argentine father who was the son of a French Basque émigré, M went to the University of Buenos Aires around 1925 to complete his graduate education. While [there] he discovered Borges' poems and ... tried to persuade his teachers to let him write a thesis on Borges' ultraist poetry"(Rodríguez Monegal, p. 239). Ibarra's groundbreaking and very important study of JLB, Borges et Borges, and his translations of JLB (along with those of Roger Caillois) into French in the 19505 were instrumental in the worldwide recognition of JLB's greatness. Among the other telling associations with this and other stories is the fact that Ibarra and Borges invented a new language ("with surrealist or ultraist touches"), a new French school of literature, Identism, "in which objects were always compared to themselves," and a new review, tided Papers for the Suppression of Reality (see "Pierre Menard," in this volume; this information, Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 240-241). The N. R. F. is the Nouvelle Revue Française, an extremely important French literary magazine that published virtually every important modern writer in the first three decades of this century.
* Ezequiel Martínez Estrada: Martinez Estrada (1895-1964) was an influential Argentine writer whose work Radiografiade la pampa (X-ray of the Pampa) JLB reviewed very favorably in 1933 in the literary supplement (Revista Multicolor de los Sábados["Saturday Motley Review"] ) to the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica.
* Drieu La Rochelle: Pierre-Eugene Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945) was for a time the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française; he visited Argentina in 1933, recognized JLB's genius, and is reported to have said on his return to France that "Borges vaut levoyage" (Físhburn and Hughes).
* Alfonso Reyes: Reyes (1889-1959) was a Mexican poet and essayist, ambassador to Buenos Aires (1927-1930 and again 1936—1937), and friend of JLB's (Fishburn and Hughes). Reyes is recognized as one of the great humanists of the Americas in the twentieth century, an immensely cultured man who was a master of the Spanish language and its style ("direct and succinct without being thin or prosaic" [Rodriquez Monegal]).
* Xul Solar: Xul Solar is the nom de plume-turned-name of Alejandro Schultz (1887-1963), a lifelong friend of JLB, who compared him favorably with William Blake. Xul was a painter and something of a "creative linguist," having invented a language he called creol: a "language ... made up of Spanish enriched by neologisms and by monosyllabic English words ... used as adverbs" (Roberto Alifano, interviewer and editor, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges, trans. Nicomedes Suárez Araúz, Willis Barnstone, and Noemi Escandell [Housatonic, Mass.: Lascaux Publishers, 1984], p. 119). In another place, JLB also notes another language invented by Xul Solar: "a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins" ("Autobiographical Essay," * The Aleph and Other Stories: 1933-1969 [New York: Dutton, 1970], pp. 203-260). JLB goes on to note that "Xul was his version of Schultz and Solar of Solari." Xul Solar's painting has often been compared with that of Paul Klee;"strange" and "mysterious" are adjectives often applied to it. Xul illustrated three of JLB's books: El tamaño de mi esperanza(1926), El idioma de los argentinos(1928), and Un modelo para la muerte, the collaboration between JLB and Adolfo Bioy Casares that was signed"B. SuárezLynch." In his biography of Borges, Emir Rodríguez Monegal devotes several pages to Xul's influence on JLB's writing; Borges himself also talks at length about Xul in the anthology of interviews noted above. Xul was, above all, a "character" in the Buenos Aires of the twenties and thirties and beyond.
* Amorim: Enrique Amorim (1900-1960) was a Uruguayan novelist, related to Borges by marriage. He wrote about the pampas and the gaucho (and gaucho life); Borges thought his El Paisano Aguilar"a closer description of gaucho life than Gùiraldes' more famous Don Segundo Sombra" (Fishburn and Hughes).
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
* Local color in Maurice Barresor Rodríguez Larreta: Barres (1862-1923) was a "French writer whose works include a text on bullfighting entitled Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort" (Fishburn and Hughes); one can see what the narrator is getting at in terms of romanticizing the foreign. Enrique Rodriguez Larreta (1875-1961) wrote historical novels; one, set in Avila and Toledo in the time of Philip II (hence the reference to that name in the text) and titled La gloriade Don Ramiro, used an archaic Spanish for the dialogue; clearly this suggests the archaism of Menard's Quixote. (Here I paraphrase Fishburn and Hughes.)
A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain
* The Siamese Twin Mystery: A novel by Ellery Queen, published in 1933. Here the literary critic-narrator is lamenting the fact that Quain's novel was overshadowed by the much more popular Queen's.
ARTIFICES
Funes, His Memory
* Title: This story has generally appeared under the tide"Funes the Memorious," and it must be the brave (or foolhardy) translator who dares change such an odd and memorable title. Nor would the translator note (and attempt to justify) his choice of a translation except in unusual circumstances. Here, however, the title in the original Spanish calls for some explanation. The title is"Funes el memorioso"; die word memorioso is not an odd Spanish word; it is in fact perfectly common, if somewhat colloquial. It simply means "having a wonderful or powerful memory," what in English one might render by the expression "having a memory like an elephant." The beauty of the Spanish is that the entire long phrase is compressed into a single word, a single adjective, used in the original title as an epithet: Funes die Elephant-Memoried. (The reader can see that that translation won't do.) The word "memorisi" is perhaps die closest thing that common English yields up without inventing a new word such as "memorious," which strikes the current translator as vaguely Lewis Carroll-esque, yet "memorisi" has something vaguely show business about it, as though Funes worked vaudeville or the carnival sideshows. The French tide of this story is the lovely eighteenth-century-sounding "Funesou La Mémoire"; with a nod to JLB's great admirer John Bardi, I have chosen "Funes, His Memory."
* The Banda Oriental: The "eastern bank" of the River Plate, die old name of Uruguay before it became a country, and a name used for many years afterward by the "old-timers" or as a sort of nickname.
* Pedro Leandro Ipuche: The Uruguayan Ipuche was a friend of die young ultraist-period Borges (ca.1925), with whom (along with Ricardo Guiraldes, author of the important novel Don Segundo Sombra) he worked on the literary magazine Proa (Fishburn and Hughes). Proa was an influential little magazine, and Borges and friends took it seriously; they were engaged, as Rodriguez Monegal quotes the "Autobiographical Essay" as saying, in "renewing both prose and poetry."
* Fray Bentos:"A small town on the banks of the Uruguay River, famous for its meat-canning industry. In his youth Borges was a regular visitor to his cousins' ranch near Fray Bentos"(Fishburn and Hughes). Haedo was in fact the family name of these cousins.
* The thirty-three Uruguayan patriots: The "Thirty-three," as they were called, were a band of determined patriots under the leadership of Juan Antonio Lavalleja who crossed the River Plate from Buenos Aires to Montevideo in order to "liberate" the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) from the Spaniards. Their feat of bravery, under impossible odds, immortalized them in the mythology of the Southern Cone. For fuller detail, see the note to p. 474, for the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume The Book of Sand.
Three Versions of Judas
* Euclides daCunha: Cunha (1866-1909) was a very wellknown Brazilian writer whose most famous novel is a fictional retelling of an uprising in the state of Bahia. He was moved by the spiritualism (Fishburn and Hughes note its mystical qualities) of the rebels.
* Antonio Conselheiro:(1828-1897). Conselheiro was "a Brazilian religious dissident who led a rebellion in Canudos, in the northern state of Bahía. The rebels were peasants ... who lived in a system of communes, working out their own salvation. They rose against the changes introduced by the new Republican government, which they regarded as the Antichrist.... Conselheiro's head was cut off and put on public display" (Fishburn and Hughes). His real name was Antonio Maciel; conselheiro means "counselor," and so his messianic, ministerial role is here emphasized.
* Almafuerte: The pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacio (1854-1917), one of Argentina's most beloved poets. A kind of role model and hero to young writers, akin to the phenomenon of Dylan Thomas in Britain and the United States a few years ago, Almafuerte was one of JLB's most admired contemporaries.
The End
* "It'd been longer than seven years that I'd gone without seeing my children. I found them that day, and I wouldn't have it so's I looked to them like a man on his way to a knife fight": It is not these words that need noting, but an"intertextual event." It is about here that the Argentine reader will probably realize what this story is about: It is a retelling of the end of José Hernández' famous tale Martín Fierro. As Fierrois a knife fighter, and as a black man figures in the poem, and as there is a famous song contest, the reader will put two and two together, no doubt, even before Martin Fierro's name is mentioned a few lines farther on. This is the way Fishburn and Hughes state the situation: "The episode alluded to in 'The End' is the payada, or song contest, between Martín Fierro and el moreno["the black man"] who was the brother of the murdered negro. In the contest the gauchos discuss metaphysical themes, but towards the end el moreno reveals his identity, and his desire for revenge is made clear. In keeping with the more conciliatory tone of pt. 2 [of Hernandez' original poem] a fight is prevented between the two contestants, each going his own way. "The End" is a gloss on this episode, the fight that might have taken place." By this late in the volume, JLB's Preface to the stories, hinting at the coexistence of a "famous book" in this story, may have dimmed in the reader's memory, but for the Latin American reader, the creeping familiarity of the events, like the echoes of Shakespeare in the assassination of Kilpatrick in "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," should come into the foreground in this section of the story, and the reader, like Ryan in that other story, make the "connection."
