THIS - somacles.files.wordpress.com · THIS CRAFT OF VERSE JORGE LUIS BORGES Edited by Calin-Andrei...

T H I S

C R A F T O F

V E R S E

The

Charles Eliot

Norton Lectures

–

T H I S

C R A F T O F

V E R S E

J O R G E L U I S B O R G E SEdited by C�alin-Andrei Mih�ailescu

H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S � 2000

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeAll rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Frontispiece: Borges lecturing at Harvard University, . Photo byChristopher S. Johnson; courtesy of Harvard Magazine.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBorges, Jorge Luis, –

This craft of verse / Jorge Luis Borges;edited by C�alin-Andrei Mih�ailescu.

p. cm.—(The Charles Eliot Norton lectures; –)ISBN --- (alk. paper)

. Poetry—History and criticism. I. Mih �ailescu, C�alin-Andrei, –II. Title. III. Series.

PN.B

.—dc

-

C O N T E N T S

1 The Riddle of Poetry

2 The Metaphor

3 The Telling of the Tale

4 Word-Music and Translation

5 Thought and Poetry

6 A Poet’s Creed

Notes

“Of This and That Versatile Craft”by C�alin-Andrei Mih�ailescu

Index

T H E

R I D D L E O F

P O E T R Y

At the outset, I would like to give you fair warning

of what to expect—or rather, of what not to ex-pect—from me. I ~nd that I have made a slip in thevery title of my ~rst lecture. The title is, if we are notmistaken, “The Riddle of Poetry,” and the stress ofcourse is on the ~rst word, “riddle.” So you may thinkthe riddle is all-important. Or, what might be stillworse, you may think I have deluded myself intobelieving that I have somehow discovered the truereading of the riddle. The truth is that I have no reve-lations to offer. I have spent my life reading, analyz-ing, writing (or trying my hand at writing), andenjoying. I found the last to be the most importantthing of all. “Drinking in” poetry, I have come to a

T H E R I D D L E O F P O E T R Y

2

~nal conclusion about it. Indeed, every time I am

faced with a blank page, I feel that I have to redis-

cover literature for myself. But the past is of no avail

whatever to me. So, as I have said, I have only my per-

plexities to offer you. I am nearing seventy. I have

given the major part of my life to literature, and I can

offer you only doubts.The great English writer and dreamer Thomas De

Quincey wrote—in some of the thousands of pages ofhis fourteen volumes—that to discover a new problemwas quite as important as discovering the solution toan old one. But I cannot even offer you that; I can offeryou only time-honored perplexities. And yet, whyneed I worry about this? What is a history of philoso-phy, but a history of the perplexities of the Hindus, ofthe Chinese, of the Greeks, of the Schoolmen, ofBishop Berkeley, of Hume, of Schopenhauer, and soon? I merely wish to share those perplexities with you.

Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, Ihave had an uncomfortable feeling that I was readingthe works of astronomers who never looked at thestars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as ifpoetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passionand a joy. For example, I have read with great respectBenedetto Croce’s book on aesthetics, and I have been


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handed the de~nition that poetry and language are an“expression.” Now, if we think of an expression ofsomething, then we land back at the old problem ofform and matter; and if we think about the expressionof nothing in particular, that gives us really nothing. Sowe respectfully receive that de~nition, and then we goon to something else. We go on to poetry; we go on tolife. And life is, I am sure, made of poetry. Poetry is notalien—poetry is, as we shall see, lurking round the cor-ner. It may spring on us at any moment.

Now, we are apt to fall into a common confusion.We think, for example, that if we study Homer, or theDivine Comedy, or Fray Luis de León, or Macbeth, weare studying poetry. But books are only occasions forpoetry.

I think Emerson wrote somewhere that a library isa kind of magic cavern which is full of dead men. Andthose dead men can be reborn, can be brought to lifewhen you open their pages.

Speaking about Bishop Berkeley (who, may I re-mind you, was a prophet of the greatness of America),I remember he wrote that the taste of the apple is nei-ther in the apple itself—the apple cannot taste it-self—nor in the mouth of the eater. It requires acontact between them. The same thing happens to a

book or to a collection of books, to a library. For whatis a book in itself? A book is a physical object in aworld of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols.And then the right reader comes along, and thewords—or rather the poetry behind the words, forthe words themselves are mere symbols—spring tolife, and we have a resurrection of the word.

I am reminded now of a poem you all know by heart;but you will never have noticed, perhaps, how strangeit is. For perfect things in poetry do not seem strange;they seem inevitable. And so we hardly thank thewriter for his pains. I am thinking of a sonnet writtenmore than a hundred years ago by a young man in Lon-don (in Hampstead, I think), a young man who died oflung disease, John Keats, and of his famous and per-haps hackneyed sonnet “On First Looking into Chap-man’s Homer.” What is strange about that poem—andI thought of this only three or four days ago, when Iwas pondering this lecture—is the fact that it is a poemwritten about the poetic experience itself. You know itby heart, yet I would like you to hear once more thesurge and thunder of its ~nal lines,

Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes


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He stared at the Paci~c—and all his menlook’d at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Here we have the poetic experience itself. We haveGeorge Chapman, the friend and rival of Shake-speare, being dead and suddenly coming to life whenJohn Keats read his Iliad or his Odyssey. I think it wasof George Chapman (but I cannot be sure, as I am nota Shakespearean scholar) that Shakespeare was think-ing when he wrote: “Was it the proud full sail of hisgreat verse, / Bound for the prize of all too preciousyou?”1

There is a word that seems to me very important:“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” This“~rst” may, I think, prove most helpful to us. At thevery moment I was going over those mighty lines ofKeats’s, I was thinking that perhaps I was only beingloyal to my memory. Perhaps the real thrill I got out ofthe verses by Keats lay in that distant moment of mychildhood in Buenos Aires when I ~rst heard my fatherreading them aloud. And when the fact that poetry,language, was not only a medium for communicationbut could also be a passion and a joy—when this wasrevealed to me, I do not think I understood the words,but I felt that something was happening to me. It was


5

Exam

Cop

y

happening not to my mere intelligence but to mywhole being, to my _esh and blood.

Going back to the words “On First Looking intoChapman’s Homer,” I wonder if John Keats felt thatthrill after he had gone through the many books ofthe Iliad and the Odyssey. I think the ~rst reading of apoem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselvesinto the belief that the sensation, the impression, is re-peated. But, as I say, it may be mere loyalty, a meretrick of the memory, a mere confusion between ourpassion and the passion we once felt. Thus, it mightbe said that poetry is a new experience every time.Every time I read a poem, the experience happens tooccur. And that is poetry.

I read once that the American painter Whistler wasin a café in Paris, and people were discussing the wayin which heredity, the environment, the political stateof the times, and so on in_uence the artist. And thenWhistler said, “Art happens.” That is to say, there issomething mysterious about art. I would like to takehis words in a new sense. I shall say: Art happens every

time we read a poem. Now, this may seem to clearaway the time-honored notion of the classics, the ideaof everlasting books, of books where one may always~nd beauty. But I hope I am mistaken here.


6

Perhaps I may give a brief survey of the history ofbooks. So far as I can remember, the Greeks had nogreat use for books. It is a fact, indeed, that most ofthe great teachers of mankind have been not writersbut speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates,the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken ofSocrates, I would like to say something about Plato. Iremember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dra-matist who invented Socrates, even as the four evan-gelists were the dramatists who invented Jesus. Thismay be going too far, but there is a certain truth in it.In one of the dialogues of Plato, he speaks aboutbooks in a rather disparaging way: “What is a book?A book seems, like a picture, to be a living being; andyet if we ask it something, it does not answer. Then wesee that it is dead.”2 In order to make the book into aliving thing, he invented—happily for us—the Pla-tonic dialogue, which forestalls the reader’s doubtsand questions.

But we might say also that Plato was wistful aboutSocrates. After Socrates’ death, he would say to him-self, “Now, what would Socrates have said about thisparticular doubt of mine?” And then, in order to hearonce again the voice of the master he loved, he wrotethe dialogues. In some of these dialogues, Socrates


7

stands for the truth. In others, Plato has dramatized hismany moods. And some of those dialogues come to noconclusion whatever, because Plato was thinking as hewrote them; he did not know the last page when hewrote the ~rst. He was letting his mind wander, andhe was dramatizing that mind into many people. Isuppose his chief aim was the illusion that, despite thefact that Socrates had drunk the hemlock, Socrateswas still with him. I feel this to be true because I havehad many masters in my life. I am proud to be a disci-ple—a good disciple, I hope. And when I think of myfather, when I think of the great Jewish-Spanish authorRafael Cansinos-Asséns,3 when I think of MacedonioFernández,4 I would also like to hear their voices. Andsometimes I train my voice into a trick of imitatingtheir voices, in order that I may think as they wouldhave thought. They are always around me.

There is another sentence, in one of the Fathers ofthe Church. He said that it was as dangerous to puta book into the hands of an ignorant man as to put asword into the hands of children. So books, to the an-cients, were mere makeshifts. In one of his many let-ters, Seneca wrote against large libraries; and longafterwards, Schopenhauer wrote that many peoplemistook the buying of a book for the buying of the


8

contents of the book. Sometimes, looking at the manybooks I have at home, I feel I shall die before I cometo the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptationof buying new books. Whenever I walk into a book-store and ~nd a book on one of my hobbies—for ex-ample, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say tomyself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I al-ready have a copy at home.”

After the ancients, from the East there came a dif-ferent idea of the book. There came the idea of HolyWrit, of books written by the Holy Ghost; there cameKorans, Bibles, and so on. Following the example ofSpengler in his Untergang des Abendlandes—The De-

cline of the West—I would like to take the Koran as anexample. If I am not mistaken, Muslim theologiansthink of it as being prior to the creation of the word.The Koran is written in Arabic, yet Muslims think ofit as being prior to the language. Indeed, I have readthat they think of the Koran not as a work of God butas an attribute of God, even as His justice, His mercy,and His whole wisdom are.

And thus there came into Europe the idea of HolyWrit—an idea that is, I think, not wholly mistaken.Bernard Shaw (to whom I am always going back) wasasked once whether he really thought the Bible was


9

the work of the Holy Ghost. And he said, “I think theHoly Ghost has written not only the Bible, but allbooks.” This is rather hard on the Holy Ghost, ofcourse—but all books are worth reading, I suppose.This, I think, is what Homer meant when he spoke tothe muse. And this is what the Hebrews and whatMilton meant when they talked of the Holy Ghostwhose temple is the upright and pure heart of men.And in our less beautiful mythology, we speak of the“subliminal self,” of the “subconscious.” Of course,these words are rather uncouth when we comparethem to the muses or to the Holy Ghost. Still, we haveto put up with the mythology of our time. For thewords mean essentially the same thing.

We come now to the notion of the “classics.” Imust confess that I think a book is really not an im-mortal object to be picked up and duly worshiped,but rather an occasion for beauty. And it has to be so,for language is shifting all the time. I am very fond ofetymologies and would like to recall to you (for I amsure you know much more about these things than Ido) some rather curious etymologies.

For example, we have in English the verb “totease”—a mischievous word. It means a kind of joke.Yet in Old English tesan meant “to wound with a


10

sword,” even as in French navrer meant “to thrust asword through somebody.” Then, to take a differentOld English word, þreat, you may ~nd out from thevery ~rst verses of Beowulf that it meant “an angrycrowd”—that is to say, the cause of the “threat.” Andthus we might go on endlessly.

But now let us consider some particular verses. Itake my examples from English, since I have a partic-ular love for English literature—though my knowl-edge of it is, of course, limited. There are cases wherepoetry creates itself. For example, I don’t think thewords “quietus” and “bodkin” are especially beauti-ful; indeed, I would say they are rather uncouth. Butif we think of “When he himself might his quietusmake / With a bare bodkin,” we are reminded of thegreat speech by Hamlet.5 And thus the context cre-ates poetry for those words—words that no onewould ever dare to use nowadays, because they wouldbe mere quotations.

Then there are other examples, and perhaps sim-pler ones. Let us take the title of one of the most fa-mous books in the world, Historia del ingenioso

hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. The word hidalgo

has today a peculiar dignity all its own, yet when Cer-vantes wrote it, the word hidalgo meant “a country


11

gentleman.” As for the name “Quixote,” it was meantto be a rather ridiculous word, like the names of manyof the characters in Dickens: Pickwick, Swiveller,Chuzzlewit, Twist, Squears, Quilp, and so on. Andthen you have “de la Mancha,” which now sounds no-ble in Castilian to us, but when Cervantes wrote itdown, he intended it to sound perhaps (I ask theapology of any resident of that city who may be here)as if he had written “Don Quixote of Kansas City.”You see how those words have changed, how theyhave been ennobled. You see a strange fact: that be-cause the old soldier Miguel de Cervantes poked mildfun at La Mancha, now “La Mancha” is one of theeverlasting words of literature.

Let us take another example of verses that havechanged. I am thinking of a sonnet by Rossetti, a son-net that labors under the not-too-beautiful name“Inclusiveness.” The sonnet begins thus:

What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep to brood,How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,Of what her kiss was, when his father wooed?6

I think that these lines are perhaps more vivid nowthan when they were written, some eighty years ago,


12

because the cinema has taught us to follow quick se-quences of visual images. In the ~rst line, “What manhas bent o’er his son’s sleep to brood,” we have the fa-ther bending over the face of the sleeping son. Andthen in the second line, as in a good ~lm, we have thesame image reversed: we see the son bending over theface of that dead man, his father. And perhaps our re-cent study of psychology has made us more sensitive tothese lines: “Or thought, as his own mother kissed hiseyes, / Of what her kiss was, when his father wooed.”Here we have, of course, the beauty of the soft Englishvowels in “brood,” “wooed.” And the additionalbeauty of “wooed” being by itself—not “wooed her”but simply “wooed.” The word goes on ringing.

There is also a different kind of beauty. Let us takean adjective that once was commonplace. I have noGreek, but I think that the Greek is oinopa pontos,and the common English rendering is “the wine-darksea.” I suppose the word “dark” is slipped in to makethings easier for the reader. Perhaps it would be “thewiny sea,” or something of the kind. I am sure thatwhen Homer (or the many Greeks who recordedHomer) wrote it, they were simply thinking of the sea;the adjective was straightforward. But nowadays, if Ior if any of you, after trying many fancy adjectives,


13

write in a poem “the wine-dark sea,” this is not a mererepetition of what the Greeks wrote. Rather, it is a go-ing back to tradition. When we speak of “thewine-dark sea,” we think of Homer and of the thirtycenturies that lie between us and him. So that al-though the words may be much the same, when wewrite “the wine-dark sea” we are really writing some-thing quite different from what Homer was writing.

Thus, the language is shifting; the Latins knew allabout that. And the reader is shifting also. This bringsus back to the old metaphor of the Greeks—the meta-phor, or rather the truth, about no man stepping twiceinto the same river.7 And there is, I think, an element offear here. At ~rst we are apt to think of the river as_owing. We think, “Of course, the river goes on butthe water is changing.” Then, with an emerging senseof awe, we feel that we too are changing—that we areas shifting and evanescent as the river is.

However, we need not worry too much about thefate of the classics, because beauty is always with us.Here I would like to quote another verse, by Brown-ing, perhaps a now-forgotten poet. He says:

Just when we’re safest, there’s a sunset-touch,A fancy from a _ower-bell, some one’s death,A chorus-ending from Euripides.8


14

Yet the ~rst line is enough: “Just when we’re saf-est . . .” That is to say, beauty is lurking all about us. Itmay come to us in the name of a ~lm; it may come tous in some popular lyric; we may even ~nd it in thepages of a great or famous writer.

And since I have spoken of a dead master of mine,Rafael Cansinos-Asséns (maybe this is the secondtime you’ve heard his name; I don’t quite know whyhe is forgotten),9 I remember that Cansinos-Assénswrote a very ~ne prose poem wherein he asked Godto defend him, to save him from beauty, because, hesays, “there is too much beauty in the world.” Hethought that beauty was overwhelming it. Although Ido not know if I have been a particularly happy man(I hope I am going to be happy at the ripe age ofsixty-seven), I still think that beauty is all around us.

As to whether a poem has been written by a greatpoet or not, this is important only to historians of lit-erature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, thatI have written a beautiful line; let us take this as aworking hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, thatline came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the sub-liminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I of-ten ~nd I am merely quoting something I read some


15

time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Per-haps it is better that a poet should be nameless.

I spoke of “the wine-dark sea,” and since myhobby is Old English (I am afraid that, if you have thecourage or the patience to come back to some of mylectures, you may have more Old English in_icted onyou), I would like to recall some lines that I thinkbeautiful. I will say them ~rst in English, and then inthe stark and voweled Old English of the ninth cen-tury.

It snowed from the north;rime bound the ~elds;hail fell on earth,the coldest of seeds.

Norþan sniwdehrim hrusan bondhægl feol on eorþancorna caldast.10

This takes us back to what I said about Homer: whenthe poet wrote these lines, he was merely recordingthings that had happened. This was of course verystrange in the ninth century, when people thought interms of mythology, allegorical images, and so on. He


16

was merely telling very commonplace things. Butnowadays when we read

It snowed from the north;rime bound the ~elds;hail fell on earth,the coldest of seeds . . .

there is an added poetry. There is the poetry of anameless Saxon having written those lines by theshores of the North Sea—in Northumberland, Ithink; and of those lines coming to us so straightfor-ward, so plain, and so pathetic through the centuries.So we have both cases: the case (I need hardly dwellupon it) when time debases a poem, when the wordslose their beauty; and also the case when time en-riches rather than debases a poem.

I talked at the beginning about de~nitions. To endup, I would like to say that we make a very commonmistake when we think that we’re ignorant of some-thing because we are unable to de~ne it. If we are ina Chestertonian mood (one of the very best moodsto be in, I think), we might say that we can de~nesomething only when we know nothing about it.

For example, if I have to de~ne poetry, and if I feelrather shaky about it, if I’m not too sure about it, I say


17

something like: “Poetry is the expression of the beau-tiful through the medium of words artfully woven to-gether.” This de~nition may be good enough for adictionary or for a textbook, but we all feel that it israther feeble. There is something far more impor-tant—something that may encourage us to go on notonly trying our hand at writing poetry, but enjoying itand feeling that we know all about it.

