Borges on Writing [book review]
Like many other Anglophone readers, I assumed for a long time that Borges wrote primarily fiction, which meant that I had been overlooking roughly half of his writing. This book of essays (Jorge Luis Borges On Writing, London:Penguin 2010), chosen and introduced by the celebrated translator Suzanne Jill Levine, is a glimpse of what I had been missing, but more particularly a recognition of Borges as a writer who lived with a rare, perhaps unique joy and trust in writing. This is a voice perfectly assured of writing’s capacity to transmit the most subtle, ephemeral of human experiences and more, to continue expanding that experience in ways we cannot yet guess. The conviction appears so strong, so self-evident, that he can calmly and convincingly expose quite a few received wisdoms (e.g. that an “original” text is always superior to any translation).
Among the most remarkable observations, at least from my standpoint, was that readers are among the forces that shape and limit what can be read or written at any given moment. Borges expresses disappointment in rising numbers of readers who are content to adopt the values of others in their reading, rather than to take their own awareness and experience as a point of reference and let themselves be affected by whatever harmonies or dissonances the writing may produce. A whole section of the book is made up of very short, very appreciative essays on individual critics (some very familiar, e.g. Virginia Woolf), a quiet, yet complete rejection of any hasty assumption that critical writing is less than, or even radically different from “creative” writing, or that reading cannot be creative.
The essays in the section on translation approach the topic variously from the standpoint of someone who translates, whose work is translated, or who reads translations — and any of these using various combinations of source and target languages (Borges was knowledgeable in French, German and English, as well as Spanish literature). He seems always more willing to see a spectrum of possible positions than any kind of confrontation between points of view. He outlines range of possibilities stretching from, say, translations that are adamant about “fidelity” to a given text at one end, and translations loyal to the “voice” of a given author on the other. Or he anchors one end of the continuum on texts so polished and perfect in the original language as to almost inevitably look dishevelled in another, and contrasts this with a text that may be clumsier in the original (Don Quixote is his prime example here), but that gives its characters and story such strength as to survive and be loveable no matter what translational indignities it may suffer.
Finally, one of the last essays addressed an old suspicion of mine that we tend to unfairly and unwisely trivialise the force of “magic” these days. Rather than confronting the matter directly, though, Borges leads a reader gently through the experience of reading a narrative — words in a language, lines on a page, accessible, familiar stuff — that nevertheless reliably makes a new time and space become real for a reader. It isn’t logical; it isn’t the stuff or mystery in any religious sense, either. It’s magic. The essay “Narration Art and Magic” was singled out in the introduction as one of Borges’s best-known and admired. Small wonder, when it names such a common, everyday experience, gives it historical depth or at least a sense of its age, and leaves the question of its positive or negative implications undecided…all in a single word!