The South
* Buenos Aires: Here the province, not the city. The reference is to the northern border, near Entre Ríos and Santa Fe provinces, on the Paraná River.
* Catriel: Cipriano Catriel (d. 1874). Catriel was an Indian chieftain who fought against the Argentines in the Indian wars. Later, however, he fought on the side of the revolutionary forces (Fishburn and Hughes).
* His gaucho trousers: This is the chiripá, a triangular worsted shawl tied about the waist with the third point pulled up between the legs and looped into a knot to form a rudimentary pant, or a sort of diaper. It is worn over a pair of pantaloons (ordinarily white) that "stick out" underneath. Sometimes, incredible as it strikes Anglo-Saxons that the extraordinarily machista gauchos would wear such clothing (but think of the Scots' kilts), the pantaloons had lace bottoms.
Notes to The Aleph
The Dead Man
* Rio Grande doSul: The southernmost state of Brazil, bordering both Argentina and Uruguay on the north. Later in this story, a certain wildness is attributed to this region; JLB often employed the implicit contrast between the more "civilized" city and province of Buenos Aires (and all of Argentina) and the less "developed" city of Montevideo and nation of Uruguay and its "wilderness of horse country," the "plains," "the interior," here represented by Rio Grande do Sul.
* Paso del Molino:"A lower-to-middle-class district outside Montevideo" (Fishburn and Hughes).
Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
* The Auracan or Pampas tongue: The Pampas Indians were a nomadic people who inhabited the plains of the Southern Cone at the time of the Conquest; they were overrun by the Araucans, and the languages and cultures merged; today the two names are essentially synonymous (Fishburn and Hughes). English seems not to have taken the name Pampas for anything but the plains of Argentina.
* Pulpería: A country store or general store, though not the same sort of corner grocery-store-and-bar, the esquina or almacén, that Borges uses as a setting in the stories that take place in the city. The pulpería would have been precisely the sort of frontier general store that one sees in American westerns.
A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
* Montoneros: Montoneros were the men of guerrilla militias (generally gauchos) that fought in the civil wars following the wars of independence. They tended to rally under the banner of a leader rather than specifically under the banner of a cause; Fishburn and Hughes put it in the following way: "[T]heir allegiance to their leader was personal and direct, and they were largely indifferent to his political leanings."
* Lavalle: Juan GaloLavalle (1797-1841) was an Argentine hero who fought on the side of the Unitarians, the centralizing Buenos Aires forces, against the Federalist montoneros of the outlying provinces and territories, whose most famous leader was Juan Manuel de Rosas, the fierce dictator who appears in several of JLB's stories. The mention here of Lavalle and López would indeed locate this story in 1829, a few months before Lavalle was defeated by the combined Rosas and López forces (Fishburn and Hughes). One would assume, then, that the man who fathered Tadeo Isidoro Cruz was fighting with Rosas' forces themselves.
* Suárez' cavalry: Probably Manuel Isidoro Suárez (1759-1843), JLB's mother's maternal grandfather, who fought on the side of the Unitarians in the period leading up to 1829 (Fishburn and Hughes). Borges may have picked up the protagonist's name, as well, in part from his forebear.
* Thirty Christian men... Sgt. Ma}. Eusebia Laprida... two hundred Indians: Eusebio Laprida (1829-1898) led eighty, not thirty, men against a regular army unit of two hundred soldiers, not Indians, in a combat at the Cardoso Marshes on January 25, not 23,1856 (data, Fishburn and Hughes). The defeat of the Indians took place during a raid in 1879. JLB here may be conflating the famous Thirty-three led by Lavalleja against Montevideo (see note to"Avelino Arredondo"in The Book of Sand), Laprida's equally heroic exploit against a larger "official" army unit, and Laprida's exploit against the Indians two decades later.
* Manuel Mesa executed in the Plazade la Victoria: Manuel Mesa (1788-1829) fought on the side of Rosas and the Federalists. In 1829 he organized a force of montoneros and friendly Indians and battled Lavalle, losing that engagement. In his retreat, he was met by Manuel Isidoro Suárez and captured. Suárez sent him to Buenos Aires, where he was executed in the Plaza Victoria.
* The deserter Martín Fierro: As JLB tells the reader in the Afterword to this volume, this story has been a retelling, from the "unexpected" point of view of a secondary character, of the famous gaucho epic poem Martín Fierro, by José Hernández. Since this work is a classic (or the classic) of nineteenth-century Argentine literature, every reader in the Southern Cone would recognize "what was coming": Martin Fierro, the put-upon gaucho hero, stands his ground against the authorities, and his friend abandons his uniform to stand and fight with him. This changing sides is a recurrent motif in Borges; see "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" in this volume, for instance. It seems to have been more interesting to JLB that one might change sides than that one would exhibit the usual traits of heroism. Borges is also fond of rewriting classics: See "The House of Asterion," also in this volume, and note that the narrator in "The Zahir" retells to himself, more or less as the outline of a story he is writing, the story of the gold of the Nibelungen. One could expand the list to great length.
Emma Zunz
* Bagé: A city in southern Rio Grande do Sul province, in Brazil.
* Gualeguay: "A rural town and department in the province of Entre Ríos"(Fishburn and Hughes).
* Lanús:"A town and middle-class district in Greater Buenos Aires, south-west of the city" (Fishburn and Hughes).
* Almagro: A lower-middle-class neighborhood near the center of Buenos Aires.
* Calle Liniers: As the story says, a street in the Almagro neighborhood.
* Paseo de Julio: Now the Avenida Alem. This street runs parallel with the waterfront; at the time of this story it was lined with tenement houses and houses of ill repute.
* A westbound Lacroze: The Lacroze Tramway Line served the northwestern area of Buenos Aires at the time; today the city has an extensive subway system.
* Warnes: A street in central Buenos Aires near the commercial district of Villa Crespo, where the mill is apparently located.
The Other Death
* Gualeguay chú:"A town on the river of the same name in the province of Entre Ríos, opposite the town of Fray Bentos, with which there is considerable interchange" (Fishburn and Hughes).
* Masoller: Masoller, in northern Uruguay, was the site of a decisive battle on September 1, 1904, between the rebel forces of Aparicio Saravia (see below) and the National Army; Saravia was defeated and mortally wounded (Fishburn and Hughes).
* The banners of Aparicio Saravia: Aparicio Saravia (1856-1904) was a Uruguayan landowner and caudillo who led the successful Blanco (White party) revolt against the dictatorship of Idiarte Borda (the Colorados, or Red party). Even in victory, however, Saravia had to continue to fight against the central government, since Borda's successor, Batlle, refused to allow Saravia's party to form part of the new government. It is the years of this latter revolt that are the time of "The Other Death." See also, for a longer explanation of the political situation of the time, the story"Avelino Arredondo"in The Book of Sand.
* Rio Negro or Paysandú: RíoNegro is the name of a department in western Uruguay on the river of the same name, just opposite the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. Paysandú is a department in Uruguay bordering Rio Negro. Once again JLB is signaling the relative "wildness" of Uruguay is comparison with Argentina, which was not touched by these civil wars at the time.
* Gualeguay: See note to p. 215 above. Note the distinction between "Gualeguay" and"Gualeguay chú"(see note to p. 223 above).
* Ñancay:"A tributary of the Uruguay River that flows through the rich agricultural lands of southern Entre Río sprovince" (Fishburn and Hughes).
* Men whose throats were slashed through to the spine: This is another instance in which JLB documents the (to us today) barbaric custom by the armies of the South American wars of independence (and other, lesser combats as well) of slitting defeated troops' throats. In other places, he notes offhandedly that "no prisoners were taken," which does not mean that all the defeated troops were allowed to return to their bivouacs. In this case, a rare case, Borges actually "editorializes" a bit: "a civil war that struck me as more some outlaw's dream than the collision of two armies."
* Ilkscas, Tupambae, Masoller: All these are the sites of battles in northern and central Uruguay fought in 1904 between Saravia's forces and the National Army of Uruguay.