This is that we know what poetry is. We know it sowell that we cannot de~ne it in other words, even aswe cannot de~ne the taste of coffee, the color red oryellow, or the meaning of anger, of love, of hatred, ofthe sunrise, of the sunset, or of our love for our coun-try. These things are so deep in us that they can be ex-pressed only by those common symbols that we share.So why should we need other words?

You may not agree with the examples I have cho-sen. Perhaps tomorrow I may think of better exam-ples, may think I might have quoted other lines. Butas you can pick and choose your own examples, it isnot needful that you care greatly about Homer, orabout the Anglo-Saxon poets, or about Rossetti. Be-cause everyone knows where to ~nd poetry. Andwhen it comes, one feels the touch of poetry, that par-ticular tingling of poetry.


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To end with, I have a quotation from Saint Augus-tine which comes in very ~tly, I think. He said, “Whatis time? If people do not ask me what time is, I know.If they ask me what it is, then I do not know.”11 I feelthe same way about poetry.

One is hardly troubled about de~nitions. This timeI am rather at sea, because I am no good at all at ab-stract thinking. But in the following lectures—if youare good enough to put up with me—we will takemore concrete examples. I will speak about the meta-phor, about word-music, about the possibility or im-possibility of verse translation, and about the tellingof a tale—that is to say, about epic poetry, the oldestand perhaps the bravest kind of poetry. And I will endwith something that I can hardly divine now. I willend with a lecture called “The Poet’s Creed,” whereinI will try to justify my own life and the con~dencesome of you may have in me, despite this rather awk-ward and fumbling ~rst lecture of mine.


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T H E

M E T A P H O R

As the subject of today’s talk is the metaphor, I shall

begin with a metaphor. This ~rst of the many meta-phors I shall try to recall comes from the Far East,from China. If I am not mistaken, the Chinese call theworld “the ten thousand things,” or—and this de-pends on the taste and fancy of the translator—“theten thousand beings.”

We may accept, I suppose, the very conservativeestimate of ten thousand. Surely there are more thanten thousand ants, ten thousand men, ten thousandhopes, fears, or nightmares in the world. But if we ac-cept the number ten thousand, and if we think that allmetaphors are made by linking two different thingstogether, then, had we time enough, we might work

out an almost unbelievable sum of possible meta-phors. I have forgotten my algebra, but I think thatthe sum should be , multiplied by ,, multi-plied by ,, and so on. Of course the sum of possi-ble combinations is not endless, but it staggers theimagination. So we might be led to think: Why onearth should poets all over the world, and all throughtime, be using the same stock metaphors, when thereare so many possible combinations?

The Argentine poet Lugones, way back in the year, wrote that he thought poets were always usingthe same metaphors, and that he would try his hand atdiscovering new metaphors for the moon. And in facthe concocted many hundreds of them. He also said,in the foreword to a book called Lunario sentimental,1

that every word is a dead metaphor. This statement is,of course, a metaphor. Yet I think we all feel the dif-ference between dead and living metaphors. If wetake any good etymological dictionary (I am thinkingof my old unknown friend Dr. Skeat)2 and if we lookup any word, we are sure to ~nd a metaphor tuckedaway somewhere.

For example—and you can ~nd this in the very~rst lines of Beowulf—the word þreat meant “an an-gry mob,” but now the word is given to the effect and

T H E M E T A P H O R

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not to the cause. Then we have the word “king.”“King” was originally cyning, which meant “a manwho stands for the kin—for the people.” So, etymo-logically, “king,” “kinsman,” and “gentleman” are thesame word. Yet if I say, “The king sat in his countinghouse, counting out his money,” we don’t think of theword “king” as being a metaphor. In fact, if we go infor abstract thinking, we have to forget that wordswere metaphors. We have to forget, for example, thatin the word “consider” there is a suggestion of astrol-ogy—“consider” originally meaning “being with thestars,” “making a horoscope.”

What is important about the metaphor, I shouldsay, is the fact of its being felt by the reader or thehearer as a metaphor. I will con~ne this talk to meta-phors that are felt as metaphors by the reader. Not tosuch words as “king,” or “threat”—and we might goon, perhaps forever.

First, I would like to take some stock patterns ofmetaphor. I use the word “pattern” because the meta-phors I will quote will be to the imagination quite dif-ferent, yet to the logical thinker they would be almostthe same. So that we might speak of them as equa-tions. Let us take the ~rst that comes to my mind. Letus take the stock comparison, the time-honored com-


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parison, of eyes and stars, or conversely of stars andeyes. The ~rst example I remember comes from theGreek Anthology,3 and I think Plato is supposed tohave written it. The lines (I have no Greek) run moreor less as follows: “I wish I were the night, so that Imight watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.” Here,of course, what we feel is the tenderness of the lover;we feel his wish to be able to see his beloved frommany points at once. We feel the tenderness behindthese lines.

Now let us take another, less illustrious example:“The stars look down.” If we take logical thinking se-riously, we have the same metaphor here. Yet the ef-fect on our imagination is quite different. “The starslook down” does not make us think of tenderness;rather, it gives the idea of generations and generationsof men toiling on and of the stars looking down with akind of lofty indifference.

Let me take a different example—one of the stan-zas that have most struck me. The lines come from apoem by Chesterton called “A Second Childhood”:

But I shall not grow too old to see enormous nightarise,

A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.4


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Not a monster full of eyes (we know those monstersfrom the Revelation of Saint John) but—and this is farmore awful—a monster made of eyes, as if those eyeswere the living tissue of him.

We have looked at three images which can all betraced back to the same pattern. But the point Iwould like to emphasize—and this is really one ofthe two important points in my talk—is that al-though the pattern is essentially the same, in the ~rstcase, the Greek example “I wish I were the night,”what the poet makes us feel is his tenderness, hisanxiety; in the second, we feel a kind of divine indif-ference to things human; and in the third, the famil-iar night becomes a nightmare.

Let us now take a different pattern: let us take theidea of time _owing—_owing as a river does. The ~rstexample comes from a poem that Tennyson wrotewhen he was, I think, thirteen or fourteen. He de-stroyed it; but, happily for us, one line survived. Ithink you will ~nd it in Tennyson’s biography writtenby Andrew Lang.5 The line is: “Time _owing in themiddle of the night.” I think Tennyson has chosen histime very wisely. In the night all things are silent, menare sleeping, yet time is _owing noiselessly on. This isone example.


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There is also a novel (I’m sure you’re thinking of it)called simply Of Time and the River.6 The mere put-ting together of the two words suggests the metaphor:time and the river, they both _ow on. And then thereis the famous sentence of the Greek philosopher: “Noman steps twice into the same river.”7 Here we havethe beginning of terror, because at ~rst we think ofthe river as _owing on, of the drops of water as beingdifferent. And then we are made to feel that we arethe river, that we are as fugitive as the river.

We also have those lines by Manrique:

Nuestras vidas son los ríosque van a dar en la marqu’es el morir.

Our lives are the riversthat _ow into that seawhich is death.8

This statement is not too impressive in English; I wishI could remember how Longfellow translated it in his“Coplas de Manrique.”9 But of course (and we shallgo into this question in another lecture) behind thestock metaphor we have the grave music of the words:

Nuestras vidas son los ríosque van a dar en la mar


26

qu’es el morir;allí van los señoríosderechos a se acabare consumir . . .

Yet the metaphor is exactly the same in all these cases.And now we will go on to something very trite,

something that may cause you to smile: the compari-son of women to _owers, and also of _owers towomen. Here, of course, there are far too many easyexamples. But there is one I would like to recall (per-haps it may not be familiar to you) from thatun~nished masterwork, Robert Louis Stevenson’sWeir of Hermiston. Stevenson tells of his hero goinginto a church, in Scotland, where he sees a girl—alovely girl, we are made to feel. And one feels that heis about to fall in love with her. Because he looks ather, and then he wonders whether there is an immor-tal soul within that beautiful frame, or whether she isa mere animal the color of _owers. And the brutalityof the word “animal” is of course destroyed by “thecolor of _owers.” I don’t think we need any other ex-amples of this pattern, which can be found in all ages,in all tongues, in all literatures.

Now let us go on to another of the essential pat-terns of metaphor: the pattern of life’s being a


27

dream—the feeling that comes over us that life isa dream. The evident example which occurs to us is:“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”10 Now,this may sound like blasphemy—I love Shakespearetoo much to care—but I think that here, if we look atit (and I don’t think we should look at it too closely;we should rather be grateful to Shakespeare for thisand his many other gifts), there is a very slight contra-diction between the fact that our lives are dreamlikeor have a dreamlike essence in them, and the rathersweeping statement, “We are such stuff as dreams aremade on.” Because if we are real in dreams, or if weare merely dreamers of dreams, then I wonder if wecan make such sweeping statements. This sentence ofShakespeare’s belongs rather to philosophy or tometaphysics than to poetry—though of course it isheightened, it is lifted up into poetry, by the context.

Another example of the same pattern comes from agreat German poet—a minor poet beside Shake-speare (but I suppose all poets are minor beside him,except two or three). It is a very famous piece byWalther von der Vogelweide. I suppose I should say itthus (I wonder how good my Middle German is—you will have to forgive me): “Ist mir mîn lebengetroumet, oder ist es war?” “Have I dreamt my life,


28

or was it a true one?”11 I think this comes nearer towhat the poet is trying to say, because instead of asweeping af~rmation we have a question. The poet iswondering. This has happened to all of us, but wehave not worded it as Walther von der Vogelweidedid. He is asking himself, “Ist mir mîn leben ge-troumet, oder ist es war?” and this hesitation gives usthat dreamlike essence of life, I think.

I don’t remember whether in my last lecture (be-cause this is a sentence I often quote over and overagain, and have quoted all through my life) I gave youthe quotation from the Chinese philosopher ChuanTzu. He dreamt that he was a butter_y, and, on wak-ing up, he did not know whether he was a man whohad had a dream he was a butter_y, or a butter_y whowas now dreaming he was a man. This metaphor is, Ithink, the ~nest of all. First because it begins with adream, so afterwards, when he awakens, his life hasstill something dreamlike about it. And second be-cause, with a kind of almost miraculous happiness, hehas chosen the right animal. Had he said, “Chuan Tzuhad a dream that he was a tiger,” then there would benothing in it. A butter_y has something delicate andevanescent about it. If we are dreams, the true way tosuggest this is with a butter_y and not a tiger. If


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Chuan Tzu had a dream he was a typewriter, it wouldbe no good at all. Or a whale—that would do him nogood either. I think he has chosen just the right wordfor what he is trying to say.

Let us try to follow another pattern—the very com-mon one that links up the ideas of sleeping and dying.This is quite common in everyday speech also; yet ifwe look for examples, we shall ~nd that they are verydifferent. I think that somewhere in Homer he speaksof the “iron sleep of death.”12 Here he gives us twoopposite ideas: death is a kind of sleep, yet that kindof sleep is made of a hard, ruthless, and cruelmetal—iron. It is a kind of sleep that is unbroken andunbreakable. Of course, we have Heine here also:“Der Tod daß ist die frühe Nacht.” And since we arenorth of Boston, I think we must remember thoseperhaps too-well-known lines by Robert Frost:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.13

These lines are so perfect that we hardly think of atrick. Yet, unhappily, all literature is made of tricks,and those tricks get—in the long run—found out.


30

And then the reader tires of them. But in this case thetrick is so unobtrusive that I feel rather ashamed ofmyself for calling it a trick (I call it this merely forwant of a better word). Because Frost has attemptedsomething very daring here. We have the same line re-peated word for word, twice over, yet the sense is dif-ferent. “And miles to go before I sleep”: this is merelyphysical—the miles are miles in space, in New Eng-land, and “sleep” means “go to sleep.” The secondtime—“And miles to go before I sleep”—we aremade to feel that the miles are not only in space but intime, and that “sleep” means “die” or “rest.” Had thepoet said so in so many words, he would have been farless effective. Because, as I understand it, anythingsuggested is far more effective than anything laiddown. Perhaps the human mind has a tendency todeny a statement. Remember what Emerson said:arguments convince nobody. They convince nobodybecause they are presented as arguments. Then welook at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, andwe decide against them.

But when something is merely said or—betterstill—hinted at, there is a kind of hospitality in ourimagination. We are ready to accept it. I rememberreading, some thirty years ago, the works of Martin


31

Buber—I thought of them as being wonderful poems.Then, when I went to Buenos Aires, I read a book bya friend of mine, Dujovne,14 and I found in its pages,much to my astonishment, that Martin Buber was aphilosopher and that all his philosophy lay in thebooks I had read as poetry. Perhaps I had acceptedthose books because they came to me through poetry,through suggestion, through the music of poetry, andnot as arguments. I think that somewhere in WaltWhitman the same idea can be found: the idea of rea-sons being unconvincing. I think he says somewherethat he ~nds the night air, the large few stars, far moreconvincing than mere arguments.

We may think of other patterns of metaphor. Let usnow take the example (this is not as common as theother ones) of a battle and a ~re. In the Iliad, we ~ndthe image of a battle blazing like a ~re. We have thesame idea in the heroic fragment of Finnesburg.15 Inthat fragment we are told of the Danes ~ghting theFrisians, of the glitter of the weapons, the shields andswords, and so on. Then the writer says that it seemedas if all Finnesburg, as if the whole castle of Finn,were on ~re.

I suppose I have left out some quite common pat-terns. We have so far taken up eyes and stars, women


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and _owers, time and rivers, life and dream, death andsleeping, ~re and battles. Had we time and learningenough, we might ~nd half a dozen other patterns, andperhaps those might give us most of the metaphors inliterature.

What is really important is the fact not that there area few patterns, but that those patterns are capable ofalmost endless variations. The reader who cares forpoetry and not for the theory of poetry might read, forexample, “I wish I were the night,” and then after-wards “A monster made of eyes” or “The stars lookeddown,” and never stop to think that these can betraced back to a single pattern. If I were a daringthinker (but I am not; I am a very timid thinker, I amgroping my way along), I could of course say that only adozen or so patterns exist and that all other metaphorsare mere arbitrary games. This would amount to thestatement that among the “ten thousand things” of theChinese de~nition, only some twelve essential af~ni-ties may be found. Because, of course, you can ~ndother af~nities that are merely astonishing, and aston-ishment hardly lasts more than a moment.

I remember that I have forgotten quite a good ex-ample of the dream-and-life equation. But I think I canrecall it now: it is by the American poet Cummings.


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There are four lines. I must apologize for the ~rst. Evi-dently it was written by a young man, writing for youngmen, and I can no longer claim the privilege—I am fartoo old for that kind of game. But the stanza should bequoted in full. The ~rst line is: “god’s terrible face,brighter than a spoon.” I am rather sorry about thespoon, because of course one feels that he thought at~rst of a sword, or of a candle, or of the sun, or of ashield, or of something traditionally shining; and thenhe said, “No—after all, I’m modern, so I’ll work in aspoon.” And so he got his spoon. But we may forgivehim that for what comes afterwards: “god’s terribleface, brighter than a spoon, / collects the image of onefatal word.” This second line is better, I think. And asmy friend Murchison said to me, in a spoon we oftenhave many images collected. I had never thought ofthat, because I had been taken aback by the spoon anddid not want to think much about it.

god’s terrible face, brighter than a spoon,collects the image of one fatal word,so that my life (which liked the sun and the moon)resembles something that has not occurred.16

“Resembles something that has not occurred”: thisline carries a kind of strange simplicity. I think it gives


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us the dreamlike essence of life better than thosemore famous poets, Shakespeare and Walther von derVogelweide.

Of course, I have chosen only a few examples. I amsure your memories are full of metaphors that youhave treasured up—metaphors that you may be hop-ing I will quote. I know that after this lecture I shallfeel remorse coming over me, thinking of the manybeautiful metaphors I have missed. And of course youwill say to me, in an aside, “But why did you omit thatwonderful metaphor by So-and-So?” And then I willhave to fumble and to apologize.

But now, I think, we might go on to metaphors thatseem to stand outside the old patterns. And since Ihave spoken of the moon, I will take a Persian meta-phor I read somewhere in Brown’s history of Persianliterature. Let us say it came from Farid al-Din Attaror Omar Khayyám, or Ha~z,17 or another of the greatPersian poets. He speaks of the moon, calling it “themirror of time.” I suppose that, from the point ofview of astronomy, the idea of the moon being a mir-ror is as it should be—but this is quite irrelevant fromthe poetic point of view. Whether in fact the moon isor is not a mirror has no importance whatever, sincepoetry speaks to the imagination. Let us look at the


35

moon as a mirror of time. I think this is a very ~nemetaphor—~rst, because the idea of a mirror gives usthe brightness and the fragility of the moon, and, sec-ond, because the idea of time makes us suddenly re-member that that very clear moon we are looking at isvery ancient, is full of poetry and mythology, is as oldas time.

Since I’ve used the phrase “as old as time,” I mustquote another line—one that perhaps is bubbling upin your memory. I can’t recall the name of the author.I found it quoted by Kipling in a not-too-memorablebook of his called From Sea to Sea: “A rose-red city,half as old as Time.”18 Had the poet written “Arose-red city, as old as Time,” he would have writtennothing at all. But “half as old as Time” gives it a kindof magic precision—the same kind of magic precisionthat is achieved by that strange and common Englishphrase, “I will love you forever and a day.” “Forever”means “a very long time,” but it is too abstract to ap-peal to the imagination.

We have the same kind of trick (I apologize for theuse of this word) in the name of that famous book, theThousand and One Nights. For “the thousand nights”means to the imagination “the many nights,” even as“forty” used to mean “many” in the seventeenth cen-


36

tury. “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,”writes Shakespeare;19 and I think of the common Eng-lish expression “forty winks” for “a nap.” For “forty”means “many.” And here you have the “thousandnights and a night”—like “a rose-red city” and thefanciful precision of “half as old as Time,” which ofcourse makes time seem even longer.