* White ribbon: Because the troops were often irregulars, or recruited from the gauchos or farmhands of the Argentine, and therefore lacking standardized uniforms, the only way to tell friend from enemy was by these ribbons, white in the case of the Blancos, red in the case of the Colorados. Here the white ribbon worn by the character marks him as a follower of Saravia, the leader of the Whites. (See notes passim about the significance of these parties.) * Zumacos: The name by which regulars in the Uruguayan National Army were known.
* Artiguismo: That is, in accord with the life and views of José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850), a Uruguayan hero who fought against both the Spaniards and the nascent Argentines to forge a separate nation out of what had just been the Banda Oriental, or east bank of the Plate. The argument was that Uruguay had its own "spirit," its own "sense of place," which the effete Argentines of Buenos Aires, who only romanticized the gaucho but had none of their own, could never truly understand or live.
* Red infantry: The Reds, or Colorados, were the forces of the official national government of Uruguay, in contradistinction to the Blancos, or Whites, of Saravia's forces; the Reds therefore had generally better weapons and equipment, and better-trained military officers on the whole, than the irregular and largely gaucho Whites.
* ¡Viva Urquiza!: Justo José Urquiza (1801-1870) was president of the Argentinian Confederation between 1854 and 1860. Prior to that, he had fought with the Federalists under Rosas (the provincial forces) against the Unitarians (the Buenos Aires-based centralizing forces), but in 1845 he broke with Rosas (whom JLB always excoriates as a vicious dictator) and eventually saw Buenos Aires province and the other provinces of the Argentinian Confederation brought together into the modern nation of Argentina, though under the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre.
* Cagancha or India Muerta: The perplexity here derives from the fact that while the battle at Masoller, in which Damián took part, occurred in 1904, the cry ¡Viva Urquiza! would have been heard at the Battle of Cagancha (1839) or India Muerta (1845), where Urquiza's rebel Federalist forces fought the Unitarians. At Cagancha, Urquiza was defeated by the Unitarians; at India Muertahe defeated them. This story may also, thus, have certain subterranean connections with "The Theologians," in its examination of the possibilities of repeating or circular, or at least nondiscrete, time.
* He "marked" no one: He left his mark on no man in a knife fight; in a fight, when the slight might, even by the standards of the day, be deemed too inconsequential to kill a man for, or if the other man refused to fight, the winner would leave his mark, a scar, that would settle the score.
Averroës' Search
* "The seven sleepers of Ephesus": This is a very peculiar story to put in the minds of these Islamic luminaries, for the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus is a Christian story, told by Gregory of Tours. Clearly the breadth of culture of these gentlemen is great, but it is difficult (at least for this translator) to see the relationship of this particular tale (unlike the other "stories," such as the children playing or "representing" life and the "if it had been a snake it would have bitten him" story told by abu-al-Hasan) to Averroës' quest.
The Zahir
* Calk Aráoz: Fishburn and Hughes tell us that in the 19305, Calle Aráoz was "a street of small houses inhabited by the impoverished middle class"; it is near the penitentiary Las Heras.
* On the corner of Chile and Tacuari: A corner in the Barrio Sur, or southern part of Buenos Aires, as the story says; it is some ten blocks from the Plaza Constitución and its great station.
* Truco: A card game indigenous, apparently, to Argentina and played very often in these establishments. Borges was fascinated by this game and devoted an essay and two or three poems to it, along with references, such as this one, scattered through-out hisœuvre. The phrase "to my misfortune" indicates the inexorability of the attraction that the game held for him; the narrator could apparently simply not avoid going to the bar. Truco's nature, for JLB, is that combination of fate and chance that seems to rule over human life as well as over games: an infinitude of possibilities within a limited number of cards, the limitations of the rules. See "Truco" in Borges: A Reader.
* La Concepción:A large church in the Barrio Sur, near the Plaza Constitución.
* The chamfered curb in darkness: Here JLB's reference is to an ochava—that is, a "corner with the corner cut off" to form a three-sided, almost round curb, and a somewhat wider eight-sided rather than four-sided intersection, as the four corners of the intersection would all be chamfered in that way. This reference adds to the "old-fashioned" atmosphere of the story, because chamfered corners were common on streets traveled by large horse-drawn wagons, which would need extra space to turn the corners so that their wheels would not ride up onto the sidewalks.
* I went neither to the Basilica del Pilar that morning nor to the cemetery: That is, the narrator did not go to Teodelina's funeral. The Basilica del Pilar is one of the most impressive churches in central Buenos Aires, near the Recoleta cemetery where Teodelina Vilar would surely have been buried.
* "She's been put into Bosch": Bosch was "a well-known private clinic frequented by the porteño elite" (Fishburn and Hughes).
The Writing of the God
* / saw the origins told by the Book of the People. I saw... the dogs that tore at their faces: Here the priest is remembering the story of the creation of the world told in the Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred text. The standard modern translation is by Dennis Tedlock: Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone, 1985). For this part of the genesis story, cf. pp.84-85.
The Wait
* Plaza del Once: Pronounced óhn-say, not wunce. This is actually "Plaza Once," but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words makes it advisable, the translator thinks, to modify the name slightly in order to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than the English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square.
The Aleph
* Quilines: A district in southern Buenos Aires; "at one time favoured for weekend villas, particularly by the British, Quilmes has since become unfashionable, a heavily industrialised area, known mainly for Quilmes Beer, the largest brewing company in the world" (Fishburn and Hughes). Thus JLB is evoking a world of privilege and luxe.
* Juan Crisóstomo Laflnur Library: This library is named after JLB's great-uncle (1797-1824), who occupied the chair of philosophy at the Colegio de la Unión del Suduntil, under attack for teaching materialism, he was forced into exile.
* "The most elevated heights of Flores": Here Daneri's absurdity reaches "new heights," for though the neighborhood of Flores had been very much in vogue among the affluent of Buenos Aires society during the nineteenth century, it was only about a hundred feet above sea level. Moreover, it had lost much of its exclusiveness, and therefore glamour, by the time of this story, since in the yellow fever epidemic of 1871 people fled "central" Buenos Aires for the "outlying" neighborhood.
* Chacarita: One of the two enormous cemeteries in Buenos Aires; the other is Recoleta. A modern guidebook* has this to say about the cemeteries of Buenos Aires: Life and Death in Recoleta & Chacarita: Death is an equalizer, except in Buenos Aires. When the arteries harden after decades of dining at Au Bec Fin and finishing up with coffee and dessert at La Bielaor Café de la Paix, the wealthy and powerful of Buenos Aires move ceremoniously across the street to Recoleta Cemetery, joining their forefathers in a place they have visited religiously all their lives-----According to Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez, Argentines are "cadaver cultists" who honor their most revered national figures not on the date of their birth but of their death.... Nowhere is this obsession with mortality and corruption more evident than in Recoleta, where generations of the elite repose in the grandeur of ostentatious mausoleums. It is a common saying and only a slight exaggeration that "it is cheaper to live extravagantly all your life than to be buried inRecoleta."Traditionally, money is not enough: you must have a surname like Anchorena, Alvear, Aramburu, Avellaneda, Mitre, Martínez de Hoz, or Sarmiento.... Although more democratic in conception, Chacaritahas many tombs which match the finest in Recoleta. One of the most visited belongs to Carlos Gardel, the famous tango singer. (* Argentina, Uruguayé-Paraguay, Wayne Bernhardson and Maria Massolo, Hawthorne, Vic, Australia; Berkeley, CA, USA; and London, UK: Lonely Planet Publications [Travel Survival Kit], 1992)
* Compendia of Dr. Acevedo Díaz: Eduardo Acevedo Díaz (1882-1959) won the Premio Nacional for his novel Cancha Larga; JLB's entry that year, The Garden of Forking Paths, won second prize.
* Pedro Henriquez Ureña: Henriquez Ureña (1884-1946), originally from the Dominican Republic, lived for years in Buenos Aires and was an early contributor to Sur, the magazine that Victoria Ocampo founded and that JLB assiduously worked on. It was through Henriquez Ureña, who had lived for a time in Mexico City, that JLB met another close friend, the Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes. Henriquez Ureña and JLB collaborated on the Antología de la literatura argentina(1937).