In order to consider different metaphors, I willnow go back—inevitably, you might say—to myfavorite Anglo-Saxons. I remember that very com-mon kenning20 which calls the sea “the whale road.” Iwonder whether the unknown Saxon who ~rstcoined that kenning knew how ~ne it was. I wonderwhether he felt (though this need hardly concern us)that the hugeness of the whale suggested and empha-sized the hugeness of the sea.

There is another metaphor—a Norse one, aboutblood. The common kenning for blood is “the waterof the serpent.” In this metaphor, you have the no-tion—which we ~nd also among the Saxons—of asword as an essentially evil being, a being that lappedup the blood of men as if it were water.

Then we have the metaphors for battle. Some ofthem are quite trite—for example, “meeting of men.”Here, perhaps, there is something quite ~ne: the idea


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of men meeting to kill each other (as if no other“meetings” were possible). But we also have “themeeting of swords,” “the dance of swords,” “theclash of armor,” “the clash of shields.” All of themmay be found in the “Ode” of Brunanburh. Andthere is another ~ne one: þorn æneoht, “a meeting ofanger.” Here the metaphor is impressive perhaps be-cause, when we think of meeting, we think of fellow-ship, of friendship; and then there comes the contrast,the meeting of anger.

But these metaphors are nothing, I should say,compared to a very ~ne Norse and—strangelyenough—Irish metaphor about the battle. It calls thebattle “the web of men.” The word “web” is reallywonderful here, for in the idea of a web we get thepattern of a medieval battle: we have the swords,the shields, the crossing of the weapons. Also, thereis the nightmare touch of a web being made of livingbeings. “A web of men”: a web of men who are dyingand killing each other.

There suddenly comes to my mind a metaphorfrom Góngora that is rather like the “web of men.”He is speaking of a traveler who comes to a “bárbaraaldea”—to a “barbarous village”; and then that vil-lage weaves a rope of dogs around him.


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Como suele tejerBárbara aldeaSoga de perrosContra forastero.

So, strangely enough, we have the same image: theidea of a rope or web made of living beings. Yet evenin those cases that seem to be synonyms, there is quitea difference. A rope of dogs is somehow baroque andgrotesque, while “web of men” has something terri-ble, something awful about it.

To end up, I will take a metaphor, or a comparison(after all, I am not a professor and the difference needhardly worry me), by the now-forgotten Byron. I readthe poem when I was a boy—I suppose you all read itat a very tender age. Yet two or three days ago I sud-denly discovered that that metaphor was a very com-plex one. I had never thought of Byron as beingespecially complex. You all know the words: “Shewalks in beauty, like the night.”21 The line is so perfectthat we take it for granted. We think, “Well, we couldhave written that, had we cared to.” But only Byroncared to write it.

I come now to the hidden and secret complexity ofthe line. I suppose you have already found out what Iam now going to reveal to you. (Because this always


39

happens with surprises, no? It happens to us whenwe’re reading a detective novel.) “She walks in beauty,like the night”: at the beginning we have a lovelywoman; then we are told that she walks in beauty. Thissomehow suggests the French language—somethinglike “vous êtes en beauté,” and so on. But: “She walksin beauty, like the night.” We have, in the ~rst in-stance, a lovely woman, a lovely lady, likened to thenight. But in order to understand the line, we have tothink of the night as a woman also; if not, the line ismeaningless. So within those very simple words, wehave a double metaphor: a woman is likened to thenight, but the night is likened to a woman. I do notknow and I do not care whether Byron knew this. Ithink if he had known it, the verse would hardly be asgood as it is. Perhaps before he died he found it out,or somebody pointed it out to him.

Now we are led to the two obvious and major con-clusions of this lecture. The ~rst is, of course, thatthough there are hundreds and indeed thousands ofmetaphors to be found, they may all be traced back toa few simple patterns. But this need not trouble us,since each metaphor is different: every time the pat-tern is used, the variations are different. And thesecond conclusion is that there are metaphors—for


40

example, “web of men,” or “whale road”—that maynot be traced back to de~nite patterns.

So I think that the outlook—even after my lec-ture—is quite good for the metaphor. Because, if welike, we may try our hand at new variations of the ma-jor trends. The variations would be very beautiful,and only a few critics like myself would take the trou-ble to say, “Well, there you have eyes and stars andthere you have time and the river over and overagain.” The metaphors will strike the imagination.But it may also be given to us—and why not hope forthis as well?—it may also be given to us to inventmetaphors that do not belong, or that do not yetbelong, to accepted patterns.


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T H E

T E L L I N G O F

T H E T A L E

Verbal distinctions should be valued, since they stand

for mental—intellectual—distinctions. Yet one feelsit is somehow a pity that the word “poet” shouldhave been split asunder. For nowadays when wespeak of a poet, we think only of the utterer of suchlyric, birdlike notes as “With ships the sea was sprin-kled far and nigh, / Like stars in heaven” (Words-worth),1 or “Music to hear, why hear’st thou musicsadly? / Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights injoy.”2 Whereas the ancients, when they spoke of apoet—a “maker”—thought of him not only as theutterer of those high lyric notes, but also as the tellerof a tale. A tale wherein all the voices of mankindmight be found—not only the lyric, the wistful, the

melancholy, but also the voices of courage and ofhope. This means that I am speaking of what I sup-pose is the oldest form of poetry: the epic. Let usconsider a few of them.

Perhaps the ~rst which comes to our mind is theone that Andrew Lang, who so ~nely translated it,called The Tale of Troy. We will look into it for thatvery ancient telling of a tale. In the very ~rst line, wehave something like: “Tell me, muse, of the anger ofAchilles.” Or, as Professor Rouse, I think, has trans-lated it: “An angry man—that is my subject.”3 Per-haps Homer, or the man we call Homer (for that is anold question, of course), thought he was writing hispoem about an angry man, and this somehow discon-certs us. For we think of anger as the Latins did: “irafuror brevis”—anger is a brief madness, a ~t of mad-ness. The plot of the Iliad is really, in itself, not acharming one—the idea of the hero sulking in histent, feeling that the king has dealt unjustly with him,and then taking up the war as a private feud becausehis friend has been killed, and afterwards selling thedead man he has killed to the man’s father.

But perhaps (I may have said this before; I am sureI have), perhaps the intentions of the poet are not thatimportant. What is important nowadays is that al-

T H E T E L L I N G O F T H E T A L E

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though Homer might have thought he was telling thatstory, he was actually telling something far ~ner: thestory of a man, a hero, who is attacking a city heknows he will never conquer, who knows he will diebefore it falls; and the still more stirring tale of mendefending a city whose doom is already known tothem, a city that is already in _ames. I think this is thereal subject of the Iliad. And, in fact, men have alwaysfelt that the Trojans were the real heroes. We think ofVirgil, but we may also think of Snorri Sturluson,4

who, in his younger era, wrote that Odin—the Odinof the Saxons, the god—was the son of Priam and thebrother of Hector. Men have sought kinship with thedefeated Trojans, and not with the victorious Greeks.This is perhaps because there is a dignity in defeatthat hardly belongs to victory.

Let us take a second epic, the Odyssey. The Odys-

sey may be read in two ways. I suppose the man (orthe woman, as Samuel Butler thought)5 who had writ-ten it felt that there were really two stories: the home-coming of Ulysses, and the marvels and perils of thesea. If we take the Odyssey in the ~rst sense, then wehave the idea of homecoming, the idea that we are inbanishment, that our true home is in the past or inheaven or somewhere else, that we are never at home.


45

But of course the seafaring and the homecoming hadto be made interesting. So the many marvels wereworked in. And already, when we come to the Ara-

bian Nights, we ~nd that the Arabian version of theOdyssey, the Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, isnot a story of homecoming but a story of adventure;and I think we read it thus. When we read the Odys-

sey, I think that what we feel is the glamour, the magicof the sea; what we feel is what we ~nd in the seafarer.For example, he has no heart for the harp, nor for thegiving of rings, nor for the delight of a woman, nor forthe greatness of the world. He thinks only of the longsea salt streams. So that we have both stories in one:we can read it as a homecoming, and we can read it asa tale of adventure—perhaps the ~nest that has everbeen written or sung.

We come now to a third “poem” that looms farabove them: the four Gospels. The Gospels may alsobe read in two ways. By the believer, they are read asthe strange story of a man, of a god, who atones forthe sins of mankind. A god who condescends to suf-fering—to death on the “bitter cross,” as Shakespearehas it.6 There is a still stranger interpretation, which Ifound in Langland:7 the idea that God wanted toknow all about human suffering, and that it was not


46

enough for Him to know it intellectually, as a godmight; he wanted to suffer as a man, and with the lim-itations of a man. However, if you are an unbeliever(many of us are) then you can read the story in a dif-ferent way. You can think of a man of genius, of a manwho thought he was a god and who at the end foundout that he was merely a man, and that god—hisgod—had forsaken him.

It might be said that for many centuries, thosethree stories—the tale of Troy, the tale of Ulysses, thetale of Jesus—have been suf~cient for mankind. Peo-ple have been telling and retelling them over and overagain; they have been set to music; they have beenpainted. People have told them many times over, yetthe stories are still there, illimitable. You might thinkof somebody, in a thousand years or ten thousandyears, writing them over again. But in the case of theGospels, there is a difference: the story of Christ, Ithink, cannot be told better. It has been told manytimes over, yet I think the few verses where we read,for example, of Christ being tempted by Satan arestronger than all four books of Paradise Regained.

One feels that Milton perhaps had no inkling as towhat kind of a man Christ was.

Well, we have these stories and we have the fact


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that men did not need many stories. I don’t supposeChaucer ever thought of inventing a story. I don’tthink people were less inventive in those days thanthey are today. I think they felt that the new shadingsbrought into the story—the ~ne shadings broughtinto it—were enough. Besides, it made things easierfor the poet. His hearers or his readers knew what hewas going to say. And so they could take in all the dif-ferences.

Now, in the epic—and we might think of the Gos-pels as a kind of divine epic—all things could befound. But poetry, as I said, has fallen asunder; orrather, on the one hand we have the lyrical poem andthe elegy, and on the other we have the telling of atale—we have the novel. One is almost tempted tothink of the novel as a degeneration of the epic, inspite of such writers as Joseph Conrad or HermanMelville. For the novel goes back to the dignity of theepic.

If we think of the novel and the epic, we aretempted to fall into thinking that the chief differencelies in the difference between verse and prose, in thedifference between singing something and statingsomething. But I think there is a greater difference.The difference lies in the fact that the important thing


48

about the epic is a hero—a man who is a pattern forall men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essenceof most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, inthe degeneration of character.

This brings us to another question: What do wethink of happiness? What do we think of defeat, andof victory? Nowadays when people talk of a happyending, they think of it as a mere pandering to thepublic, or they think it is a commercial device; theythink of it as arti~cial. Yet for centuries men couldvery sincerely believe in happiness and in victory,though they felt the essential dignity of defeat. For ex-ample, when people wrote about the Golden Fleece(one of the ancient stories of mankind), readers andhearers were made to feel from the beginning that thetreasure would be found at the end.

Well, nowadays if an adventure is attempted, weknow that it will end in failure. When we read—Ithink of an example I admire—The Aspern Papers,8

we know that the papers will never be found. Whenwe read Franz Kafka’s The Castle, we know that theman will never get inside the castle. That is to say, wecannot really believe in happiness and in success. Andthis may be one of the poverties of our time. I supposeKafka felt much the same when he wanted his books


49

to be destroyed: he really wanted to write a happy andvictorious book, and he felt that he could not do it.He might have written it, of course, but people wouldhave felt that he was not telling the truth. Not thetruth of facts but the truth of his dreams.

At the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of thenineteenth century, let’s say (we need hardly go into adiscussion of dates), man began to invent stories. Per-haps one might say that the attempt began with Haw-thorne and with Edgar Allan Poe, but of course thereare always forerunners. As Rubén Darío pointed out,nobody is the literary Adam. Still, it was Poe whowrote that a story should be written for the sake of thelast sentence, and a poem for the sake of the last line.This degenerated into the trick story, and in the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries people have inventedall kinds of plots. Those plots are sometimes veryclever. Those plots, if merely told, are cleverer thanthe plots of the epics. Yet somehow we feel that thereis something arti~cial about them—or rather, thatthere is something trivial about them. If we take twocases—let us suppose the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, then a novel or a ~lm like Psycho—perhaps theplot of the second is cleverer, but we feel that there ismore behind Stevenson’s plot.


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Regarding the idea I spoke about at the beginning,the idea about there being only a few plots: perhapswe should mention those books where the interest liesnot in the plot but in the shifting, in the changing, ofmany plots. I am thinking of the Arabian Nights, ofOrlando Furioso, and so on. One might also add theidea of an evil treasure. We get that in the Völsunga

Saga,9 and perhaps at the end of Beowulf—the idea ofa treasure bringing evil to the people who ~nd it.Here we may come to the idea I tried to work out inmy last lecture, on metaphor—the idea that perhapsall plots belong to only a few patterns. Of course,nowadays people are inventing so many plots that weare blinded by them. But perhaps this ~t of inventive-ness may _icker, and then we may ~nd that thosemany plots are but appearances of a few essentialplots. This, however, is not for me to discuss.

There is another fact to be noticed: poets seem toforget that, at one time, the telling of a tale was essen-tial, and the telling of the tale and the uttering of theverse were not thought of as different things. A mantold a tale; he sang it; and his hearers did not think ofhim as a man attempting two tasks, but rather as aman attempting one task that had two sides to it. Orperhaps they did not feel that there were two sides to


51

it, but rather thought of the whole thing as one essen-tial thing.

We come now to our own time, and we ~nd thisvery strange circumstance: we have had two worldwars, yet somehow no epic has come from them—ex-cept perhaps the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.10 In theSeven Pillars of Wisdom I ~nd many epic qualities.But the book is hampered by the fact that the hero isthe teller, and so sometimes he has to belittle himself,he has to make himself human, he has to make himselffar too believable. In fact, he has to fall into the trick-ery of a novelist.

There is another book, quite forgotten now, whichI read, I think, in —a novel called Le Feu, byHenri Barbusse.11 The author was a paci~st; it was abook written against war. Yet somehow epic thrust it-self through the book (I remember a very ~ne bayonetcharge in it). Another writer who had the epic sensewas Kipling. We get this in such a wonderful story as“A Sahib’s War.” But in the same way that Kiplingnever attempted the sonnet, because he thought thatthis might estrange him from his readers, he never at-tempted the epic, though he might have done it. I amalso reminded of Chesterton, who wrote “The Balladof the White Horse,” a poem about King Alfred’s


52

wars with the Danes. Therein we ~nd very strangemetaphors (I wonder how I forgot to quote them lasttime!)—for example, “marble like solid moonlight,”“gold like frozen ~re,” where marble and gold arecompared to two things that are even more elemen-tary.12 They are compared to moonlight and to~re—and not to ~re itself, but to a magic frozen ~re.

In a way, people are hungering and thirsting forepic. I feel that epic is one of the things that menneed. Of all places (and this may come as a kind of an-ticlimax, but the fact is there), it has been Hollywoodthat has furnished epic to the world. All over theglobe, when people see a Western—beholding themythology of a rider, and the desert, and justice, andthe sheriff, and the shooting, and so on—I think theyget the epic feeling from it, whether they know it ornot. After all, knowing the thing is not important.

Now, I do not want to prophesy, because suchthings are dangerous (though they may come true inthe long run), but I think that if the telling of a taleand the singing of a verse could come together again,then a very important thing might happen. Perhapsthis will come from America—since, as you all know,America has an ethical sense of a thing being right orwrong. It may be felt in other countries, but I do not


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think it can be found in such an obvious way as I ~ndit here. If this could be achieved, if we could go backto the epic, then something very great would havebeen accomplished. When Chesterton wrote “TheBallad of the White Horse,” it got good reviews andso on, but readers did not take kindly to it. In fact,when we think of Chesterton, we think of the FatherBrown saga and not of that poem.

I have been thinking about the subject only ratherlate in life; and besides, I do not think I could attemptthe epic (though I might have worked in two or threelines of epic). This is for younger men to do. And Ihope they will do it, because of course we all feel thatthe novel is somehow breaking down. Think of thechief novels of our time—say, Joyce’s Ulysses. We aretold thousands of things about the two characters, yetwe do not know them. We have a better knowledge ofcharacters in Dante or Shakespeare, who come tous—who live and die—in a few sentences. We do notknow thousands of circumstances about them, but weknow them intimately. That, of course, is far more im-portant.

I think that the novel is breaking down. I think thatall those very daring and interesting experiments withthe novel—for example, the idea of shifting time, the


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idea of the story being told by different charac-ters—all those are leading to the moment when weshall feel that the novel is no longer with us.

But there is something about a tale, a story, thatwill be always going on. I do not believe men will evertire of telling or hearing stories. And if along with thepleasure of being told a story we get the additionalpleasure of the dignity of verse, then something greatwill have happened. Maybe I am an old-fashionedman from the nineteenth century, but I have opti-mism, I have hope; and as the future holds manythings—as the future, perhaps, holds all things—Ithink the epic will come back to us. I believe that thepoet shall once again be a maker. I mean, he will tell astory and he will also sing it. And we will not think ofthose two things as different, even as we do not thinkthey are different in Homer or in Virgil.


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W O R D - M U S I C

A N D

T R A N S L A T I O N

For the sake of clarity, I shall con~ne myself now to the

problem of verse translation. A minor problem butalso a very relevant one. This discussion should paveus a way to the topic of word-music (or perhapsword-magic), of sense and sound in poetry.

According to a widely held superstition, all transla-tions betray their matchless originals. This is expressedby the too-well-known Italian pun, “Traduttore,traditore,” which is supposed to be unanswerable.Since this pun is very popular, there must be a kernelof truth, a core of truth, hidden somewhere in it.

We will go into a discussion of the possibilities (orotherwise) and the success (or otherwise) of versetranslation. According to my habit, we will begin with

a few examples, for I do not think that any discussioncan be carried on without examples. Since my mem-ory is sometimes quite akin to oblivion, I shouldchoose brief examples. It would be beyond our timeand my capacity to analyze whole stanzas or poems.