Notes to The Maker
Foreword
* Leopoldo Lugones: Lugones (1874-1938) was probably Argentina's leading poet in the second to fourth decades of this century; he was influenced by Spanish modernismo and by the French Symbolists. To a degree he represented to the young Turks of Argentine poetry the ancien régime; therefore he was often attacked, and often tastelessly so. Early on, JLB joined in these gibes at Lugones, though clearly Borge salso recognized Lugones' skills and talents as a poet. Rodriguez Monegal (pp. 197-198) speculates that JLB had mixed feelings about Lugones, especially in his person, but suggests that respect for Lugones as a poet no doubt prevailed, especially as JLB matured. Monegal quotes Borges (quoted by Fernández Moreno) as follows: Lugones was "a solitary and dogmatic man, a man who did not open up easily.... Conversation was difficult with him because he [would] bring everything to a close with a phrase which was literally a period.... Then you had to begin again, to find another subject.... And that subject was also dissolved with a period.... His kind of conversation was brilliant but tiresome. And many times his assertions had nothing to do with what he really believed; he just had to say something extraordinary.... What he wanted was to control the conversation. Everything he said was final. And... we had a great respect for him."(Fernández Moreno [1967], pp. 10-11, in Rodriguez Monegal, p. 197; ellipses in Rodriguez Monegal.) Another problem with Lugones was his partiality to military governments, his proto- and then unfeigned fascism; obviously this did not endear him to many, more liberal, thinkers. In this introduction JLB seems to recognize that while he and his friends were experimenting with a "new" poetics in the first decades of the century, Lugones kept on his amiable way, and to admit that later he, JLB, had put aside some of the more shocking and radical of his notions of poetry in favor of a cleaner, less "poetic" poetry, which Lugones would probably have recognized as much closer to his own. So the "son" comes to see that he has come to resemble the resented "father" (no Freudian implications intended; genetics only; no political implications intended, either; Borges hated military governments and hated fascism and Nazism).
* The Maker: The Spanish title of this "heterogeneous" volume of prose and poetry (only the prose is included in this volume) is El hacedor, and hacedor is a troublesome word for a translator into English. JLB seems to be thinking of the Greek word poeta, which means "maker," since a "true and literal" translation of poeta into Spanish would indeed be hacedor. Yet hacedor is in this translator's view, and in the view of all those native speakers he has consulted, a most uncommon word. It is not used in Spanish for "poet" but instead makes one think of someone who makes things with his hands, a kind of artisan, perhaps, or perhaps even a linkerer. The English word maker is perhaps strange too, yet it exists; however, it is used in English (in such phrases as "he went to meet his Maker" and the brand name Maker's Mark) in a way that dissuades one from seizing upon it immediately as the "perfect" translation for hacedor. (The Spanish word hacedor would never be used for "God," for instance.) Eliot Weinberger has suggested to this translator, quite rightly, perhaps, that JLB had in mind the Scots word makir, which means "poet." But there are other cases: Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, taken from Dante— il miglior fabbro, where fabbro has exactly the same range as hacedor. Several considerations seem to militate in favor of the translation "artificer": first, the sense of someone's making something with his hands, or perhaps "sculptor," for one of JLB's favorite metaphors for poetry was at one time sculpture; second, the fact that the second "volume" in the volume Fictions is clearly titled Artifices-, third, the overlap between art and craft or artisanry that is implied in the word, as in the first story in this volume. But a translational decision of this kind is never easy and perhaps never "done"; one wishes one could call the volume II fabbro, or Poeta, or leave it El hacedor. The previous English translation of this volume in fact opted for Dreamtigers. Yet sometimes a translator is spared this anguish (if he or she finds the key to the puzzle in time to forestall it); in this case there is an easy solution. I quote from Emir Rodriguez Monegal's Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, p. 438:"Borges was sixty when the ninth volume of his complete works came out-----For the new book he had thought up the title in English: The Maker, and had translated it into Spanish as El hacedor, but when the book came out in the United States the American translator preferred to avoid the theological implications and used instead the tide of one of the pieces: Dreamtigers so a translation problem becomes a problem created in the first place by a translation! (Thanks to Eliot Weinberger for coming across this reference in time and bringing it to my attention.)
Dreamtigers
* Title: The title of this story appears in italics because JLB used the English nonce word in the Spanish original.
* That spotted "tiger": While there are many indigenous words for the predatory cats of South America—puma, jaguar, etc.—that have been adopted into Spanish, Peninsular Spanish called these cats tigers. (One should recall that Columbus simply had no words for the myriad new things in this New World, so if an indigenous word did not "catch on" immediately, one was left with a European word for the thing: hence "Indians"!) Here, then, JLB is comparing the so-called tiger of the Southern Cone with its Asian counterpart, always a more intriguing animal for him. Cf., for instance, "Blue Tigers" in the volume titled Shakespeare's Memory.
Toenails
* Recoleta: The "necropolis" near the center of Buenos Aires, where the elite of Porteño society buries its dead. See also note to "The Aleph" in The Aleph.
Covered Mirrors
* Federalists/Unitarians: The Federalists were those nineteenth-century conservatives who favored a federal (i.e., decentralized) plan of government for Argentina, with the provinces having great autonomy and an equal say in the government; the Federalists were also "Argentine," as opposed to the internationalist, Europe-looking Unitarians, and their leaders tended to be populist caudillos, their fighters in the civil wars to be gauchos. The Unitarians, on the other hand, were a Buenos Aires-based party that was in favor of a centralizing, liberal government; they tended to be "free-thinkers," rather than Catholics perse, intellectuals, internationalists, and Europophile in outlook Unitarians deplored the barbarity of the gaucho ethos, and especially sentimentalizing that way of life; they were urban to a fault. This old "discord between their lineages," as Borges puts it in this story, is the discord of Argentina, never truly overcome in the Argentina that JLB lived in.
* Balvanera: One can assume that at the time"Borges"had this experience, Balvanera was a neighborhood of "genteel poverty" much as one might envision it from the description of "Julia," but in the story "The Dead Man," in The Aleph, Balvanera is the neighborhood that the "sad sort of hoodlum"Benjamín Otálora comes from, and it is described as a district on the outskirts of the Buenos Aires of 1891 (which does not, emphatically, mean that it would be on the outskirts of the Buenos Aires of 1927, the time of the beginning of "Covered Mirrors"), a neighborhood of "cart drivers and leather braiders." Thus Balvanera is associated not so much with gauchos and cattle (though the Federalist connection hints at such a connotation) as with the stockyards and their industries, the secondary (and romantically inferior) spin-offs of the pampas life. Balvanera here, like Julia's family itself, is the decayed shadow of itself and the life it once represented.
* Blank wall of the railway yard... Parque Centenario: The railway ran (and runs) through Balvanera from the Plaza del Once station westward, out toward the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Sarmiento runs westward, too, but slightly north of the rail-way line, and running slightly northwest. It meets the Parque Centenario about a mile and a half from the station.
The Mountebank
* Chaco River: In the Litoral region of northern Argentina, an area known for cattle raising and forestry.
Delia Elena San Marco
* Plaza del Once (pronounced óhn-say, not wunce). This is actually usually given as Plaza Once, but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words makes it advisable, I think, to modify the name slightly so as to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. JLB himself uses "Plaza del Once" from time to time, as in the Obras completas, vol. II, p.428, in the story"La señoramayor," in Informe de Brodie("The Elderly Lady," in Brodie's Report, p. 375). Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square, and now the site of Buenos Aires' main train station for west-bound railways.
A Dialog Between Dead Men
* Quiroga: Like many of the pieces in this volume ("The Captive," "Martin Fierro""Everything and Nothing"), "A Dialog Between Dead Men" sets up a "dialog" with others of Borges' writings, especially a famous poem called "General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage" ("El general Quirogava en coche al muere [sic, for "a sumuerte, a la muerte," etc.]"). There the reader will find the scene that is not described but only alluded to here, the murder of General Quiroga by a sword-wielding gang of horsemen under the leadership of the Reinafe brothers. Some biographical information is essential here:Juan Facundo Quiroga (1793-1835) was a Federalist caudillo (which means that he was on the side of Rosas [see below]), and was, like Rosas, a leader feared by all and hated by his opponents; he was known for his violence, cruelty, and ruthlessness and made sure that his name was feared by slitting the throats of the prisoners that his forces captured and of the wounded in the battles that he fought. So great was his charisma, and so ruthless his personality, that his supposed ally in the fight against the Unitarians, Juan Manuel de Rosas, began to resent (and perhaps suspect) him. As Quiroga was leaving a meeting with Rosas in 1835, he was ambushed by the Reinafe gang, and he and his companions were brutally murdered, their bodies hacked to pieces; it was widely believed (though stubbornly denied by Rosas) that Rosas had ordered the assassination.
* Rosas: Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) was the dictator of Argentina for eighteen years, from 1835 to 1852. His dictatorship was marked by terror and persecution, and he is for JLB one of the most hated figures in Argentine history; JLB's forebears, Unitarians, suffered the outrages of Rosas and his followers. Early in his career Rosas was a Federalist (later the distinction became meaningless, as Rosas did more than anyone to unify Argentina, though most say he did so for all the wrong reasons), a caudillo whose followers were gangs of gauchos and his own private vigilante force, the so-called mazorca(see the story "Pedro Salvadores" in In Praise of Darkness). He methodically persecuted, tortured, and killed off his opponents both outside and inside his party, until he at last reigned supreme over the entire country. See the poem "Rosas" in JLB's early volume of poetry Fervor de Buenos Aires.