We will begin with the Ode of Brunanburh andTennyson’s translation of it. This ode (my dates are al-ways rather shaky) was composed at the beginning ofthe tenth century to celebrate the victory of the Wes-sex men against the Dublin Vikings, the Scotsmen,and the Welsh. Let us go into the examination of aline or so. In the original, we ~nd something that runsmore or less like this: “sunne up æt morgentid mæretungol.” That is to say, “the sun at morning-tide” or“at morning-time,” and then “that famous star” or“that mighty star”—but here “famous” would be abetter translation (“mære tungol”). The poet goes onto speak of the sun as “godes candel beorht”—“abright candle of God.”

This ode was done into English prose by Tenny-son’s son; it was published in a magazine.1 The sonprobably explained to his father some essentials ofthe rules of Old English verse—about its beat, its useof alliteration instead of rhyme, and so on. Then Ten-nyson, who was very fond of experiments, tried his

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hand at writing Old English verse in modern English.It is noteworthy to remark that, although the experi-ment was quite successful, he never came back to itagain. So if we were looking for Old English verse inLord Alfred Tennyson’s works, we would have to becontent with that one outstanding example, the Odeof Brunanburh.

Those two fragments—“the sun, that famous star”and “the sun, the bright candle of God” (“godescandel beorht”)—came to be translated by Tennysonthus: “when ~rst the great / Sun-star of morning-tide.”2 Now, “sun-star of morning-tide” is, I think, avery striking translation. It is even more Saxon thanthe original, since we have two compound German-ic words: “sun-star” and “morning-tide.” And ofcourse, though “morning-tide” can be easily ex-plained as “morning-time,” we may also think thatTennyson wanted to suggest to us the image of thedawn as over_owing the sky. So what we have is a verystrange phrase: “when ~rst the great / Sun-star ofmorning-tide.” And then a line later, when Tennysoncomes to the “bright candle of God,” he translates itas “Lamp of the Lord God.”

Let us now take another example, not only ablameless but also a ~ne translation. This time we will


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consider a translation from the Spanish. It is the won-derful poem “Noche oscura del alma,” “Dark Nightof the Soul,” written in the sixteenth century by oneof the greatest—we may safely say the greatest—ofSpanish poets, of all men who have used the Spanishlanguage for the purposes of poetry. I am speaking, ofcourse, of San Juan de la Cruz. The ~rst stanza runsthus:

En una noche oscuracon ansias en amores in_amada¡o dichosa ventura!salí sin ser notadaestando ya mi casa sosegada.3

This is a wonderful stanza. But if we consider the lastline torn from its context and taken by itself (to besure, we are not allowed to do that), it is an undistin-guished line: “estando ya mi casa sosegada,” “whenmy house was quiet.” We have the rather hissingsound of the three s’s in “casa sosegada.” And“sosegada” is hardly a striking word. I am not tryingto disparage the text. I am merely pointing out (and ina short time you will see why I am doing this) that theline taken by itself, torn from its context, is quite un-remarkable.


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This poem was translated into English by ArthurSymons at the end of the nineteenth century. Thetranslation is not a good one, but if you care to look atit, you can ~nd it in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern

Verse.4 Some years ago a great Scottish poet who isalso a South African, Roy Campbell, attempted atranslation of “Dark Night of the Soul.” I wish I hadthe book by me; but we will con~ne ourselves to theline I have just quoted, “estando ya mi casa soseg-ada,” and we will see what Roy Campbell made of it.He translated it thus: “When all the house washushed.”5 Here we have the word “all,” which gives asense of space, a sense of vastness, to the line. Andthen the beautiful, the lovely English word “hushed.”“Hushed” seems to give us somehow the very musicof silence.

I will add to these two very favorable examples ofthe art of translation a third one. This I will not discuss,since it is a case not of verse rendered into verse butrather of prose being lifted up into verse, into poetry.We have that common Latin tag (done from the Greek,of course), “Ars longa, vita brevis”—or, as I supposewe ought to pronounce it, “wita brewis.” (This is cer-tainly very ugly. Let us go back to “vita brevis”—to“Virgil” and not to “Wirgilius.”) Here we have a plain


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statement, a statement of opinion. This is quite plainsailing; this is straightforward. It strikes no deepchord. In fact, it is a kind of prophecy of the telegramand of the literature evolved by it. “Art is long, life isshort.” This tag was repeated ever so many times.Then, in the fourteenth century, “un grand trans-lateur,”6 “a great translator”—Master Geoffrey Chau-cer—needed that line. Of course, he wasn’t thinkingabout medicine; he was thinking perhaps about po-etry. But perhaps (I don’t have the text with me, so wecan choose), perhaps he was thinking of love andwanted to work in that line. He wrote: “The life soshort, the craft so long to learn”—or, as you may sup-pose he pronounced it, “The lyf so short, the craft solong to lerne.”7 Here we get not only the statement butalso the very music of wistfulness. We can see that thepoet is not merely thinking of the arduous art and ofthe brevity of life; he is also feeling it. This is given bythe apparently invisible, inaudible keyword—theword “so.” “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

Let us go back to the ~rst two examples: the fa-mous Ode of Brunanburh and Tennyson, and the“Noche oscura del alma” of San Juan de la Cruz. Ifwe consider the two translations I have quoted, theyare not inferior to the original, yet we feel that there is


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a difference. The difference is beyond what the trans-lator can do; it depends, rather, on the way we readpoetry. For if we look back on the Ode of Brunan-burh, we know that it came from deep emotion. Weknow that the Saxons had been beaten many timesover by the Danes, and that they hated this. And wemust think of the joy the West Saxons felt when, aftera long day’s struggle—the battle of Brunanburh, oneof the greatest battles in the medieval history of Eng-land—they defeated Olaf, the king of the Dublin Vi-kings, and the hated Scotsmen and Welshmen. Wethink of what they felt; we think of the man whowrote the ode. Perhaps he was a monk. But the factremains that instead of thanking God (in the ortho-dox fashion), he thanked the sword of his king andthe sword of Prince Edmund for the victory. He doesnot say that God vouchsafed the victory to them; hesays that they won it “swordda edgiou”—“by theedge of their swords.” The whole poem is ~lled with a~erce, ruthless joy. He mocks those who have beendefeated. He is very happy that they have been de-feated. He talks of the king and his brother goingback to their own Wessex—to their own “West-Saxonland,” as Tennyson has it (each “went to hisown West-Saxonland, glad of the war”).8 After that,


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he goes far back into English history; he thinks of themen who came over from Jutland, of Hengist andHorsa.9 This is very strange—I do not suppose manymen had that historical sense in the Middle Ages. Sowe have to think of the poem as coming out of deepemotion. We have to think of it as an onrush of greatverse.

When we come to Tennyson’s version, much as wemay admire it (and I knew it before I knew the Saxonoriginal), we think of it as a successful experiment inOld English verse wrought by a master of modernEnglish verse; that is to say, the context is different.Of course, the translator is not to be blamed for this.The same thing happens in the case of San Juan de laCruz and Roy Campbell: we may think (as I supposewe are allowed to think) that “when all the house washushed” is verbally—from the point of view of mereliterature—superior to “estando ya mi casa sosegada.”But that is of no avail as regards our judgment of thetwo pieces, the Spanish original and the English ren-dering. In the ~rst case, San Juan de la Cruz, we thinkthat he reached the highest experience of which thesoul of a man is capable—the experience of ecstasies,the blending together of a human soul with the soul ofdivinity, with the soul of the godhead, of God. After


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he had had that unutterable experience, he had tocommunicate it somehow in metaphors. Then hefound ready to hand the “Song of Songs,” and he took(many mystics have done this) he took the image ofsexual love as an image for mystical union betweenman and his god, and he wrote the poem. Thus, we arehearing—we are overhearing, we may say, as in thecase of the Saxon—the very words that he uttered.

Then we come to Roy Campbell’s translation. We~nd it good, but we are perhaps apt to think, “Well,the Scotsman made, after all, quite a good job of it.”This, of course, is different. That is to say, the differ-ence between a translation and the original is not adifference in the texts themselves. I suppose if we didnot know which was the original and which was thetranslation, we could judge them fairly. But, unhap-pily, we cannot do this. And so the translator’s work isalways supposed to be inferior—or, what is worse, isfelt to be inferior—even though, verbally, the render-ing may be as good as the text.

Now we come to another problem: the problem ofliteral translation. When I speak of “literal” transla-tions, I am using a wide metaphor, since, if a trans-lation cannot be true word for word to the original, itcan still less be true letter for letter. In the nineteenth


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century, a quite forgotten Greek scholar, Newman, at-tempted a literal hexameter translation of Homer.10 Itwas his purpose to publish a translation “against”Pope’s Homer. He used phrases such as “wet waves,”“wine-dark sea,” and so on. Now, Matthew Arnoldhad his own theories on translating Homer. WhenMr. Newman’s book came out, he reviewed it. New-man answered him; Matthew Arnold answered himback. We can read that very lively and very intelligentdiscussion in the essays of Matthew Arnold.

Both men had much to say on the two sides of thequestion. Newman supposed that literal translationwas the most faithful one. Matthew Arnold beganwith a theory about Homer. He said that in Homerseveral qualities were to be found—clarity, nobility,simplicity, and so on. He thought that a translatorshould always convey the impression of those quali-ties, even when the text did not bear them out. Mat-thew Arnold pointed out that a literal translationmade for oddity and for uncouthness.

For example, in the Romance languages we do notsay “It is cold”—we say “It makes cold”: “Il faitfroid,” “Fa freddo,” “Hace frío,” and so on. Yet Idon’t think anybody should translate “Il fait froid” by“It makes cold.” Another example: in English one


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says “Good morning,” and in Spanish one says “Bue-nos días” (“Good days”). If “Good morning” weretranslated as “Buena mañana,” we should feel thatthis was a literal translation but hardly a true one.

Matthew Arnold pointed out that if a text be trans-lated literally, then false emphases are created. I donot know whether he came across Captain Burton’stranslation of the Arabian Nights; perhaps he did sotoo late. For Burton translates Quitab alif laila wa

laila as Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, in-stead of Book of the Thousand and One Nights. Thistranslation is a literal one. It is true word for word tothe Arabic. Yet it is false in the sense that the words“book of the thousand nights and a night” are a com-mon form in Arabic, while in English we have a slightshock of surprise. And this, of course, has not beenintended by the original.

Matthew Arnold advised the translator of Homerto have a Bible at his elbow. He said that the Bible inEnglish might be a kind of standard for a translationof Homer. Yet if Matthew Arnold had looked closelyinto his Bible, he might have seen that the EnglishBible is full of literal translations, and that part of thegreat beauty of the English Bible lies in those literaltranslations.


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For example, in the English Bible we have “a towerof strength.” This is the phrase translated, as sup-posed, by Luther as “ein feste Burg”—“a mighty (or a~rm) stronghold.” Then we have “the song of songs.”I read in Fray Luis de León that the Hebrews had nosuperlatives, so they could not say “the highest song”or “the best song.” They said “the song of songs,”even as they might have said “the king of kings” for“the emperor” or “the highest king”; or “the moon ofmoons” for “the highest moon”; or “the night ofnights” for the most hallowed of nights. If we com-pare the English rendering “song of songs” to theGerman by Luther, we see that Luther, who had nocare for beauty, who merely wanted Germans to un-derstand the text, translated it as “das hohe Lied,”“the high lay.” So we ~nd that these two literal trans-lations make for beauty.

In fact, it might be said that literal translationsmake not only, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, foruncouthness and oddity, but also for strangeness andbeauty. This, I think, is felt by all of us; for if we lookinto a literal version of some outlandish poem, we ex-pect something strange. If we do not ~nd it, we feelsomehow disappointed.

Now we come to one of the ~nest and most famous


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English translations. I am speaking, of course, of Fitz-Gerald’s Rubáiyát by Omar Khayyám.11 The ~rststanza runs thus:

Awake! For morning in the bowl of nightHas _ung the stone that puts the stars to _ight;And, lo! the hunter of the East has caughtThe Sultan’s turret in a daze of light.

As we know, the book was discovered in a book-store by Swinburne and Rossetti. They were over-whelmed by its beauty. They knew nothing whatso-ever of Edward FitzGerald, a quite unknown man ofletters. He had tried his hand at translating Calderón,and Farid al-Din Attar’s Parliament of Birds; thesebooks were not too good. And then there came thisfamous book, now a classic.

Rossetti and Swinburne felt the beauty of the trans-lation, yet we wonder if they would have felt thisbeauty had FitzGerald presented the Rubáiyát as anoriginal (partly it was original) rather than as a trans-lation. Would they think FitzGerald should havebeen allowed to say, “Awake! For morning in thebowl of night / Has _ung the stone that puts the starsto _ight”? (The second line sends us to a footnote,which explains that to _ing a stone into a bowl is the


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sign for the departing of the caravan.) And I wonderif FitzGerald would have been allowed the “noose oflight” and the “sultan’s turret” in a poem of his own.

But I think that we can safely dwell on a singleline—a line which is to be found in one of the otherstanzas:

Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the skyI heard a voice within the tavern cry,“Awake my little ones, and ~ll the cupBefore life’s liquor in its cup be dry.”

Let us dwell on the ~rst line: “Dreaming when dawn’sleft hand was in the sky.” Of course, the keyword inthis line is the word “left.” Had any other adjectivebeen used, the line would have been meaningless. But“left hand” makes us think of something strange, ofsomething sinister. We know that the right hand is as-sociated with “right”—in other words with “righ-teousness,” with “direct,” and so on—while here wehave the ominous word “left.” Let us remember theSpanish phrase “lanzada de modo izquierdo queatraviese el corazón,” (“launched leftwards to crossthrough the heart”)—the idea of something sinister.We feel that there is something subtly wrong about“dawn’s left hand.” If the Persian was dreaming when


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dawn’s left hand was in the sky, then his dream couldbecome a nightmare at any moment. And of this weare slightly aware; we don’t have to dwell on the word“left.” For the word “left” makes all the differ-ence—so delicate and so mysterious is the art of verse.We accept “Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was inthe sky” because we suppose that there is a Persianoriginal behind it. As far as I am aware, OmarKhayyám does not bear FitzGerald out. This bringsus to an interesting problem: a literal translation hascreated a beauty all its own.

I have always wondered about the origin of literaltranslations. Nowadays we are fond of literal transla-tions; in fact, many of us accept only literal trans-lations, because we want to give every man his due.That would have seemed a crime to translators in agespast. They were thinking of something far worthier.They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as ca-pable of a great poem as the original. And I supposethat Don Juan de Jáuregui when he rendered Lucaninto Spanish, thought of that also. I don’t think anycontemporary of Pope thought about Homer and

Pope. I suppose that readers, the best readers any-how, thought of the poem in itself. They were inter-ested in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, and they had no


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care for verbal tri_es. All throughout the MiddleAges, people thought of translation not in terms of aliteral rendering but in terms of something beingre-created. Of a poet’s having read a work and thensomehow evolving that work from himself, from hisown might, from the possibilities hitherto known ofhis language.

How did literal translations begin? I do not thinkthey came out of scholarship; I do not think they cameout of scruples. I think they had a theological origin.For although people thought of Homer as the greatestof poets, still they knew that Homer was human(“quandoque dormitat bonus Homerus,” and so on),12

and so they could reshape his words. But when it cameto translating the Bible, that was something quite dif-ferent, because the Bible was supposed to have beenwritten by the Holy Ghost. If we think of the HolyGhost, if we think of the in~nite intelligence of Godundertaking a literary task, then we are not allowed tothink of any chance elements—of any haphazard ele-ments—in his work. No—if God writes a book, if Godcondescends to literature, then every word, every let-ter, as the Kabbalists said, must have been thoughtout. And it might be blasphemy to tamper with thetext written by an endless, eternal intelligence.


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Thus, I think the idea of a literal translation camefrom translations of the Bible. This is merely my guess(I suppose there are many scholars here who can cor-rect me if I make a mistake), but I think it is highlyprobable. When very ~ne translations of the Biblewere undertaken, men began to discover, began tofeel, that there was a beauty in alien ways of expres-sion. Now everybody is fond of literal translations be-cause a literal translation always gives us those smalljolts of surprise that we expect. In fact, it might besaid that no original is needed. Perhaps a time willcome when a translation will be considered as some-thing in itself. We may think of Elizabeth BarrettBrowning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Sometimes I have attempted a rather bold meta-phor, but have seen that no one would accept it if itcame from me (I am a mere contemporary), and so Ihave attributed it to some out-of-the-way Persian orNorseman. Then my friends have said that it wasquite ~ne; and of course I have never told them that Iinvented it, because I was fond of the metaphor. Afterall, the Persians or Norsemen may have invented thatmetaphor, or far better ones.

Thus, we go back to what I said at the beginning:that a translation is never judged verbally. It should be


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judged verbally, but it never is. For example (and Ihope you won’t think that I am uttering a blasphemy),I have looked very carefully (but that was forty yearsago, and I can plead the mistakes of youth) intoBaudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and into Stefan George’sBlumen des Böse. I think that of course Baudelaire wasa greater poet than Stefan George, but Stefan Georgewas a far more skillful craftsman. I think that if wecompare them line by line, we should ~nd that StefanGeorge’s Umdichtung (this is a ~ne German word thatmeans not a poem translated from another, but a poemwoven around another; we also have Nachdichtung, an“after-poem,” a translation; and Übersetzung, a meretranslation)—I think that Stefan George’s translationis perhaps better than Baudelaire’s book. But of coursethis will do Stefan George no good, since people whoare interested in Baudelaire—and I have been verymuch interested in Baudelaire—think of his words ascoming from him; that is to say, they think of the con-text of his whole life. While in the case of Stefan Georgewe have an ef~cient but rather priggish twentieth-century poet turning Baudelaire’s very words into analien language, into German.

I have spoken of the present. I say that we are bur-dened, overburdened, by our historical sense. We


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cannot look into an ancient text as the men of theMiddle Ages or the Renaissance or even the eigh-teenth century did. Now we are worried by circum-stances; we want to know exactly what Homer meantwhen he wrote about the “wine-dark sea” (if“wine-dark sea” be the right translation; I do notknow). But if we are historically minded, I think wemay perhaps suppose that a time will come when menwill be no longer as aware of history as we are. A timewill come when men shall care very little about the ac-cidents and circumstances of beauty; they shall carefor beauty itself. Perhaps they shall not even careabout the names or the biographies of the poets.