* "Chacabuco and junin and Palma Redondo and Caseros": Battles in the wars of independence of the countries of the Southern Cone.
The Yellow Rose
* Porpora de' giardin, pompa de' prato, I Gemma dì primavera, occhio d'aprile... : These lines are from a poem, L'Adone, written by Marino (1569-1625) himself (III:i58,11.1-2).
Martín Fierro
* Ituzaingó or Ayacucho: Battles (1827 and 1824 respectively) in the wars of independence against Spain.
* Peaches... a young boy... the heads of Unitarians, their beards bloody: This terrible image captures the cruelty and horror of the civil war that racked Argentina in the early nineteenth century, and the brutality with which the Federalists, when they were in power under Rosas, persecuted and terrorized the Unitarians. In other stories the translator has noted that slitting throats was the preferred method of dispatching captured opponents and the wounded of battles; here the opponents are decapitated. Making this all the more horrific is the fact that it was JLB's maternal grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, who as a child witnessed this scene. In JLB: Selected Poems 1923-1967 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 316, the editor quotes Borges (without further citation): "One day, at the age of nine or ten, he [Isidoro Acevedo] walked by the Plata Market. It was in the time of Rosas. Two gaucho teamsters were hawking peaches. He lifted the canvas covering the fruit, and there were the decapitated heads of Unitarians, with blood-stained beards and wide-open eyes. He ran home, climbed up into the grapevine growing in the back patio, and it was only later that night that he could bring himself to tell what he had seen in the morning. In time, he was to see many things during the civil wars, but none ever left so deep an impression on him."
* A man who knew all the words ... metaphors of metal... the shapes of its moon: This is probably Leopoldo Lugones. See the note, above, to the foreword to The Maker, p. 291.
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
* "My Lord Jesus Christ, ... is this, indeed, Thy likeness in such fashion wrought?": Borges is translating Dante, Paradiso, XXXI: 108-109; in English, the lines read as given. Quoted from The Portable Dante, ed. Paolo Milano, Paradiso, trans. Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) (New York: Penguin, 1975 [orig. copyright, 1947]), p. 532.
Everything and Nothing
* Title: In italics here because the story was tided originally in this way by JLB, in English.
Ragnarök
* PedroHenríquez Ureña: Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), originally from the Dominican Republic, lived for years in Buenos Aires and was an early contributor to Sur, the magazine dial Victoria Ocampo founded and that JLB assiduously worked on. It was through Henríquez Ureña, who had lived for a time in Mexico City, dial JLB met another friend, the Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes. Henríquez Ureña and JLB collaborated on die Antología de la literatura argentina(1937), and diey were very close friends.
In Memoriam, J. F. K.
* Avelino Arredondo: The assassin, as the story says, of the president of Uruguay, Juan Idiarte Borda (1844-1897). See the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume The Book of Sand.
Notes to In Praise of Darkness
Foreword
* Ascasubi: Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875) was a prolific, if not always successful, writer of gaucho poetry and prose. (The Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hispano-Americana gives several tides of little magazines begun by Ascasubi that didn't last beyond the first number.) He was a fervid opponent of the Rosas regime and was jailed for his opposition, escaping in 1832 to Uruguay. There and in Paris he produced most of his work.
Pedro Salvadores
* A dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). In Borges, Rosas is variously called "the tyrant" and "the dictator"; as leader of the Federalist party he ruled Argentina under an iron hand for almost two decades, from 1835 to 1852. Thus the "vast shadow," which cast its pall especially over the mostly urban, mostly professional (and generally landowning) members of the Unitarian party, such as, here, Pedro Salvadores. Rosas confiscated lands and property belonging to the Unitarians in order to finance his campaigns and systematically harassed and even assassinated Unitarian party members.
* Battle of Monte Caseros: At this battle, in 1852, Rosas was defeated by forces commanded by Justo José Urquiza, and his tyranny ended.
* Unitarian party: The Unitarian party was a Buenos Aires-based party whose leaders tended to be European-educated liberals who wished to unite Argentina's several regions and economies (the Argentinian Confederation) into a single nation and wished also to unite that new Argentine economy with Europe's, through expanded exports: hence the party's name. The party's color was sky blue; thus the detail, later in the story, of the "sky blue china" in Pedro Salvadores' house.
* They lived ... on Calle Suipacha, not far from the corner of Temple: Thus, in what was at this time a northern suburb of Buenos Aires about a mile north of the Plazade Mayo. This area, later to become the Barrio Norte, was clearly respectable but not yet fashionable (as it was to become after the yellow fever outbreak of 1871 frightened the upper classes out of the area south of the Plaza de Mayo up into the more northern district).
* The tyrant's posse: The Mazorca (or "corn cob," so called to stress its agrarian rather than urban roots), Rosas' private army, or secret police. The Mazorca was beyond the control of the populace, the army, or any other institution, and it systematically terrorized Argentina during the Rosas years.
* Smashed all the sky blue china: The color of the china used in the house is the color symbolizing the Unitarian party (see above, note to p. 336) and denounces Salvadores as a follower.
Notes to Brodie's Report
Foreword
* "In the House of Suddhoo": Borges often drops hints as to where one might look to find clues not only to the story or essay in question but also to other stories or essays; he gives signposts to his own "intertextuality." In this case, the reader who looks at this Kipling story will find that there is a character in it named Bhagwan Dass; the name, and to a degree the character, reappear in "Blue Tigers," in the volume Shakespeare's Memory.
* Hormiga Negra:"The Black Ant,"a gaucho bandit. Borges includes a note on Hormiga Negrain his essay on Martín Fierro:"During the last years of the nineteenth century, Guillermo Hoyo, better known as the 'Black Ant,' a bandit from the department ofSan Nicolás, fought (according to the testimony of Eduardo Gutiérrez) with bolos [stones tied to the ends of rope] and knife" (Obras completas en colaboración[Buenos Aires: Emecé,1979], p.546, trans. A. H.).
* Rosas: Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), tyrannical ruler of Argentina from 1835 to 1852, was in many ways a typical Latin American caudillo. He was the leader of the Federalist party and allied himself with the gauchos against the "city slickers" of Buenos Aires, whom he harassed and even murdered once he came to power. Other appearances of Rosas may be found in "Pedro Salvadores" (In Praise of Darkness) and "The Elderly Lady" (in this volume).
* And I prefer... Here the Obras completas seems to have a textual error; the text reads apto(adjective: "germane, apt, appropriate") when logic would dictate opto(verb: "I prefer, I choose, I opt.").
* Hugo Ramirez Moroni: JLB was fond of putting real people's names into his fictions; of course, he also put "just names" into his fictions. But into his forewords? Nevertheless, the translator has not been able to discover who this person, if person he be, was.
* The golden-pink coat of a certain horse famous in our literature: The reference is to the gauchesco poem "Fausto" by Estanislao del Campo, which was fiercely criticized by Paul Groussac, among others, though praised by Calixto Oyuela ("never charitable with gauchesco writers," in JLB's own words) and others. The color of the hero's horse (it was an overo rosado) came in for a great deal of attack; Rafael Hernández, for instance, said such a color had never been found in a fast horse; it would be, he said, "like finding a three-colored cat." Lugones also said this color would be found only on a horse suited for farm work or running chores. (This information from JLB,"La poesía gauchesca," Discusión[1932].)
The Interloper
* 2 Reyes 1:26: This citation corresponds to what in most English Bibles is the Second Book of Samuel (2 Samuel); the first chapter of the "Second Book of Kings" has only eighteen verses, as the reader will note. In the New Catholic Bible, however, 1 and 2 Samuel are indexed in the Table of Contents asiand 2 Kings, with the King James's 1 and 2 Kings bumped to 3 and 4 Kings. Though the translator's Spanish-language Bible uses the same divisions as the King James, one presumes that JLB was working from a "Catholic Bible" in Spanish. In a conversation with Norman Thomas diGiovanni, Borges insisted that this was a "prettier" name than "Samuel," so this text respects that sentiment. The text in question reads: "I am distressed for thee, my brother: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (See Daniel Balderston, "The 'Fecal Dialectic': Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges," in ¿Entiendes?:Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995]. PP- 29-45, for an intriguing reading of this story and others.)