This is all to the good, when we think that there arewhole nations who think this way. For example, I donot think that in India people have the historicalsense. One of the thorns in the _esh of Europeanswho write or have written histories of Indian philoso-phy is that all philosophy is seen as contemporary bythe Indians. That is to say, they are interested in theproblems themselves, not in the mere biographicalfact or historical, chronological fact. That So-and-Sowas What’s-His-Name’s master, that he came before,that he wrote under that in_uence—all those thingsare nothing to them. They care about the riddle of the


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universe. I suppose, in a time to come (and I hope thistime is around the corner), men will care for beauty,not for the circumstances of beauty. Then we willhave translations not only as good (we have themalready) but as famous as Chapman’s Homer, asUrquhart’s Rabelais, as Pope’s Odyssey.13 I think thisis a consummation devoutly to be wished.


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T H O U G H T

A N D

P O E T R Y

Walter Pater wrote that all art aspires to the condition

of music.1 The obvious reason (I speak as a layman ofcourse) would be that, in music, form and substancecannot be torn asunder. Melody, or any piece of mu-sic, is a pattern of sounds and pauses unwinding itselfin time, a pattern that I do not suppose can be torn.The melody is merely the pattern, and the emotions itsprang from, and the emotions it awakens. The Aus-trian critic Hanslick2 wrote that music is a languagethat we can use, that we can understand, but that weare unable to translate.

In the case of literature, and especially of poetry,the case is supposed to be quite the opposite. Wemight tell the plot of The Scarlet Letter to a friend of

ours who had not read it, and I suppose we couldeven tell the pattern, the framework, the plot of, say,Yeats’s sonnet “Leda and the Swan.” So that we fall tothinking of poetry as being a bastard art, as beingsomething of a mongrel.

Robert Louis Stevenson has also spoken of thissupposed dual nature of poetry. He says that, in asense, poetry is nearer to the common man, the manin the street. For the materials of poetry are words,and those words are, he says, the very dialect of life.Words are used for everyday humdrum purposesand are the material of the poet, even as sounds arethe material of the musician. Stevenson speaks ofwords as being mere blocks, mere conveniences.Then he wonders at the poet, who is able to weavethose rigid symbols meant for everyday or abstractpurposes into a pattern, which he calls “the web.”3 Ifwe accept what Stevenson says, we have a theory ofpoetry—a theory of words’ being made by literatureto serve for something beyond their intended use.Words, says Stevenson, are meant for the commoneveryday commerce of life, and the poet somehowmakes of them something magic. I suppose I agreewith Stevenson, yet I think he may perhaps beproved wrong. We know that those lonely and admi-

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rable Norsemen, in their elegies, were able to conveyto us their loneliness, their courage, their loyalty,their feeling for the bleak seas and the bleak wars.Yet I suppose those men who wrote those poemswhich seem so near to us and come through the cen-turies—we know that those men would have beenhard put to it, had they been made to reason outsomething in prose. This is the case even with KingAlfred. His prose is straightforward; it is ef~cient forits purposes; but it rings no deep note. He tells us astory—the story may or may not be interesting, butthat is all; while there were contemporaries whowrote poetry that still rings, poetry that is still verymuch living.

Pursuing a historical argument (of course I havetaken this example at random; it might be paralleledall over the world), we ~nd that words began not bybeing abstract, but rather by being concrete—and Isuppose “concrete” means much the same thing as“poetic” in this case. Let us consider a word suchas “dreary”: the word “dreary” meant “bloodstained.”Similarly, the word “glad” meant “polished,” and theword “threat” meant “a threatening crowd.” Thosewords that now are abstract once had a strong mean-ing.


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We might go on to other examples. Let us take theword “thunder” and look back at the god Thunor, theSaxon counterpart of the Norse Thor. The wordþunor stood for thunder and for the god; but had weasked the men who came to England with Hengistwhether the word stood for the rumbling in the sky orfor the angry god, I do not think they would havebeen subtle enough to understand the difference. Isuppose that the word carried both meanings withoutcommitting itself very closely to either one of them. Isuppose that when they uttered or heard the word“thunder,” they at the same time felt the low rumblingin the sky and saw the lightning and thought of thegod. The words were packed with magic; they did nothave a hard and fast meaning.

Therefore, when speaking of poetry we may saythat poetry is not doing what Stevenson thought—poetry is not trying to take a set of logical coins andwork them into magic. Rather, it is bringing languageback to its original source. Remember that AlfredNorth Whitehead wrote that, among the many falla-cies, there is the fallacy of the perfect dictionary—thefallacy of thinking that for every perception of thesenses, for every statement, for every abstract idea,one can ~nd a counterpart, an exact symbol, in the


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dictionary. And the very fact that languages are differ-ent makes us suspect that this does not exist.

For example, in English (or rather in the Scots) wehave such words as “eerie” and “uncanny.” Thesewords cannot be found in other languages. (Well, ofcourse, we do have the German unheimlich.) Why isthis so? Because men who spoke other languages hadno need for these words—I suppose a nation evolvesthe words it needs. This observation, made byChesterton (I think in his book on Watts),4 amountsto saying that language is not, as we are led to supposeby the dictionary, the invention of academicians orphilologists. Rather, it has been evolved through time,through a long time, by peasants, by ~shermen, byhunters, by riders. It did not come from the libraries;it came from the ~elds, from the sea, from rivers, fromnight, from the dawn.

Thus, we have in language the fact (and this seemsobvious to me) that words began, in a sense, as magic.Perhaps there was a moment when the word “light”seemed to be _ashing and the word “night” was dark.In the case of “night,” we may surmise that it at ~rststood for the night itself—for its blackness, for itsthreats, for the shining stars. Then, after ever so long atime, we come to the abstract sense of the word


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“night”—the period between the twilight of the raven(as the Hebrews had it) and the twilight of the dove,the beginning of day.

Since I have spoken of the Hebrews, we might ~ndan additional example in Jewish mysticism, in theKabbalah. To the Jews, it seemed obvious there lay apower in words. This is the idea behind all those sto-ries of talismans, of Abracadabras—stories to befound in the Arabian Nights. They read in the ~rstchapter of the Torah: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’and there was light.” So it seemed obvious to themthat in the word “light” there lay a strength suf~cientto cause light to shine all over the world, a strengthsuf~cient to engender, to beget light. I have donesome thinking about this problem of thought andmeaning (a problem that of course I will not solve).We spoke earlier about the fact that in music thesound, the form, and the substance cannot be tornasunder—that they are in fact the same thing. And itmay be suspected that to a certain degree the samething happens in poetry.

Let us consider two fragments by two great poets.The ~rst comes from a short piece by the great Irishpoet William Butler Yeats: “Bodily decrepitude iswisdom; young / We loved each other and were igno-


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rant.”5 Here we ~nd at the beginning a statement:“Bodily decrepitude is wisdom.” This, of course,could be read ironically. Yeats knew quite well thatwe might attain bodily decrepitude without attainingwisdom. I suppose that wisdom is more importantthan love; love, than mere happiness. There is some-thing trivial about happiness. We get a statementabout happiness in the other part of the stanza.“Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young / We lovedeach other and were ignorant.”

Now I will take a verse by George Meredith. Itruns thus: “Not till the ~re is dying in the grate / Lookwe for any kinship with the stars.”6 This statement,taken at its face value, is false. The idea that we are allinterested in philosophy only when we are throughwith bodily lusts—or when the lusts of the body arethrough with us—is, I think, false. We know of manypassionate young philosophers; think of Berkeley, ofSpinoza, and of Schopenhauer. Yet this is quite irrele-vant. What is really important is the fact that bothfragments—“Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young /We loved each other and were ignorant,” and Mere-dith’s “Not till the ~re is dying in the grate / Look wefor any kinship with the stars”—taken in the abstractway, mean much the same thing. Yet they strike quite


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different chords. When we are told—or when I nowtell you—that they mean the same thing, you all in-stinctively and rightly feel that this is irrelevant, thatthe verses are really different.

I have suspected many a time that meaning is reallysomething added to verse. I know for a fact that wefeel the beauty of a poem before we even begin tothink of a meaning. I do not know whether I have al-ready quoted an example from one of the sonnets ofShakespeare. It runs thus:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,And the sad augurs mock their own presage;Incertainties now crown themselves assured,And peace proclaims olives of endless age.7

Now, if we look at the footnotes, we ~nd that the ~rsttwo lines—“The mortal moon hath her eclipse en-dured, / And the sad augurs mock their own pres-age”—are supposed to be an allusion to Queen Eliza-beth—the Virgin Queen, the famous queen comparedby the court poets to Diana the chaste, the maiden. Isuppose that when Shakespeare wrote these lines, hehad both moons in mind. He had that metaphor of“the moon, the Virgin Queen”; and I do not think hecould help thinking of the moon in the sky. The point I


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would like to make is that we do not have to commitourselves to a meaning—to any one of the meanings.We feel the verses before we adopt one, the other, orboth of these hypotheses. “The mortal moon hath hereclipse endured, / And the sad augurs mock their ownpresage” has, at least to me, a beauty far beyond themere fact of how it is interpreted.

There are, of course, verses that are beautiful andmeaningless. Yet they still have a meaning—not to thereason but to the imagination. Let me take a very sim-ple example: “Two red roses across the moon.”8 Hereit might be said that the meaning is the image given bythe words; but to me, at least, there is no de~nite im-age. There is a pleasure in the words, and of course inthe lilt of the words, in the music of the words. Andlet us take another example from William Morris:“‘Therefore,’ said fair Yoland of the _owers” (fairYoland is a witch) “‘This is the tune of Seven Tow-ers.’”9 These verses have been torn from their con-text, and yet I think they stand.

Somehow, though I love English, when I am recall-ing English verse I ~nd that my language, Spanish, iscalling to me. I would like to quote a few lines. If youdo not understand them, you may console yourselvesby thinking that I do not understand them either, and


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that they are meaningless. They are beautifully, in aquite lovely way meaningless; they are not meant tomean anything. They come from that too-forgottenBolivian poet Ricardo Jaimes Freire—a friend ofDarío and of Lugones. He wrote them in the last de-cade of the nineteenth century. I wish I could remem-ber the whole sonnet—I think that something of itssonorous quality would come through to you. Butthere is no need. I think that these lines should besuf~cient. They run thus:

Peregrina paloma imaginariaQue enardeces los últimos amoresAlma de luz, de música y de _oresPeregrina paloma imaginaria.10

They do not mean anything, they are not meantto mean anything; and yet they stand. They stand asa thing of beauty. They are—at least to me—inex-haustible.

And now, since I have quoted Meredith, I will takeanother example. This example is different from theothers, since it bears a meaning; we feel a convictionthat it corresponds to an experience of the poet. Andyet, had we to put our ~nger on that experience, or ifthe poet were to tell us how he came to these lines,


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how he attained them, we should be at a loss. Thelines are:

Love, that had robbed us of immortal things,This little movement mercifully gave,Where I have seen across the twilight waveThe swan sail with her young beneath her wings.11

We ~nd in the ~rst line a re_ection that may strike usas strange: “Love, that had robbed us of immortalthings”—not (as we might fairly suppose) “love thathad made us a gift of immortal things.” No —“Love,that had robbed us of immortal things, / This littlemovement mercifully gave.” We are made to feel thathe is speaking of himself and of his beloved. “Where Ihave seen across the twilight wave / The swan sailwith her young beneath her wings”: here we have thethreefold beat of the line—we do not need any anec-dotes about the swan, about how she sailed into ariver and then into Meredith’s poem, and then foreverinto my memory. We know, or at least I know, that Ihave heard something unforgettable. And I may sayof this what Hanslick said of music: I can recall it, Ican understand it (not with the mere reason—with adeeper imagination); but I cannot translate it. AndI do not think it needs any translation.


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Since I have used the word “threefold,” I am re-minded of a metaphor by a Greek poet of Alexandria.He wrote about “the lyre of the threefold night.” Thisstrikes me as being a mighty line. When I looked intothe notes, I found that the lyre was Hercules, and thatHercules had been begotten by Jupiter in a night thathad the length of three nights, so that the pleasure ofthe god might be vast. This explanation is quite irrele-vant; in fact, perhaps it rather does damage to theverse. It provides us with a small anecdote and takesaway something from that wonderful riddle, “the lyreof the threefold night.” This should be enough—theriddle. We have no need to read it. The riddle is there.

I have spoken of words standing out at the begin-ning, when men invented them. I have thought thatthe word “thunder” might mean not only the soundbut the god. And I have spoken of the word “night.”When I speak of night, I am inevitably—and happilyfor us, I think—reminded of the last sentence of the~rst book in Finnegans Wake, wherein Joyce speaks of“the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.Night!”12 This is an extreme example of an elaboratestyle. We feel that such a line could have been writtenonly after centuries of literature. We feel that the lineis an invention, a poem—a very complex web, as


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Stevenson would have had it. And yet I suspect therewas a moment when the word “night” was quite asimpressive, was quite as strange, was quite asawe-striking as this beautiful winding sentence:“rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.Night!”

Of course, there are two ways of using poetry—atleast, two opposite ways (there are many others, ofcourse). One of the ways of the poet is to use commonwords and somehow make them uncommon—toevolve magic from them. Quite a good examplewould be that very English poem, made of under-statement, by Edmund Blunden:

I have been young and now am not too old;And I have seen the righteous forsaken,His health, his honour and his quality taken.This is not what we formerly were told.13

Here we have plain words; we have a plain meaning,or at least a plain feeling—and this is more important.But the words do not stand out as they did in that lastexample from Joyce.

And in this one, which will be mere quotation. Itwill be three words. They run thus: “Glittergates ofel~nbone.”14 “Glittergates” is Joyce’s gift to us. And


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then we have “el~nbone.” Of course, when Joycewrote this, he was thinking of the German for “ivory,”Elfenbein. Elfenbein is a distortion of Elephantenbein,“elephant bone.” But Joyce saw the possibilities ofthat word, and he translated it into English; and thenwe have “el~nbone.” I think “el~n” is more beautifulthan “elfen.” Besides, as we have heard Elfenbein somany times, it does not come to us with the shock ofsurprise, with the shock of amazement, that we ~nd inthat new and elegant word “el~nbone.”

So we have two ways of writing poetry. Peoplespeak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style.I think this is wrong, because what is important, whatis all-meaning, is the fact that poetry should be livingor dead, not that the style should be plain or elabo-rate. That depends on the poet. We may have, for ex-ample, very striking poetry written plainly, and suchpoetry is, to me, no less admirable—in fact, I some-times think it is more admirable—than the other. Forexample, when Stevenson (and as I have disagreedwith Stevenson, I want to worship him now) wrote his“Requiem”:

Under the wild and starry skyDig the grave and let me lieGlad did I live and gladly die,


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And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you ’grave for me:“Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,And the hunter home from the hill.”

This verse is plain language; it is plain and living. Butalso, the poet must have worked very hard to get it. Ido not think that such lines as “Glad did I live andgladly die” come except in those very rare momentswhen the muse is generous.

I think that our idea of words’ being a mere algebraof symbols comes from dictionaries. I do not want tobe ungrateful to dictionaries—my favorite readingwould be Dr. Johnson, Dr. Skeat, and that compositeauthor, the Shorter Oxford.15 Yet I think the fact ofhaving long catalogues of words and explanationsmakes us think that the explanations exhaust thewords, and that any one of those coins, of thosewords, can be exchanged for another. But I think weknow—and the poet should feel—that every wordstands by itself, that every word is unique. And we getthis feeling when a writer uses a little-known word.For example, we think of the word “sedulous” as be-ing a rather far-fetched but interesting word. Yetwhen Stevenson—I greet him again—wrote that he


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“played the sedulous ape” to Hazlitt, then suddenlythe word comes to life.16 So this theory (it is not mine,of course—I’m sure it can be found in other authors),this idea of words’ beginning as magic and beingbrought back to magic by poetry, is, I think, a trueone.

Now we come to another, quite important ques-tion: that of conviction. When we read an author (andwe may be thinking of verse, we may be thinking ofprose—it is all one), it is essential that we should be-lieve in him. Or rather, that we should attain that“willing suspension of disbelief” of which Coleridgespoke.17 When I spoke of elaborate verses, of words’standing out, I should have remembered of course:

Weave a circle round him thrice,And close your eyes with holy dread,For he on honey-dew hath fed,And drunk the milk of Paradise.18

Let us now—and this will be our last subject—speak about this conviction that is needed both inprose and in verse. In the case of a novel, for example(and why should we not speak of the novel when weare speaking of poetry?), our conviction lies in thefact that we believe in the central character. If we be-


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lieve in him, all is well. I am not—and I hope this willnot come as a heresy to you—I am not quite sureabout the adventures of Don Quixote. I may disbe-lieve in some of them. I think some of them may beexaggerated. I feel quite sure that when the knightspoke to the squire, he was not weaving those long setspeeches. Yet such things are not important; what isreally important is the fact that I believe in Don Qui-xote himself. This is why books such as Azorín’s La

ruta de Don Quijote, or even Unamuno’s Vida de Don

Quijote y Sancho,19 strike me as somehow irrelevant,for they take the adventures too much in earnest.While I really believe in the knight himself. Even ifsomebody told me that those things had never hap-pened, I would still go on believing in Don Quixoteas I believe in the character of a friend.

I have had the luck to possess many admirablefriends, and there are many anecdotes told of them.Some of those anecdotes have—I am sorry to say, I amproud to say—been coined by myself. But they arenot false; they are essentially true. De Quincey saidthat all anecdotes are apocryphal. I think that had hecared to go deeper into the matter, he would have saidthat they are historically apocryphal but essentiallytrue. If a story is told of a man, then that story resem-


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bles him; that story is his symbol. When I think ofsuch dear friends of mine as Don Quixote, Mr. Pick-wick, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, HuckleberryFinn, Peer Gynt, and so on (I’m not sure I have manymore friends), I feel that the men who wrote their his-tories were drawing the longbow,20 but that the ad-ventures they evolved were mirrors or adjectives orattributes of those men. That is to say, if we believe inMr. Sherlock Holmes, then we may look with derisionon the hound of the Baskervilles; we need not fearhim. So I say that what is important is our believing ina character.