* Those two criollos: There is no good word or short phrase for the Spanish word criollo. It is a word that indicates race, and so class; it always indicates a white-skinned person (and therefore presumed to be "superior") born in the New World colonies, and generally, though not always, to parents of Spanish descent (another putative mark of superiority). Here, however, clearly that last characteristic does not apply. JLB is saying with this word that the genetic or cultural roots of these men lie in Europe, and that their family's blood has apparently not mixed with black or Indian blood, and that they are fully naturalized as New Worlders and Argentines. The implicit reference to class (which an Argentine would immediately understand) is openly ironic.
* Costa Brava:"A small town in the district of Ramallo, a province of Buenos Aires, not to be confused with the island of the same name in the Paraná River, scene of various battles, including a naval defeat of Garibaldi" (Fishburn and Hughes). Bravo/a means "tough, mean, angry," etc.; in Spanish, therefore, Borges can say the toughs gave Costa Bravaits name, while in translation one can only say they gave the town its reputation.
Unworthy
* The Maldonado: The Maldonado was a stream that formed the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires at the turn of the century; the neighborhood around it, Palermo, was known as a rough part of town, and JLB makes reference to it repeatedly in his work. See the story "Juan Murafia," p. 370, for example. Thus, Fischbein and his family lived on the tough outskirts of the city. See also mention of this area on p. 359, below.
* I had started calling myself Santiago ... but there was nothing I could do about the Fischbein: The terrible thing here, which most Spanish-language readers would immediately perceive, is that the little red-headed Jewish boy has given himself a saint's name: Santiago is "Saint James," and as St. James is the patron saint of Spain, Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor Slayer. The boy's perhaps unwitting self-hatred and clearly conscious attempt to "fit in" are implicitly but most efficiently communicated by JLB in these few words.
* Juan Moreira: Agaucho turned outlaw (1819-1874) who was famous during his lifetime and legendary after death. Like Jesse James and Billy the Kid in the United States, he was seen as a kind of folk hero, handy with (in Moreira's case) a knife, and hunted down and killed by a corrupt police. Like the U. S. outlaws, his fictionalized life, by Eduardo Gutiérrez, was published serially in a widely read magazine, La Patria Argentina, and then dramatized, most famously by José de Podestà. See below, in note to "The Encounter," p. 368).
* Little Sheeny: Fishburn and Hughes gloss this nickname (in Spanish el rusito, literally "Little Russian") as being a "slang term for Ashkenazi Jews ... (as opposed to immigrants from the Middle East, who were known as turcos, 'Turks')." An earlier English translation gave this, therefore, as "sheeny," and I follow that solution. The slang used in Buenos Aires for ethnic groups was (and is) of course different from that of the English-speaking world, which leads to a barber of Italian extraction being called, strange to our ears, a gringo in the original Spanish version of the story "Juan Muraña" in this volume.
* Calle Junín: In Buenos Aires, running from the Plaza del Once to the prosperous northern district of the city; during the early years of the century, a stretch of Junín near the center of the city was the brothel district.
* Lunfardo: For an explanation of this supposed "thieves' jargon," see the Foreword to this volume, p. 347.
The Story from Rosendo Juárez
* The corner of Bolivar and Venezuela: Now in the center of the city, near the Plaza de Mayo, and about two blocks from the National Library, where Borges was the director. Thus the narrator ("Borges") is entering a place he would probably have been known to frequent (in "Guayaquil," the narrator says that "everyone knows" that he lives on Calle Chile, which also is but a block or so distant); the impression the man gives, of having been sitting at the table a good while, reinforces the impression that he'd been waiting for"Borges."But this area, some six blocks south of Rivadavia, the street "where the Southside began," also marks more or less the northern boundary of the neighborhood known as San Telmo, where Rosendo Juárez says he himself lives.
* His neck scarf: Here Rosendo Juárez is wearing the tough guy's equivalent of a tie, the chalina, a scarf worn much like an ascot, doubled over, the jacket buttoned up tight to make a large "bloom" under the chin. This garb marks a certain "type" of character.
* "You've put the story in a novel": Here "the man sitting at the table,"Rosendo Juárez, is referring to what was once perhaps JLB's most famous story, "Man on Pink Corner," in A Universal History of Iniquity, q.v., though he calls it a novel rather than a story.
* Neighborhood of the Maldonado: The Maldonado was the creek marking the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires around the turn of the century; Rosendo Juárez"words about the creek are true and mark the story as being told many years after the fact. The neighborhood itself would have been Palermo.
* Calle Cabrera: In Palermo, a street in a rough neighborhood not far from the center of the city.
* A kid in black that wrote poems: Probably Evaristo Carriego, JLB's neighbor in Palermo who was the first to make poetry about the "riffraff "—the knife fighters and petty toughs—of the slums. JLB wrote a volume of essays dedicated to Carriego.
* Moreira: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Chacarita: one of the city's two large cemeteries; La Recoleta was where the elite buried their dead, so Chacarita was the graveyard of the "commoners."
* San Telmo: One of the city's oldest districts, it was a famously rough neighborhood by the time of the story's telling. Fishburn and Hughes associate it with a popular song that boasts of its "fighting spirit" and note that the song would have given "an ironic twist to the last sentence of the story."
The Encounter
* Lunfardo: For an explanation of this supposed "thieves' jargon," see the Foreword to this volume, p. 347.
* One of those houses on Calle Junín: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Moreira: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra: Unlike the real-life Juan Moreira, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra were fictional gauchos. Martín Fierrois the hero of the famous poem of the same name by José Hernández; the poem is centrally important in Argentine literature and often figures in JLB's work, as a reference, as a subject of meditation in essays, or rewritten (in "The End," in the volume Fictions, q.v.); his headstrong bravery and antiauthoritarianism are perhaps the traits that were most approved by the "cult of the gaucho" to which JLB alludes here. Don Segundo Sombra is the protagonist of a novel by Ricardo Gúiraldes; for this novel, see the note, below, to "The Gospel According to Mark," p. 399. It is interesting that JLB notes that the model for the gaucho shifts from a real-life person to fictional characters, perhaps to indicate that the true gaucho has faded from the Argentine scene and that (in a common Borges trope) all that's left is the memory of the gaucho.
* The Podestás and the Gutierrezes: The Podestà family were circus actors; in 1884, some ten years after the outlaw gaucho Juan Moreira's death, Juande Podestà put on a pantomime version of the life of Moreira."Two years later," Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he added extracts from the novel [by Eduardo Gutiérrez]to his performance." The plays were extraordinarily successful. Eduardo Gutiérrez was a prolific and relatively successful, if none too "literary," novelist whose potboilers were published serially in various Argentine magazines. His Juan Moreira, however, brought himself and Moreira great fame, and (in the words of the Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hisf ano-Americana)"created the stereotype of the heroic gaucho."The dictionary goes on to say that"Borges claims that Gutiérrezis much superior to Fenimore Cooper."
Juan Muraña
* Palermo: A district in Buenos Aires, populated originally by the Italians who immigrated to Argentina in the nineteenth century. Trapani's name marks him as a "native" of that quarter, while Borges and his family moved there probably in search of a less expensive place to live than the central district where they had been living; Borges always mentioned the "shabby genteel" people who lived in that "shabby genteel" neighborhood (Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 48-55).
* Juan Muraña: As noted in "The Encounter," at one point Juan Moreira was the very model of the gaucho and therefore of a certain kind of swaggering masculinity; Juan Muraña's name so closely resembles Moreira's that one suspects that JLB is trading on it to create the shade that so literarily haunts this story. In the dream, especially, Muraña has the look of the gaucho:dressed all in black, with long hair and mustache, etc. Nor, one suspects, is it pure coincidence that the story"Juan Muraña"immediately follows the story in which Juan Moreira's ghost plays such a large part.
* Around the time of the Centennial: The Centennial of the Argentine Declaration of Independence, signed 1810, so the story takes place around 1910.
* A man named Luchessi: Luchessi's name marks him too as a "native" of Palermo, though he has now moved into a district in southern Buenos Aires, near the bustling (if "somewhat dilapidated" [Fishburn and Hughes]) Plaza de la Constitución and its railway station.
* Barracas: Fishburn and Hughes gloss this as a "working-class district in southern Buenos Aires near La Boca and Constitución [see note just above] and bordering the Riachuelo."
* Wop: See note to "Little Sheeny," p. 355, above. In Spanish, gringo was the word used to refer to Italian immigrants; see A Note on the Translation.
* Calle Thames: In Palermo.
The Elderly Lady
* Wars of independence: For the independence not only of Argentina but of the entire continent. During this period there were many famous generals and leaders, many named in the first pages of this story. Thus Rubiois associated with the grand forces of continental self-determination that battled in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.