In the case of poetry, there might seem to be a dif-ference—for a writer works with metaphors. Themetaphors need not be believed in. What is really im-portant is the fact that we should think they corre-spond to the writer’s emotion. This is, I should say,quite suf~cient. For example, when Lugones wroteabout the sunset’s being “un violento pavo real verde,deliriado en oro,”21 there is no need to worry aboutthe likeness—or rather the unlikeness—of a sunset toa green peacock. What is important is that we aremade to feel that he was stirred by the sunset, that heneeded that metaphor to convey his feelings to us.This is what I mean by conviction in poetry.


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This has, of course, little to do with plain or elabo-rate language. When Milton writes, for example (andI am sorry to say, perhaps to reveal to you, that theseare the last lines of Paradise Regained), “hee un-observ’d / Home to his Mothers house privatereturn’d,”22 the language is plain enough, but at thesame time it is dead. While when he writes “When Iconsider how my light is spent / Ere half my days, inthis dark world,”23 the language he uses may be elabo-rate, but it is a living language. In that sense, I thinkwriters like Góngora, John Donne, William ButlerYeats, and James Joyce are justi~ed. Their words,their stanzas may be far-fetched; we may ~nd strangethings in them. But we are made to feel that the emo-tion behind those words is a true one. This should besuf~cient for us to tender them our admiration.

I have spoken of several poets today, and I am sorryto say that in the last lecture I shall be speaking of alesser poet—a poet whose works I never read, but apoet whose works I have to write. I shall speak of my-self. And I hope that you will forgive me this quite af-fectionate anticlimax.


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A

P O E T ’ S

C R E E D

My purpose was to speak about the poet’s creed, but,

looking into myself, I have found that I have only afaltering kind of creed. This creed may perhaps beuseful to me, but hardly to others.

In fact, I think of all poetic theories as being meretools for the writing of a poem. I suppose thereshould be as many creeds, as many religions, asthere are poets. Though at the end I will say some-thing about my likes and dislikes as to the writing ofpoetry, I think I will begin with some personal mem-ories, the memories not only of a writer but also ofa reader .

I think of myself as being essentially a reader. Asyou are aware, I have ventured into writing; but I

think that what I have read is far more important thanwhat I have written. For one reads what one likes—yet one writes not what one would like to write, butwhat one is able to write.

My memory carries me back to a certain eveningsome sixty years ago, to my father’s library in BuenosAires. I see him; I see the gaslight; I could place myhand on the shelves. I know exactly where to ~ndBurton’s Arabian Nights and Prescott’s Conquest ofPeru, though the library exists no longer. I go back tothat already ancient South American evening, and Isee my father. I am seeing him at this moment; and Ihear his voice saying words that I understood not, butyet I felt. Those words came from Keats, from his“Ode to a Nightingale.” I have reread them ever somany times, as you have, but I would like go overthem once more. I think this might please my father’sghost, if he is around.

The lines I remember are those that you are recall-ing at this moment:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!No hungry generations tread thee down;The voice I hear this passing night was heardIn ancient days by emperor and clown:Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

A P O E T ’ S C R E E D

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Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,She stood in tears amid the alien corn.1

I thought I knew all about words, all about language(when one is a child, one feels that one knows manythings), but those words came as a revelation to me.Of course, I did not understand them. How couldI understand those lines about birds’—about ani-mals’—being somehow eternal, timeless, because theylive in the present? We are mortal because we live inthe past and in the future—because we remember atime when we did not exist, and foresee a time when weshall be dead. Those verses came to me through theirmusic. I had thought of language as being a way of say-ing things, of uttering complaints, of saying that onewas glad, or sad, and so on. Yet when I heard thoselines (and I have been hearing them, in a sense, eversince), I knew that language could also be a music anda passion. And thus was poetry revealed to me.

I have toyed with an idea—the idea that although aman’s life is compounded of thousands and thou-sands of moments and days, those many instants andthose many days may be reduced to a single one: themoment when a man knows who he is, when he seeshimself face to face. I suppose that when Judas kissedJesus (if indeed he did so), he felt at that moment that


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he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny,and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny. We allremember The Red Badge of Courage, the story of aman who does not know whether he is a coward or abrave man. Then the moment comes and he knowswho he is. When I heard those lines of Keats’s, I sud-denly felt that that was a great experience. I have beenfeeling it ever since. And perhaps from that moment(I suppose I may exaggerate for the purposes of a lec-ture) I thought of myself as being “literary.”

That is to say, many things have happened to me, asto all men. I have found joy in many things—in swim-ming, in writing, in looking at a sunrise or a sunset, inbeing in love, and so on. But somehow the central factof my life has been the existence of words and thepossibility of weaving those words into poetry. At~rst, certainly, I was only a reader. Yet I think the hap-piness of a reader is beyond that of a writer, for areader need feel no trouble, no anxiety: he is merelyout for happiness. And happiness, when you are areader, is frequent. Thus, before I go on to speak ofmy literary output, I would like to say a few wordsabout books that have been important to me. I knowthat this list will abound in omissions, as all lists do. Infact, the danger of making a list is that the omissions


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stand out and that people think of you as being insen-sitive.

I spoke a few moments ago about Burton’s Arabian

Nights. When I really think about the Arabian Nights,

I am thinking not of those many, and ponderous, andpedantic (or rather stilted) volumes, but of what Imay call the true Arabian Nights—the Arabian Nights

of Galland and, perhaps, of Edward William Lane.2 Ihave done most of my reading in English; most bookshave come to me through the English language, andI am deeply grateful for that privilege.

When I think of the Arabian Nights, the ~rst feel-ing I have is one of vast freedom. Yet at the same timeI know that the book, though vast and free, is limitedto a few patterns. For example, the number three oc-curs in it very frequently. And we have no characters,or rather _at characters (except perhaps for the silentbarber). Then we have evil men and good men, re-wards and punishments, magic rings and talismans,and so on.

Though we are apt to think of mere size as beingsomehow brutal, I think there are many books whoseessence lies in their being lengthy. For example, in thecase of the Arabian Nights, we need to think that thebook is a large one, that the story goes on, that we


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may never come to the end of it. We may never havegone through all the thousand and one nights, but thefact that they are there somehow lends wideness tothe whole thing. We know that we can delve deeper,that we can roam on, and that the marvels, the magi-cians, the three beautiful sisters, and so on will alwaysbe there, awaiting us.

There are other books I would like to recall—Huckleberry Finn, for instance, which was one of thevery ~rst I read. I have reread it ever so many timessince, and also Roughing It (the ~rst days in Califor-nia), Life on the Mississippi, and so on. Had I to ana-lyze Huckleberry Finn, I would say that, in order tocreate a great book, perhaps only one central and verysimple fact is needed: there should be somethingpleasing to the imagination in the very framework ofthe book. In the case of Huckleberry Finn, we feel thatthe idea of the black man, of the boy, of the raft, of theMississippi, of the long nights—that these ideas aresomehow agreeable to the imagination, are acceptedby the imagination.

I would also like to say something about Don Qui-

xote. It was one of the ~rst books I ever read through.I remember the very engravings. One knows so littleabout oneself that, when I read Don Quixote, I


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thought I read it because of the pleasure I found inthe archaic style and in the adventures of the knightand the squire. Now I think that my pleasure lay else-where—that it came from the character of the knight.I am not sure now that I believe in the adventures, orin the conversations between the knight and thesquire; but I know that I believe in the knight’s char-acter, and I suppose that the adventures were in-vented by Cervantes in order to show us the characterof the hero.

The same might be said of another book that onemay call a minor classic. The same might be said ofMr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. I am not sure Ibelieve in the hound of the Baskervilles. I am sure Ido not believe in being terri~ed by a dog painted overwith luminous paint. But I am sure that I believe inMr. Sherlock Holmes and in the strange friendshipbetween him and Dr. Watson.

Of course, one never knows what the future mightbring. I suppose the future will bring all things in thelong run, and so we may imagine a moment whenDon Quixote and Sancho, Sherlock Holmes and Dr.Watson will still exist, though all their adventures mayhave been blotted out. Yet men, in other languages,may still go on inventing stories to ~t those charac-


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ters—stories that should be as mirrors to the charac-ters. This, for all I know, may happen.

Now I will jump over the years and go to Geneva. Iwas then a very unhappy young man. I suppose youngmen are fond of unhappiness; they do their best to beunhappy, and they generally achieve it. Then I discov-ered an author who doubtless was a very happy man.It must have been in that I came to Walt Whit-man, and then I felt ashamed of my unhappiness. Ifelt ashamed, for I had tried to be still more unhappyby reading Dostoevsky. Now that I have reread WaltWhitman, and also biographies of him, I suppose thatperhaps when Walt Whitman read his Leaves of Grass

he may have said to himself: “Oh! if only I were WaltWhitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son!”3 Becausedoubtless he was a very different kind of man. Doubt-less he evolved “Walt Whitman” from himself—akind of fantastic projection.

At the same time, I also discovered a very differ-ent writer . I also discovered—and I was also over-whelmed by—Thomas Carlyle. I read Sartor Resartus,

and I can recall many of its pages; I know them byheart. Carlyle sent me to the study of German. I re-member I bought Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo and aGerman-English dictionary. After a while, I found I


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could dispense with the dictionary and could go onreading about his nightingales, his moons, his pinetrees, his love, and so on.

But what I really wanted and did not ~nd at thetime was the idea of Germanism. The idea, I suppose,was evolved not by the Germanic people themselvesbut by a Roman gentleman, Tacitus. I was led by Car-lyle to think that I could ~nd it in German literature. Ifound many other things; I am very grateful to Carlylefor having sent me to Schopenhauer, to Hölderlin, toLessing, and so on. But the idea I had—the idea ofmen not at all intellectual but given over to loyalty, tobravery, to a manly submission to fate—this I did not~nd, for example, in the Nibelungenlied. All of thatseemed too romantic for me. I was to ~nd it years andyears afterwards in the Norse sagas and in the study ofOld English poetry.

There I found at last what I had been looking forwhen I was a young man. In Old English I discovereda harsh language, but a language whose harshnessmade for a certain kind of beauty and also for verydeep feeling (even if, perhaps, not very deep think-ing). In poetry, feeling is enough, I suppose. If thefeeling comes through to you, it should be suf~cient. Iwas led to the study of Old English by my inclination


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to the metaphor. I had read in Lugones that the meta-phor was the essential element of literature, and I ac-cepted that dictum. Lugones wrote that all wordswere originally metaphors. This is true, but it is alsotrue that in order to understand most words, you haveto forget about the fact of their being metaphors. Forexample, if I say, “Style should be plain,” then I don’tthink we should remember that “style” (stylus) meant“pen,” and that “plain” means “_at,” because in thatcase we would never understand it.

Allow me to go back again to my boyhood daysand remember other authors who struck me. I won-der if it has been often remarked that Poe and OscarWilde are really writers for boys. At least, the storiesof Poe impressed me when I was a boy, yet now I canhardly reread them without feeling rather uncomfort-able over the style of the author. In fact, I can quiteunderstand what Emerson meant when he called Ed-gar Allan Poe the “jingle” man. I suppose that thisfact of being a writer for boys might be applied tomany other writers. In some cases, such a descriptionis unjust—in the case of Stevenson, for example, or ofKipling; for although they write for boys, they alsowrite for men. But there are other writers whom onemust read when one is young, because if one comes to


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them when one is old and gray and full of days, thenthe reading of those writers can hardly be pleasant. Itmay be blasphemy to say that in order to enjoyBaudelaire and Poe we should be young. Afterwardsit is dif~cult. One has to put up with so many things;one has to think of history, and so on.

As to the metaphor, I should add that I nowsee that metaphor is a far more complicated thingthan I thought. It is not merely a comparing of onething to another—saying, “the moon is like . . . ,” andso on. No—it may be done in a more subtle way.Think of Robert Frost. You of course remember thelines:

For I have promises to keepAnd miles to go before I sleepAnd miles to go before I sleep.

If we take the last two lines, the ~rst—“And miles togo before I sleep”—is a statement: the poet is think-ing of miles and of sleep. But when he repeats it,“And miles to go before I sleep,” the line becomes ametaphor; for “miles,” stands for “days,” for “years,”for a long stretch of time, while “sleep” presumablystands for “death.” Perhaps I am doing no good forus by pointing this out. Perhaps the pleasure lies not


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in our translating “miles” into “years” and “sleep”into “death,” but rather in feeling the implication.

The same thing might be said of that other very ~nepoem of his, “Acquainted with the Night.” In the be-ginning, “I have been one acquainted with the night”may mean literally what he is telling us. But the linecomes again at the end:

O luminary clock against the sky,Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night.

Then we are made to think of the night as an image ofevil—of sexual evil, I suppose.

I spoke a moment ago about Don Quixote, andabout Sherlock Holmes; I said that I could believe inthe characters but not in their adventures, and hardlyin the words that the authors put in their mouths.Now we wonder whether we could ~nd a book wherethe exact contrary occurred. Could we ~nd a book inwhose characters we disbelieved but where we mightbelieve the story? Here I remember another bookthat struck me: I remember Melville’s Moby-Dick. Iam not sure if I believe in Captain Ahab, I am not surethat I believe in his feud with the white whale; I canhardly tell the characters apart. Yet I believe in the


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story—that is, I believe in it as in a kind of parable(though I don’t exactly know what it’s a parableof—perhaps a parable of the struggle against evil, ofthe wrong way of ~ghting evil). I wonder if there areany books of which this might be said. In The Pil-

grim’s Progress, I think I believe both in the allegoryand in the characters. This should be looked into.

Remember that the Gnostics said the only way tobe rid of a sin is to commit it, because afterwards yourepent it. In regard to literature, they were essentiallyright. If I have attained the happiness of writing fouror ~ve tolerable pages, after writing ~fteen intolerablevolumes, I have come to that feat not only throughmany years but also through the method of trial anderror. I think I have committed not all the possiblemistakes—because mistakes are innumerable—butmany of them.

For example, I began, as most young men do, bythinking that free verse is easier than the regular formsof verse. Today I am quite sure that free verse is farmore dif~cult than the regular and classic forms. Theproof—if proof be needed—is that literature beginswith verse. I suppose the explanation would be thatonce a pattern is evolved—a pattern of rhymes, of as-sonances, of alliterations, of long and short syllables,


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and so on—you only have to repeat the pattern. While,if you attempt prose (and prose, of course, comes longafter verse), then you need, as Stevenson pointed out, amore subtle pattern. Because the ear is led to expectsomething, and then it does not get what it expects.Something else is given to it; and that something elseshould be, in a sense, a failure and also a satisfaction.So that unless you take the precaution of being WaltWhitman or Carl Sandburg, then free verse is moredif~cult. At least I have found, now when I am near myjourney’s end, that the classic forms of verse are easier.Another facility, another easiness, may lie in the factthat once you have written a certain line, once you haveresigned yourself to a certain line, then you have com-mitted yourself to a certain rhyme. And since rhymesare not in~nite, your work is made easier for you.

Of course, what is important is what is behind theverse. I began by trying—as all young men do—todisguise myself. At ~rst, I was so mistaken that at thetime I read Carlyle and Whitman, I thought thatCarlyle’s way of writing prose was the only possibleone, and that Whitman’s way of writing verse was theonly possible one. I made no attempt whatever to rec-oncile the very strange fact that two opposite men hadattained the perfection of prose and of verse.


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When I began writing, I always said to myself thatmy ideas were very shallow—that if a reader sawthrough them, he would despise me. And so I dis-guised myself. In the beginning, I tried to be aseventeenth-century Spanish writer with a certainknowledge of Latin. My knowledge of Latin was quiteslight. I do not think of myself now as a seventeenth-century Spanish writer, and my attempts to be SirThomas Browne in Spanish failed utterly. Or perhapsthey evolved quite a dozen ~ne-sounding lines. Ofcourse, I was out for purple patches. Now I think thatpurple patches are a mistake. I think they are a mistakebecause they are a sign of vanity, and the reader thinksof them as being signs of vanity. If the reader thinksthat you have moral defect, there is no reason whateverwhy he should admire you or put up with you.

Then I fell into a very common mistake: I did mybest to be—of all things—modern. There is a charac-ter in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre who says:“Well, you may say of me what you like, but nobodywill deny that I am a contemporary.” I see no differ-ence between that quite absurd character in Goethe’snovel and the wish to be modern. Because we aremodern; we don’t have to strive to be modern. It isnot a case of subject matter or of style.


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If you look into Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or (totake a very different example) into Flaubert’sSalammbô, you may tell the date when those bookswere written. Though Flaubert spoke of Salammbô asa “roman cartaginois,” any reader worth his salt willknow after reading the ~rst page that the book wasnot written in Carthage, but was written by a very in-telligent Frenchman of the nineteenth century. As forIvanhoe, we are not taken in by the castles and theknights and the Saxon swineherds and so on. All thetime, we know that we are reading an eighteenth- ornineteenth-century author.

Besides, we are modern by the very simple fact thatwe live in the present. Nobody has yet discovered theart of living in the past, and not even the futuristshave discovered the secret of living in the future. Weare modern whether we want to be or not. Perhapsthe very fact of my attacking modernity now is a wayof being modern.

When I began writing stories, I did my best to trickthem out. I labored over the style, and sometimesthose stories were hidden under the many over-layings. For example, I thought of a quite good plot;then I wrote the story “El inmortal.”4 The idea behindthat story—and the idea might come as a surprise to


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any of you who have read the story—is that if a manwere immortal, then in the long run (and the runwould be long, of course), he would have said allthings, done all things, written all things. I took as myexample Homer; I thought of him (if indeed he ex-isted) as having written his Iliad. Then Homer wouldgo on living, and he would change as the generationsof men have changed. Eventually, of course, he wouldforget his Greek, and in due time he would forget thathe had been Homer. A moment may come when wewill think of Pope’s translation of Homer as being notonly a ~ne work of art (indeed it is), but as being trueto the original. This idea of Homer forgetting that hewas Homer is hidden under the many structures Iwove around the book. In fact, when I reread thatstory a couple of years ago, I found it a weariness ofthe _esh, and I had to go back to my old plan to seethat the story would have been quite good had I beencontent to write it down simply and not permit somany purple patches and so many strange adjectivesand metaphors.