* Chacabuco, Cancha Rayada, Maipú, Arequipa: Chacabuco (Chile,1817): The Army of the Andes under General José San Martín fought the Spanish royalist forces under General Marcò del Pont and won. Cancha Rayada (Chile, March 1818): San Martin's army was defeated by the royalists and independence was now very uncertain. Maipú(Chile, April 1818): San Martin's army decisively defeated the royalist forces and secured the independence of Chile. Arequipa ( Peru, 1825): General Antonio José de Sucre, leading Bolivar's army, accepted Spain's surrender of the city after a siege; this, after the Battle of Ayacucho (see below), meant the full independence of Peru.
* He and José de Olavarría exchanged swords: Olavarría (1801-1845) was an Argentine military leader who fought at the battles just mentioned and perhaps at the great Battle of Ayacucho, which determined the full independence of Peru. Exchanging swords was a "romantic custom among generals, and Borges recalls that his own grandfather had exchanged swords with Gen. Mansilla on the eve of a battle" (Fishburn and Hughes). Olavarría and Lavalle (see below) are probably the models for Rubio.
* The famous battle of Cerro Alto ... Cerro Bermejo: However famous this battle may be, I confess I have not been able to locate it. I hope (for the good name of the humble research that has gone into these notes) that this is an example of Borges' famous put-ons (see A Note on the Translation). I feel that it may well be; this is the bird's-eye statement given in the Penguin History of Latin America (Edwin Williamson, New York/London: Penguin, 1992), p. 228, of the years 1823-1824 as they apply to Bolivar (who is mentioned as winning this battle): "Arriving in Peru in September 1823, Bolivar began to prepare for the final offensive against the royalists. By the middle of 1824 he launched his campaign, winning an important battle at Junin, which opened to him the road to Lima, the ultimate prize. In December, while Bolivar was in Lima, Marshal Sucre defeated Viceroy De la Serna's army at the battle of Ayacucho. Spanish power in America had been decisively broken and the Indies were at last free." Thus, it appears that in April of 1823 Bolivar was planning battles, not fighting them. If it is a real battle, I ask a kind reader to inform me of the date and location so that future editions, should there be any, may profit from the knowledge.
* Ayacucho: In Peru between Lima and Cuzco (1824). Here Sucre's Peruvian forces decisively defeated the Spanish royalists.
* Ituzaingó: In the province of Corrientes (1827). Here the Argentine and Uruguayan forces defeated the Brazilians.
* Carlos Maria Alvear: Alvear (1789-1852) had led the Argentine revolutionary forces against the Spanish forces in Montevideo in 1814 and defeated them. When he conspired against the Unitarian government, however, he was forced into exile in Uruguay, but was recalled from exile to lead the republican army of Argentina against the Brazilians. He defeated the Brazilians at Ituzaingó, ending the war. He was a diplomat for the Rosas government.
* Rosas: Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), tyrannical ruler of Argentina from 1835 to 1852. See note to Foreword, p. 345.
* Rubio was a Lavalle man: Juan Galo Lavalle (1797-1841), chosen to lead the Unitarians against the Federalists under Rosas, whom Lavalle defeated in 1828. Lavalle was defeated in turn by Rosas in 1829; then "after ten years in Montevideo he returned to lead the Unitarians in another attempt to oust Rosas" (Fishburn and Hughes). Thus he spent his life defending the policies and the principles of the Buenos Aires political party against those of the gaucho party headed by Rosas.
* The montonero insurgents: These were gaucho guerrillas who fought under their local caudillo against the Buenos Aires-based Unitarian forces. While it is claimed that they would have had no particular political leanings, just a sense of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of the Unitarians, the effect would have been that they were in alliance with the Federalists, led by Rosas, etc.
* Oribe's White army: The White party, or Blancos, was "a Uruguayan political party founded by the followers of Oribe,... [consisting] of rich landowners who supported the Federalist policy of Rosas in Buenos Aires___The Blancos are now known
as the Nationalists and represent the conservative classes" (Fishburn and Hughes). Manuel Oribe (1792-1856) was a hero of the Wars of Independence and fought against the Brazilian invasion of Uruguay. He served as minister of war and the navy under Rivera; then, seeking the presidency for himself, he sought the support of Rosas. Together they attacked Montevideo in a siege that lasted eight days. (This information, Fishburn and Hughes). See also note to p. 386, "Battle of Manantiales,"in the story "The Other Duel."
* The tyrant: Rosas (see various notes above).
* Pavónand Cepeda: Cepeda (Argentina, 1859) and Pavón (Argentina, 1861) were battles between the Confederation forces under Urquiza and the Buenos Aires-based Porteño forces (basically Unitarian) under Mitre, fought to determine whether Buenos Aires would join the Argentine Confederation or would retain its autonomy. Buenos Aires lost at Cepeda but won at Pavón, enabling Mitre to renegotiate the terms of association between the two entities, with more favorable conditions for Buenos Aires.
* Yellow fever epidemic: 1870-1871.
* Married ... one Saavedra, who was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance: Fishburn and Hughes tell us that "employment in the Ministry of Finance is considered prestigious, and consistent with the status of a member of an old and well-established family." They tie "Saavedra" to Corneliode Saavedra, a leader in the first criollo government of Argentina, in 1810, having deposed the Spanish viceroy. This is a name, then, that would have had resonances among the Argentines similar to a Jefferson, Adams, or Marshall among the Americans, even if the person were not directly mentioned as being associated with one of the founding families. "Saavedra" will also invariably remind the Spanish-language reader of Miguel de Cervantes, whose second (maternal) surname was Saavedra.
* She still abominated Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza: Rosas has appeared in these notes several times. Here he is the archenemy not only of the Buenos Aires Unitarians but of the family as well, because he has confiscated their property and condemned them to "shabby gentility," as Borges would have put it. José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) fought against the Spaniards for the liberation of the Americas but was allied with the gauchos and the Federalist party against the Unitarians; in 1815 he defeated the Buenos Aires forces but was later himself defeated by help from Brazil. Justo José Urquiza (1801-1870) was president of the Argentinian Confederation from 1854 to 1860, having long supported the Federalists (and Rosas) against the Unitarians. As a military leader he often fought against the Unitarians, and often defeated them. In addition, he was governor (and caudillo) of Entre Ríos province.
* Easterners instead of Uruguayans: Before Uruguay became a country in 1828, it was a Spanish colony which, because it lay east of the Uruguay River, was called the Banda Oriental ("eastern shore"). (The Uruguay meets the Paranáto create the huge estuary system called the Río de la Plata, or River Plate; Montevideo is on the eastern bank of this river, Buenos Aires on the west.) La Banda Oriental is an old-fashioned name for the country, then, and orientales("Easterners") is the equally old-fashioned name for those who live or were born there. Only the truly "elderly" have a right to use this word.
* Plaza del Once: Pronounced óhn-say, not wunce. This is generally called Plaza Once, but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words make it advisable, the translator thinks, to modify the name slightly in order to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square.
* Barracas: Once a district virtually in the country, inhabited by the city's elite, now a "working-class district" in southern Buenos Aires, near the Plaza Constitución (Fishburn and Hughes).
* Sra. Figueroa's car and driver. Perhaps the Clara Glencairn de Figueroa of the next story in this volume, "The Duel"; certainly the social sphere in which these two Sras. Figueroa move is the same.
* Benzoin: Probably used, much as we use aromatic preparations today, to clear the nasal passages and give a certain air of health to the elderly. An aromatic preparation called alcoholado(alcohol and bay leaves, basically) is much used in Latin America as a kind of cureall for headaches and various aches and pains and for "refreshing" the head and skin; one presumes this "benzoin" was used similarly.
* One of Rosas' posses: The Mazorca ("corncob," so called [or so folk etymology has it] for the Federalist party's agrarian ties), a private secret police force-c«m-army employed by Rosas to intimidate and terrorize the Unitarians after his rise to Federalist power. The Mazorcas beat and murdered many people, and so the elderly lady is right to have been shocked and frightened. (See also the story "Pedro Salvadores"in In Praise of Darkness.)
The Duel
* Clara Glencairn de Figueroa: Clara's name is given here as Christian name + patronymic or family (father's) name + de indicating "belonging to" or, less patriarchally, "married to" + the husband's last name. This indication of a character by full name, including married name, underscores Clara's equivocal position in life and in the world of art that she aspires to: a woman of some (limited) talent in her own right, with a "career" or at least a calling in which she is entitled to personal respect, versus the "wife of the ambassador." This tension is noted a couple of pages later, when "Mrs." Figueroa, having won a prize, now wants to return to Cartagena "in her own right," not as the ambassador's wife that she had been when she had lived there before. It is hard for the English reader, with our different system of naming, to perceive the subtleties of JLB's use of the conventions of naming in Hispanic cultures.
* Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur: Lafinur (1797-1824), a great-uncle of Borges', was the holder of the chair of philosophy "at the newly-formed Colegio de la Unión del Sud" (Fishburnand Hughes) and thus a "personage."
* Colonel Pascual Pringles: Pringles (1795-1831) was a distinguished Unitarian military leader from the province of San Luis. "[Rather than surrender his sword to the enemy" in defeat, Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he broke it and threw himself into the river."
* The solid works of certain nineteenth-century Genoese bricklayers: This snide comment refers to the Italian immigrant laborers and construction foremen who built those "old houses of Buenos Aires" that Marta paints; she is influenced, that is, not by an Italian school of painting (which would be acceptable, as "European" was good; see the first line of the next paragraph in the text) but by Italian immigrant (and therefore, in Buenos Aires society hierarchy, "undesirable" or "inferior") artisans. Note in "The Elderly Lady" the narrator's mild bigotry in the statement that one of the daughters married a "Sr. Molinari, who though of Italian surname was a professor of Latin and a very well-educated man." The social lines between the old criollo families (descendants of European, especially Spanish, colonists), the newer immigrant families, those with black or Indian blood, etc. were clear, especially in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.
* Mrs. Figueroa: Here, clear in the Spanish, though difficult to convey in the English, the judge slights Clara Glencairn de Figueroa by referring to her by her married name (Figueroa's wife) rather than by her "personal" and "professional" name, Clara Glencairn. She is looked down on, as the story subtly shows, for her social standing, which is in contrast to the vie bohème that she would like to think she had lived and the reputation as a painter she would like to think she had earned for herself. Note "Clara Glencairn" throughout the paragraph on p. 383, for the more "professional" or "personally respectful" mode of naming, and note the way the story swings between the two modes as one or another of Clara's "statuses" is being emphasized.
The Other Duel
* Adrogué:In the early years of the century, a town south of Buenos Aires (now simply a suburb or enclave of the city) where Borges and his family often spent vacations; a place of great nostalgia for Borges.
* Battle of Manantiales: In Uruguay. For many years (ca. i837-ca. 1886) Uruguay was torn by rivalry and armed conflicts between the Blancos (the conservative White party) led by, among others, Manuel Oribe and Timoteo Aparicio (see below), and the Colorados (the more liberal Red party) led by Venancio Flores and Lorenzo Baiile. Manantiales (1871) marked the defeat of Aparicio's Blancos by the Colorado sunder Batlle. Once Cardoso and Silveira are seen joining up with Aparicio's forces, this understated sentence tells the Argentine or Uruguayan reader (or any other Latin American reader familiar, through little more than high school history classes, with the history of the Southern Cone—these dates and places are the very stuff of Latin American history) that their end was fated to be bloody.
* Cerro Largo: A frontier area in northeast Uruguay, near the Brazilian border. Aparicio had to recruit from all over the countryside, as he was faced by the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and the Uruguayan Colorado government.
* Thirty-three: This in homage to the tiny band of thirty-three soldiers who in 1825 crossed the Uruguay River along with Juan Antonio Lavalleja and Manuel Oribein order to galvanize the Uruguayans to rise up against the Brazilians who at that time governed them. The flag of the Uruguayan rebellion against Brazil carried the motto Libertad o Muerte("Liberty or Death"). Thus Silveira asserts himself as a tough, independent, and yet "patriotic"gaucho.
* Aparicio's revolution: See the note to p. 386, above.
* Montoneros:The montoneros were gaucho (Blanco, or White, party) forces, something like quasi-independent armies, organized under local leaders to fight the Unitarians (the Colorados, or Red party) during the civil wars that followed the wars of independence.
* White badges: To identify them with the Blancos, as opposed to the Colorados (Red party). The armies would have been somewhat ragtag groups, so these badges (or sometimes hatbands) would have been virtually the only way to distinguish ally from enemy in the pitched battles of the civil war.
* Cut anybody's throat: Here and in many other places in Borges, the slashing of opponents' throats is presented in the most matter-of-fact way. It was a custom of armies on the move not to take prisoners; what would they do with them? So as a matter of course, and following the logic of this type of warfare (however "barbaric" it may seem to us today), losers of battles were summarily executed in this way.
Guayaquil
* Guayaquil: The name of this city in Ecuador would evoke for the Latin American reader one of the most momentous turns in the wars of independence, since it was here that Generals Simón Bolívar and José San Martín met to decide on a strategy for the final expulsion of the Spaniards from Peru. After this meeting, San Martin left his armies under the command of Bolivar, who went on to defeat the Spaniards, but there is no record of what occurred at the meeting or of the reasons that led San Martin to retire from the command of his own army and leave the glory NOTES TO THE FICTIONS of liberation to Bolivar. A long historical controversy has been waged over the possible reasons, which the story briefly recounts. Clearly, the "contest of wills" thought by some to have occurred between the two generals is reflected in the contest of wills between the two modern historians. For a fuller (and very comprehensible) summary of this event and the historiographie controversy surrounding it, see Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges(Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 115-131. In this chapter Balderston also discusses Borges' equating of history with fiction, providing us another important way of reading the story. See also, for a brief historical summary, The Penguin History of Latin America (Edwin Williams, New York/ London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 227-228 and passim in that chapter.
* Gen. José de San Martín: As the note just above indicates, San Martin (1778-1850), an Argentine, was one of the two most important generals of the wars of independence, the other being Simón Bolivar, a Venezuelan. This story is subtly written from the Argentine point of view, because it deals with the reasons—psychological, perhaps, or perhaps military, or, indeed, perhaps other—for which San Martin, after winning extraordinary battles in his own country and in Peru (where he came to be called Protector of Peru), turned his entire army over to Bolivar so that Bolivar could go on to win the independence of the continent from Spain. The enigma of San Martin is one that absorbed the Argentine historical mind for decades, and perhaps still does, so any letters that might have even the slightest, or the most self-serving (if Argentines will forgive me that possible slur on the general's psyche), explanation for his actions would be of supreme importance to Argentine history. This story, then, is filled with those pulls and tugs between one sort of (or nationality of) history and another, one sort of "rationale" and another. Fishburn and Hughes note that the Masonic lodge mentioned in the story (p- 395) is the Logia Lautaro, of which San Martin was indeed a member. Masonic lodges were famed as centers of progressive, not to say revolutionary, thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern Freemasonry was founded in the seventeenth century.
* Calle Chile: It is Fishburn and Hughes's contention that the physical, geographical location of this street is not really important here, though they give that location as "in the southern part of Buenos Aires,... some ten blocks from Plaza Constitución"; their interesting view of this street's mention here is, rather, that it is a symbolic name, linking JLB (that library he had inhabited [see"Juan Muraña"in this volume], the house, and perhaps some of the objets de la gloire that JLB had inherited from his grandfather and other members of his family) with the narrator of "Guayaquil": "The narrator lives in a street called Chile, Borges lived in a street called Maipú and both names are associated in the Argentine mind, since San Martin's great victory in Chile was the battle of Maipú."
* Baltasar Espinosa: The Spanish reader will sooner or later associate the young man's surname, Espinosa ("thorny") with the Christian "crown of thorns" evoked at the end of this story.
* Ramos Mejia: "A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony; now an industrial suburb" (Fishburn and Hughes).
* A couple of chapters of [Don Segundo Sombra]: The next sentence is perhaps not altogether opaque, but both its sense and its humor are clearer if the reader knows the novel in question. Don Segundo Sombra deals with the life ofa gaucho (considerably romanticized by nostalgia) and the customs of life on the pampas. Therefore, Gutre père sees nothing in it for him; indeed, the gauchesco novel was an urban form, a manifestation perhaps of what Marie Antoinette's critics were wont to call nostalgie de la boue, or so "The Gospel According to Mark" would seem to imply. JLB himself makes reference to this "urban nostalgia" in the story titled "The Duel," above, on p. 384.
Brodie's Report
* Qzr: The English reader will not, probably, be able to perceive the fine irony here. Brodie has said that these barbarous people do not have vowels, so he will call them Yahoos. He then gives a few words in their language. Here, the word for "citadel," qzr, is the Spanish word for citadel, alcázar, with the vowels removed. But the Spanish derives from the Arabic, which does not have vowels; the vowels are sometimes marked, sometimes not; thus, qzr is a transliteration of a word that any Spanish speaker would recognize as being fully and legitimately Arabic. Thus the Yahoos are, or might be, Arabs. Here Borges'"traveler's satire" is acute: one can find "barbarism" even in the most refined and advanced of societies.
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