I think I have come not to a certain wisdom butperhaps to a certain sense. I think of myself as awriter. What does being a writer mean to me? Itmeans simply being true to my imagination. When I


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write something, I think of it not as being factuallytrue (mere fact is a web of circumstances and acci-dents), but as being true to something deeper. WhenI write a story, I write it because somehow I believe init—not as one believes in mere history, but rather asone believes in a dream or in an idea.

I think perhaps we may be led astray by one of thestudies I value most: the study of the history of litera-ture. I wonder (and I hope this is not blasphemy) ifwe are not too aware of history. Being aware of thehistory of literature—or of any other art, for that mat-ter—is really a form of unbelieving, a form of skepti-cism. If I say to myself, for example, that Wordsworthand Verlaine were very good nineteenth-century po-ets, then I may fall into the danger of thinking thattime has somehow destroyed them, that they are notas good now as they were. I think the ancientidea—that we might allow perfection to art withouttaking into account the dates—was a braver one.

I have read several histories of Indian philosophy.The authors (Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen,Americans, and so on) always wonder at the fact that inIndia people have no historical sense—that they treatall thinkers as if they were contemporary. They trans-late the words of ancient philosophy into the modern


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jargon of today’s philosophy. But this stands for some-thing brave. This stands for the idea that one believes

in philosophy or that one believes in poetry—thatthings beautiful once can go on being beautiful still.

Though I suppose I am being quite unhistoricalwhen I say this (since of course the meanings and con-notations of words are changing), still I think there arelines—for example, when Virgil wrote “Ibant obscurisola sub nocte per umbram”5 (I wonder if I am scan-ning this as I should—my Latin is very rusty), or whenan old English poet wrote “Norþan sniwde . . . ,”6 orwhen we read “Music to hear, why hear’st thou musicsadly? / Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights injoy”7—where somehow we are beyond time. I thinkthat there is an eternity in beauty; and this, of course, iswhat Keats had in mind when he wrote “A thing ofbeauty is a joy forever.”8 We accept this verse, but weaccept it as a kind of right, as a kind of formula. Some-times I am courageous and hopeful enough to thinkthat it may be true—that though all men write in time,are involved in circumstances and accidents and fail-ures of time, somehow things of eternal beauty may beachieved.

When I write, I try to be loyal to the dream and notto the circumstances. Of course, in my stories (people


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tell me I should speak about them) there are truecircumstances, but somehow I have felt that those cir-cumstances should always be told with a certainamount of untruth. There is no satisfaction in telling astory as it actually happened. We have to changethings, even if we think them insigni~cant; if we don’t,we should think of ourselves not as artists but per-haps as mere journalists or historians. Though I sup-pose all true historians have known that they can bequite as imaginative as novelists. For example, whenwe read Gibbon, the pleasure we get from him isquite akin to the pleasure we get from reading a greatnovelist. After all, he knew very little about his char-acters. I suppose he had to imagine the circum-stances. He must have thought of himself as havingcreated, in a sense, the decline and fall of the RomanEmpire. And he did it so wonderfully that I do notcare to accept any other explanation.

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not thinkthey need it, because everyone has to ~nd out thingsfor himself), I would tell them simply this: I would askthem to tamper as little as they can with their ownwork. I do not think tinkering does any good. The mo-ment comes when one has found out what one cando—when one has found one’s natural voice, one’s


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rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendationsshould prove useful.

When I write, I do not think of the reader (becausethe reader is an imaginary character), and I do notthink of myself (perhaps I am an imaginary characteralso), but I think of what I am trying to convey and I domy best not to spoil it. When I was young, I believed inexpression. I had read Croce, and the reading of Crocedid me no good. I wanted to express everything. Ithought, for example, that if I needed a sunset I should~nd the exact word for a sunset—or rather, the mostsurprising metaphor. Now I have come to the conclu-sion (and this conclusion may sound sad) that I no lon-ger believe in expression: I believe only in allusion.After all, what are words? Words are symbols forshared memories. If I use a word, then you should havesome experience of what the word stands for. If not,the word means nothing to you. I think we can only al-lude, we can only try to make the reader imagine. Thereader, if he is quick enough, can be satis~ed with ourmerely hinting at something.

This makes for ef~ciency—and in my own case italso makes for laziness. I have been asked why I havenever attempted a novel. Laziness, of course, is the~rst explanation. But there is another one. I have


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never read any novel without feeling a certain weari-ness. Novels include padding; I think padding may bean essential part of the novel, for all I know. Yet I haveread many short stories over and over again. I ~ndthat in a short story by, for example, Henry James orRudyard Kipling you get quite as much complexity,and in a more pleasurable way, as you may get out ofa long novel.

I think that this is what my creed comes to. WhenI promised “a poet’s creed,” I thought, very credu-lously, that once I had given ~ve lectures I would, inthe process, have evolved a creed of some kind. But Ithink I owe it to you to say that I have no particularcreed, except those few precautions and misgivings Ihave been talking to you about.

When I am writing something, I try not to under-stand it. I do not think intelligence has much to dowith the work of a writer. I think that one of the sinsof modern literature is that it is too self-conscious.For example, I think of French literature as being oneof the great literatures in the world (I don’t supposeanybody could doubt this). Yet I have been made tofeel that French authors are generally too self-con-scious. A French writer begins by de~ning himself be-fore he quite knows what he is going to write. He says:


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What should (for example) a Catholic born insuch-and-such province, and being a bit of a socialist,write? Or: How should we write after the SecondWorld War? I suppose there are many people all overthe world who labor under those illusory problems.

When I write (of course, I may not be a fair exam-ple, but merely an awful warning), I try to forget allabout myself. I forget about my personal circum-stances. I do not try, as I tried once, to be a “SouthAmerican writer.” I merely try to convey what thedream is. And if the dream be a dim one (in my case,it usually is), I do not try to beautify it, or even to un-derstand it. Maybe I have done well, for every time Iread an article about me—and somehow there seemto be quite a lot of people doing that sort of thing—Iam generally amazed and very grateful for the deepmeanings that have been read into those quite hap-hazard jottings of mine. Of course, I am grateful tothem, for I think of writing as being a kind of collabo-ration. That is to say, the reader does his part of thework; he is enriching the book. And the same thinghappens when one is lecturing.

You may think now and then that you have heard agood lecture. In that case, I must congratulate you, be-cause, after all, you have been working with me. Had it


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not been for you, I don’t think the lectures would haveseemed particularly good, or even tolerable. I hopethat you have been collaborating with me tonight. Andsince this night is different from other nights, I wouldlike to say something about myself.

I came to America six months ago. In my country Iam practically (to repeat the title of a famous book byWells) the Invisible Man.9 Here, I am somehow visible.Here, people have read me—they have read me somuch that they cross-examine me on stories I have for-gotten all about. They ask me why So-and-So was si-lent before he answered, and I wonder who So-and-Sowas, why he was silent, what he answered. I hesitate totell them the truth. I say that So-and-So was silent be-fore he answered because generally one is silent beforeone answers. And yet, all these things have made mehappy. I think you are quite mistaken if you admire (Iwonder if you do) my writing. But I think of it as a verygenerous mistake. I think that one should try to believein things even if they let you down afterwards.

If I am joking now, I do so because I feel somethingwithin me. I am joking because I really feel what thismeans to me. I know that I shall look back on thisnight. I will wonder: Why did not I say what I shouldhave said? Why did not I say what these months in


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America have meant to me—what all these unknownand known friends have meant to me? But I supposethat somehow my feeling is coming through to you.

I have been asked to say some verses of mine; so Iwill go over a sonnet, the sonnet on Spinoza. The factthat many of you may have no Spanish will make it a~ner sonnet. As I have said, meaning is not impor-tant—what is important is a certain music, a certainway of saying things. Maybe, though the music maynot be there, you will feel it. Or rather, since I knowyou are very kind, you will invent it for me.

Now we come to the sonnet, “Spinoza”:

Las traslúcidas manos del judíoLabran en la penumbra los cristalesY la tarde que muere es miedo y frío.(Las tardes a las tardes son iguales.)Las manos y el espacio de jacintoQue palidece en el confín del GhettoCasi no existen para el hombre quietoQue está soñando un claro laberinto.No lo turba la fama, ese re_ejoDe sueños en el sueño de otro espejoY el temeroso amor de las doncellas.Libre de la metáfora y del mito,Labra un arduo o cristal: el in~nitoMapa de Aquél que es todas Sus estrellas.10


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N O T E S

“ O F T H I S A N D T H A T V E R S A T I L E C R A F T ”

I N D E X

N O T E S

Unless otherwise stated, all translations used in this bookare by the editor.

. The Riddle of Poetry

. William Shakespeare, Sonnet .. Borges is no doubt thinking of Plato’s Phaedrus (sec-

tion d), where Socrates says: “I cannot help feeling,Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for thecreations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet ifyou ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence”(trans. Benjamin Jowett). According to Socrates, thingsshould be taught and communicated orally; this is “the trueway of writing” (b). To write with pen and ink is to write“in water,” since the words cannot defend themselves. Thespoken word—“the living word of knowledge, which has asoul”—is thus superior to the written word, which is noth-ing more than its image. The words written with pen andink are as defenseless as those who trust them.

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. Rafael Cansinos-Asséns is the Andalusian writer ofwhose “magni~cent memories” Borges never tired of speak-ing. While in Madrid in the early s, the young Argentinefrequented his literary circle (tertulia). “Meeting him, Iseemed to encounter the libraries of the Orient and of theWest” (Roberto Alifano, Conversaciones con Borges [Bue-nos Aires: Debate, ], –). Cansinos-Asséns, whoboasted that he could salute the stars in fourteen languages(or seventeen, as Borges says on another occasion)—bothclassical and modern—did translations from French, Ara-bic, Latin, and Hebrew. See Jorge Luis Borges and OswaldoFerrari, Diálogos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, ), .

. Macedonio Fernández (–) was a proponentof absolute idealism who exerted a steady fascination uponBorges. He was one of the two authors whom Borges com-pared to Adam for their sense of a beginning (the other wasWhitman). This most unconventional Argentine declared,“I write only because writing helps me think.” He pro-duced a large number of poems (collected in Poesíascompletas, ed. Carmen de Mora [Madrid: Visor, ]) anda great deal of prose, including Una novela que comienza (ANovel That Begins), Papelas de recienvenido: Continuaciónde la nada (Papers of the Recently Arrived: A Continua-tion of Nothing), Museo de la novela de la eterna: Primeranovela buena (Museum of the Novel of the Eternal: TheFirst Good Novel), Manera de una psique sin cuerpo (Man-ner of a Bodiless Psyche), and Adriana Buenos Aires:Última novela mala (Adriana Buenos Aires: The Last Bad

Novel). Borges and Fernández cofounded the literary jour-nal Proa in .

. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act , scene , lines –.. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Inclusiveness,” Sonnet , in

Rossetti, Poems, st ed. (London: Ellis, ), .. Heraclitus, Fragment , in The Fragments of the

Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, trans. IngramBywater (Baltimore: N. Murray, ). See also Plato,Cratylus, a; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, a, n.

. Robert Browning (–), “Bishop Blougram’sApology,” lines –.

. Borges’ poem “To Rafael Cansinos-Asséns” runs thus:

Long and ~nal passage over the breathtaking height of thetrestle’s span.

At our feet the wind gropes for sails and the stars throb in-tensely.

We relish the taste of the night, trans~xed bydarkness-night become now, again, a habit of our _esh.The ~nal night of our talking before the sea-miles part us.Still ours is the silencewhere, like meadows, the voices glitter.Dawn is still a bird lost in the most distant vileness of the

world.This last night of all, sheltered from the great wind of ab-

sence.The inwardness of Good-bye is tragic,like that of every event in which Time is manifest.It is bitter to realize that we shall not even have the stars in

common.

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When evening is quietness in my patio,from your pages morning will rise.Your winter will be the shadow of my summer,and your light the glory of my shadow.Still we persist together.Still our two voices achieve understandinglike the intensity and tenderness of sundown.

Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, in Jorge Luis Borges, Se-lected Poems, –, ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni(New York: Delacorte, ), , .

. The Seafarer, ed. Ida Gordon (Manchester: Man-chester University Press, ), , lines b–a. Borges’translation “rime bound the ~elds” avoids the repetition of“earth” present in the original. A literal translation wouldbe: “rime bound the earth.”

. This famous quotation (“Quid est ergo tempus? Sinemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim,nescio”) is from Augustine’s Confessions, ..

. The Metaphor

. Leopoldo Lugones (–), a major Argentinewriter of the early twentieth century, was initially a modern-ist. His Lunario sentimental (Sentimental Moonery) (Bue-nos Aires: Moen, ) is an eclectic volume of poetry, shortstories, and plays that revolve around the theme of themoon; it caused a scandal when it came out, both for break-ing with the already established highbrow modernismo andfor mocking the audiences of this trend. Lugones is often

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quoted and commented on in Borges’ works. See, for exam-ple, Borges, “Leopoldo Lugones, El imperio jesuítico,” Bib-lioteca personal, in Obras completas, vol. (Buenos Aires:Emecé Editores, ), –, where Lugones is de-scribed as “a man of elemental convictions and passions.”

. Borges is referring to An Etymological Dictionary ofthe English Language, by the Reverend Walter W. Skeat,which was ~rst published in Oxford, England, –.

. What we know today as the Greek Anthology consistsof about , short poems by some authors, repre-senting Greek literature from the seventh century B.C. tothe tenth century A.D. These are preserved mainly in twooverlapping collections, the Palatine Anthology (which wascompiled in the tenth century and takes its name from thePalatine Library in Heidelberg) and the Planudean Anthol-ogy (which dates from the fourteenth century and is namedfor the rhetorician and compiler Maximus Planudes). ThePlanudean Anthology was ~rst printed in Florence in ;the Palatine Anthology was rediscovered in .

. G. K. Chesterton (–), “A Second Child-hood,” in The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (Lon-don: Cecil Palmer, ), (stanza ).

. Andrew Lang, Alfred Tennyson, nd ed. (Edinburgh:Blackwood, ), . Lang actually says that the line isfrom Tennyson’s poem “The Mystic,” published in 1830.

. Of Time and the River, by Thomas Wolfe, was ~rstpublished in .

. Heraclitus, Fragment , in The Fragments of the

Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, trans. IngramBywater (Baltimore: N. Murray, ). See also Plato,Cratylus, a; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, a, n.

. Jorge Manrique (–), “Coplas de Don JorgeManrique por la muerte de su padre,” stanza , lines –.For a reprint, see Manrique, Poesía, ed. Jesús-Manuel AldaTesán, th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, ).

. Longfellow’s translation runs:

Our lives are rivers, gliding freeTo that unfathomed, boundless sea,The silent grave!Thither all earthly pomp and boastRoll, to be swallowed up and lostIn one dark wave.

. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act , scene , lines –: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and ourlittle life / Is rounded with a sleep.”

. Walther von der Vogelweide was a German medievalpoet (c.–c.), one of the twelve “apostles” of thebards (zwöllf Schirmherrenden Meistersängers). The ~rstthree lines of his poem “Die Elegie” (The Elegy) read:

Owêr sint verswundenist mir mîn leben getroumet,daz ich ie wânde ez wære.

In Walther von der Vogelweide, Gedichte: Mittelhoch-deutscher Text und Übertragung, ed. Peter Wapnewski

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(Frankfurt: Fischer, ), . Borges’ version of the quoteis half in Middle High German, half in modern German.

. There is no reference to “iron sleep” among theninety-one occurrences of “sleep” listed in a concordanceto Homer. Borges may be thinking of Virgil’s Aeneid, inJohn Dryden’s translation: “Dire dreams to thee, and ironsleep, he bears” (Book , line ); “An iron sleep his stu-pid eyes oppress’d” (Book , line ).

. Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve-ning,” stanza , lines –.

. Among other achievements, León Dujovne trans-lated the Sepher Ietzirah from Hebrew into Spanish.

. See “Beowulf” and the Finnesburg Fragment, trans-lated into modern English by John R. Clark Hall (London:Allen and Unwin, ).

. From Poem of E. E. Cummings’ collection W(ViVa), published in (when Cummings was thirty-seven). Borges quotes the ~rst four lines of the third stanza.

. Farid al-Din Attar (died ca. ) was the author ofMantiq al-tayr, in English The Conference of the Birds,trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, ). Omar Khayyám (_. eleventh cen-tury) was the author of the Rubáiyát, translated in byEdward FitzGerald, whose version subsequently wentthrough many editions. Ha~z of Shiraz (died –)was the author of Divan, translated from the Persian byGertrude Lowthian Bell (London: Octagon Press, ).

. Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea (Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday Page, ), . The quote is from Dean Bur-gon’s poem “Petra” (), which echoes Samuel Rogers’“Italy: A Farewell” (): “many a temple half as old asTime.”

. Shakespeare, Sonnet .. A kenning (plural kenningar) is a multi-noun para-

phrase used in place of a single noun. Kenningar are com-mon in Old Germanic verse, especially in skaldic poetry,and to a lesser extent in Eddic literature. Borges discussedsuch phrases in his essay “Las kenningar,” part of Lahistoria de la eternidad (The History of Eternity; ), andin Literaturas germánicas medievales (Germanic MedievalLiteratures; ), written with María Esther Vázquez.

. This is the ~rst line of Byron’s eighteen-line poem“She Walks in Beauty, Like the Night,” ~rst published inhis collection Hebrew Melodies (), a series of songs tobe set to adaptations of traditional Jewish tunes by the mu-sician Isaac Nathan.

. The Telling of the Tale

. William Wordsworth, “With Ships the Sea Was Sprin-kled Far and Nigh,” collected in his volume Poems, .

. William Shakespeare, Sonnet .. Homer, The Iliad: The Story of Achillês, trans. William

H. D. Rouse (New York: New American Library, ).. See Borges, “Las kenningar,” in La historia de la

eternidad (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, ), whichdeals extensively with Snorri Sturluson (–), the Ice-

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landic master of the Edda. Borges’ poem dedicated to himruns thus:

You, who bequeathed a mythologyOf ice and ~re to ~lial recall,Who chronicled the violent gloryOf your de~ant Germanic stock,Discovered in amazement one nightOf swords that your untrustworthy _eshTrembled. On that night without sequelYou realized you were a coward. . . .In the darkness of Iceland the saltWind moves the mounting sea. Your house isSurrounded. You have drunk to the dregsUnforgettable dishonor. OnYour head, your sickly face, falls the sword,As it fell so often in your book.

Translated by Richard Howard and César Rennert, in JorgeLuis Borges, Selected Poems, – (bilingual edition),ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (New York: Delacorte,), .

. See Samuel Butler (–), The Authoress of the“Odyssey,” Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, theUse She Made of the “Iliad,” and How the Poem Grew underHer Hands, ed. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, ).

. Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part I, Act ,scene , lines –: “those blessed feet / Which fourteenhundred years ago were nail’d / For our advantage on thebitter cross.”

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. William Langland (?–?), The Vision of Piersthe Plowman, ed. Kate M. Warren (London: T. FisherUnwin, ).

. Henry James, The Aspern Papers (London: MartinSecker, ).

. Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Nib-lungs, ed. H. Halliday Sparling, translated from the Icelan-dic by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris (London: W.Scott, ).

. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph(London: J. Cape, ).

. Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: Journal d’une escouade(Paris: Flammarion, ).

. G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse”(), in The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (London:Cecil Palmer, ), . This is a long poem of some

stanzas. Borges quotes from Book , stanza .

. Word-Music and Translation

. That prose translation was published in the Contem-porary Review (London), November .

. Tennyson, “The Battle of Brunanburh,” in The Com-plete Poetical Works of Tennyson (Boston: HoughtonMif_in, ), (stanza , lines –).

. This is the ~rst of the eight stanzas of San Juan’s“Noche oscura del alma,” or, as the Golden Age Castilianhas it, “Canciones de el alma que se goza de aver llegado alalto estado de la perfectión, que es la unión con Dios, por

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el camino de la negación espiritual.” E. Allison Peers trans-lates it as:

Upon a darksome night,Kindling with love in _ame of yearning keen—O moment of delight!—I went by all unseen,New-hush’d to rest in the house where I had been.

Saint John of the Cross (–), The Spiritual Canticleand Poems, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: Burns andOates, ), . Willis Barnstone’s translation runs:

On a black night,starving for love and dark in _ames,Oh lucky turn and _ight!unseen I slipped away,my house at last was calm and safe.

Saint John of the Cross, The Poems of Saint John of theCross, trans. Willis Barnstone (New York: New Directions,), .

. Symons translated it as “The Obscure Night of theSoul.” See William Butler Yeats, ed., The Oxford Book ofModern Verse, – (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, ), –.

. Roy Campbell, Collected Poems (London: BodleyHead, ; rpt. ), –. Campbell takes the ~rstphrase of the Spanish original as the title of his translation:“En una noche oscura.”

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. The phrase “grand translateur” comes from a bal-lade by Eustache Deschamps, Chaucer’s French contem-porary. The refrain is: “et translateur, noble GeoffroyChaucier.”

. This is the ~rst line of Chaucer’s “Parlement ofFowles.”

. Tennyson, “The Battle of Brunanburh,” in The Com-plete Poetical Works, (stanza , lines –).

. According to tradition, Hengist and Horsa werebrothers who led the Jutish invasion of Britain in themid-~fth century and founded the kingdom of Kent.

. Francis William Newman (–) not only was aclassical scholar and translator, but wrote extensively on re-ligion, politics, philosophy, economics, morality, and othersocial issues. His translation of the Iliad was published in (London: Walton and Maberly).

. Omar Khayyám (?–), Rubáiyát, trans. Ed-ward FitzGerald (–), ed. Carl J. Weber (Waterville,Maine: Colby College Press, ). FitzGerald’s versionwas ~rst published in London in .

. The line is from Horace, Ars poetica, : “Indignorquandoque bonus dormitat Homerus” (“I’m aggrievedwhen sometimes even excellent Homer nods”).

. George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad waspublished in ; his Odyssey, in –. ThomasUrquhart (or Urchard) published his translation of the ~vevolumes of Rabelais between and . AlexanderPope’s translation of the Odyssey appeared in –.

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. Thought and Poetry

. “All art constantly aspires towards the condition ofmusic.” Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in Pater,Studies in the History of the Renaissance ().

. Eduard Hanslick (–), Austrian music critic,was the author of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, ~rst publishedin . In English: The Beautiful in Music, trans. GustavCohen (London: Novello, ).

. See Stevenson’s essay “On Some Technical Elements ofStyle in Literature” (section , “The Web”), in Robert LouisStevenson, Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing (NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), –, esp. and: “The motive and end of any art whatever is to make apattern. . . . The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sen-suous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that isstyle, that is the foundation of the art of literature.”

. G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth,). Borges may be thinking of pp. –, where Chester-ton discusses signs, symbols, and the mutability of language.

. William Butler Yeats, “After Long Silence,” in W. B.Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York:Macmillan, ), (lines –).

. George Meredith, Modern Love (), Sonnet .. Shakespeare, Sonnet .. William Morris, “Two Red Roses across the Moon,”

in Morris, “The Defence of Guenevere” and Other Poems(London: Longmans, Green, ), –. This line is therefrain to each of the nine stanzas.

. William Morris, “The Tune of Seven Towers,” in “TheDefence of Guenevere” and Other Poems, –. Again,Borges quotes the refrain. The poem was written in ,and was inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting TheTune of Seven Towers ().

. The lines could be translated as follows:

Wandering imaginary doveThat in_ames the last loves,Soul of light, music, and _owers,Wandering imaginary dove.

. Meredith, Modern Love, Sonnet .. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, ; rpt. ), (end of Book ). The wholepassage runs: “Who were Shem and Shaun the living sonsor daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm!Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside therivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!”Borges’ attitude toward Joyce’s last novel is ambiguous:“The justi~cation for the whole period lies in the twoworks by Joyce, . . . of which Finnegans Wake, whose pro-tagonist is the English language, is ineluctably unread-able, and certainly untranslatable into Spanish.” SeeRoberto Alifano, Conversaciones con Borges (Madrid: De-bate, ), .

. These lines from “Report on Experience,” by Ed-mund Blunden (–), gain power from the fact thatthey echo, in inverted form, a passage from the King James

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version of the Bible: “I have been young, and now am old;yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed beg-ging bread” (Psalms :).

. “Luck! In the house of breathings lies that word, allfairness. The walls are of rubinen and the glittergates ofel~nbone. The roof herof is of massicious jasper and a can-opy of Tyrian awning rises and still descends to it.” JamesJoyce, Finnegans Wake, (Book ).

. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Languagewas published in London in . Walter W. Skeat’s Etymo-logical Dictionary of the English Language was ~rst pub-lished in Oxford, England, –. The Shorter OxfordEnglish Dictionary (based on the twelve-volume OED) was~rst published in Oxford in .

. Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories and Portraits(), Chapter : “I have thus played the sedulous ape toHazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne,to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, andto Obermann.”

. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chap-ter : “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,which constitutes poetic faith.”

. These are the last four lines of Samuel TaylorColeridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

. Azorín (–), La ruta de Don Quijote (BuenosAires: Losada, ). Miguel de Unamuno (–),Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho según Miguel de CervantesSaavedra, nd ed. (Madrid: Renacimiento, ).

. “To draw the longbow” means “to tell tall tales,” “tomake exaggerated statements.”

. “A violent green peacock, deliriated/unlillied ingold.”

. Paradise Regained, Book , lines –; in TheComplete Works of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross(New York: Doubleday, ), .

. From Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, “When IConsider How My Light Is Spent” ().

. A Poet’s Creed

. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” lines –

(stanza ).. Borges had dealt extensively with this issue in “Los

traductores de las noches” (The Translators of theThousand and One Nights), included in his volume Lahistoria de la eternidad. The scholar Antoine Galland(–) published his French translation of the Thou-sand and One Nights in the years –. The Britishorientalist Edward William Lane (–) published hisEnglish translation in –.

. The phrase is from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (

edition), “Song of Myself,” section , line .. “El inmortal” (The Immortal) was ~rst published in

, in Borges’ collection El Aleph.. Virgil, Aeneid, Book , line . In John Dryden’s

translation the line runs: “Obscure they went thro’ drearyshades” (Book , line ). Robert D. Williams renders it

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as: “They walked exploring the unpeopled night” (Book ,line ).

. From The Seafarer, ed. Ida Gordon (Manchester,England: Manchester University Press, ), . SeeBorges’ discussion in Chapter of this volume.

. Shakespeare, Sonnet .. This is the ~rst line of Keats’s “Endymion” ().. Borges, in conversation with Willis Barnstone, ex-

pressed a desire for anonymity. “‘If the Bible is peacockfeathers, what kind of bird are you?’ I asked. ‘I am,’Borges answered, ‘the bird’s egg, in its Buenos Aires nest,unhatched, gladly unseen by anyone with discrimination,and I emphatically hope it will stay that way!’” WillisBarnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in BuenosAires: A Memoir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,), .

. “Spinoza” was published in a volume dedicated toLeopoldo Lugones, El otro, el mismo (The Self and theOther) (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, ). The transla-tion runs thus:

The Jew’s hands, translucent in the dusk,Polish the lenses time and again.The dying afternoon is fear, isCold, and all afternoons are the same.The hands and the hyacinth-blue airThat whitens at the ghetto edgesDo not quite exist for this silentMan who conjures up a clear labyrinth,Undisturbed by fame—that re_ection

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Of dreams in the dream of anotherMirror—or by maidens’ timid love.Free of metaphor and myth, he grindsA stubborn crystal: the in~niteMap of the One who is all His stars.

Translated by Richard Howard and César Rennert, in JorgeLuis Borges, Selected Poems, –, ed. NormanThomas di Giovanni (New York: Delacorte Press, ),. A second sonnet devoted to the philosopher, “BaruchSpinoza,” was published in La moneda de hierro (The IronCoin) in , and translated by Willis Barnstone:

A haze of gold, the Occident lights upThe window. Now, the assiduous manuscriptIs waiting, weighed down with the in~nite.Someone is building God in a dark cup.A man engenders God. He is a JewWith saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped inA river, is borne off by waters toIts end. No matter. The magician movedCarves out his God with ~ne geometry;From his disease, from nothing, he’s begunTo construct God, using the word. No oneIs granted such prodigious love as he:The love that has no hope of being loved.

Barnstone, With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in BuenosAires, . For the original, see Borges, Obras completas, vol.

(Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, ), .

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O F T H I S A N D T H A T

V E R S A T I L E C R A F T

C�alin-Andrei Mih�ailescu

When Borges came to Harvard in the fall of todeliver the Norton Lectures, he had long beendeemed precious capital. In his self-deprecating way,he claimed to be something of an Invisible Man in hisown country, yet his North American contemporariesseemed certain (polite enthusiasm apart) that his wasone of the names destined to survive through time’slong run. We know that thus far they were not mis-taken: Borges has resisted the usual effacement of

I would like to thank Melitta Adamson, Sherri Clendinning, Rich-ard Green, Christina Johnson, Gloria Koyounian, Thomas Orange,Andrew Szeib, Jane Toswell, and Marek Urban. Without their help,my efforts to get these lectures into book form would have been morepainful. I am most indebted to Maria Ascher, senior editor at HarvardUniversity Press, whose professionalism and utter devotion to Borgesmade this book possible.

time,* and the charm and power of this forget-ting-dodger’s work are undiminished. For more thanthirty years the six lectures never made it into print,the tapes gathering dust in the quiet ever-after of a li-brary vault. When they had gathered enough, theywere found. The spectacular precedent of Igor Stra-vinsky’s Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons,delivered as Norton Lectures in – and pub-lished by Harvard University Press in , showsthat a long delay in the transition to print need not de-prive lectures of their relevance. Borges’ have asmuch appeal now as they had three decades ago.

This Craft of Verse is an introduction to literature,to taste, and to Borges himself. In the context of hiscomplete works, it compares only with Borges, oral(), which contains the ~ve lectures—somewhatnarrower in scope than these—that he gave May–June at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires.†

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* With his customary irony, Borges declared that he was not asgood at mocking himself as other writers—his great friend AdolfoBioy Casares among them. “It consoles me to know that I will be dis-solved by forgetfulness. Forgetting will make me anonymous, will itnot?” Borges—Bioy: Confesiones, confesiones, ed. Rodolfo Braceli(Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, ), –.

† Borges, oral contains the “personal part” of those Belgrano lec-tures. The topics include (in chronological order) the book, immor-

These Norton Lectures, which precede Borges, oral bya decade, are a treasury of literary riches that come tous in essayistic, unassuming, often ironic, and alwaysstimulating forms.

The ~rst lecture, “The Riddle of Poetry,” deliveredon October , , deals with the ontological statusof poetry and effectively leads us into the volume as awhole. “The Metaphor” (delivered November ) dis-cusses, on the model of Leopoldo Lugones, the way inwhich poets through the centuries have used and re-used the same metaphorical patterns, which, Borgessuggests, can be reduced to twelve “essential af~n-ities,” the rest being merely designed to astonish andtherefore ephemeral. In “The Telling of the Tale” (De-cember ), devoted to epic poetry, Borges commentson the modern world’s neglect of the epic, speculatesabout the death of the novel, and looks at the way thecontemporary human condition is re_ected in the ide-ology of the novel: “We do not really believe in happi-


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tality, Swedenborg, the detective story, and time. Borges, oral was firstpublished by Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires in , and was re-printed in Borges, Obras completas, vol. (Buenos Aires: EmecéEditores, ), –. Since its publication, it has become a stan-dard reference for Borges scholars and for readers in the Hispanicworld.

ness, and this is one of the poverties of our time.” Herehe shows af~nities with Walter Benjamin and FranzKafka (the latter of whom he considered a lesser writerthan G. B. Shaw or G. K. Chesterton): he advocates theimmediacy of storytelling and seems something of ananti-novelist, invoking laziness as the main reason fornot having written novels. “Word-Music and Trans-lation” (February , ) is a virtuoso meditationon the translation of poetry. “Thought and Poetry”(March ) illustrates his essayistic rather than theo-retical take on the status of literature. While holdingthat magical, musical truth is more potent than rea-son’s stable ~ctions, Borges argues that meaning in po-etry is a fetish, and that powerful metaphors unsettlehermeneutic frameworks rather than enhancing mean-ing. Finally, “A Poet’s Creed” (April ) is a confes-sional text, a kind of literary testament that hecomposed “in the middle of life’s way.” In 1968 Borgeswas still at the height of his powers and would yet pub-lish ~rst-rate works, such as El informe de Brodie (Dr.Brodie’s Report; )—which contains “La Intrusa”(The Intruder), the story he claimed was his best—andEl libro de arena (The Book of Sand; ).

These Norton Lectures were delivered by a seerwho has often been ranked with the other “great blind


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men of the West.” Borges’ unfailing admiration forHomer, his high but complex praise for Joyce, and histhinly disguised doubt of Milton say much about thistradition. His progressive blindness had becomenearly total by the s, when he was able to see noth-ing more than an amorphous ~eld of yellow. He dedi-cated El oro de los tigres (The Gold of the Tigers; )to this last and most loyal color of his world. Borges’style of delivery was as singular as it was compelling:while speaking, he would look upward with a gentleand shy expression on his face, seeming to materiallytouch the world of the texts—their colors, fabric, mu-sic. Literature, for him, was a mode of experience.

Unlike the brusque and idiosyncratic tone thatcharacterizes most of his Spanish interviews and pub-lic lectures, Borges’ manner in This Craft of Verse isthat of a versatile and soft-spoken guest of honor. Yetthis book, though wonderfully accessible, does notoffer easy-to-munch-on teachings; rather, it is fullof deeply personal re_ections, and is neither naivenor cynical. It preserves the immediacy of its oral de-livery—its _ow, humor, and occasional hesitations.(Borges’ syntax has been altered here only as much asis necessary to make the prose grammatical and read-able. Also, occasional misquotations on his part have


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been corrected.) This spoken-written text addressesits audience with informality and much warmth.

Borges’ facility with English is charming. Helearned the language in his early childhood from hispaternal grandmother, who had come to BuenosAires from Staffordshire. Both his parents knewEnglish well (his father was a professor of psychologyand modern languages; his mother, a translator).Borges spoke it _uidly, musically, with delicate conso-nants, and took particular delight in the “stark andvoweled” sound of Old English.

One cannot quite take at face value Borges’ claimthat he is “groping” his way along, that he is a “timidthinker rather than a daring one,” and that his cul-tural background is “a series of unfortunate miscella-nies.”* Borges was immensely learned, and one of thechief themes of his work—the theme of the world asan in~nite library—has clear autobiographical conno-tations. His memory was extraordinary: he deliveredthese six lectures without the help of notes, since hispoor eyesight made it impossible for him to read.†


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* See Chapter ; also Borges—Bioy: Confesiones, confesiones, .† Borges’ memory was legendary. An American professor of

Romanian origin reports that, during a chat with Borges in atthe University of Indiana, the Argentine writer recited to him an

Aided by this remarkable mnemonic capacity, Borgesenriches his lectures with myriad textual exam-ples—his aesthetics is always rooted in the primaryground of literature. For literary theorists, he doesnot have much use; for critics, he has just a little; andphilosophers interest him only to the extent that theirideas do not forsake the world for pure abstraction.Thus, his remembering of world literature lives thebelles lettres as he speaks.

In This Craft of Verse, Borges converses with au-thors and texts he never lost the pleasure of requotingand discussing, sources ranging from Homer, Virgil,Beowulf, the Norse Eddas, the Thousand and One

Nights, the Koran, and the Bible, to Rabelais, Cer-vantes, Shakespeare, Keats, Heine, Poe, Stevenson,Whitman, Joyce, and of course himself.

Borges’ greatness is due in part to a wit and polishthat characterize not only his works but his life aswell. Asked whether he had ever been visited in hisdreams by Juan Perón (the Argentine dictator, and


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eight-stanza Romanian poem which he had learned from its author, ayoung refugee, in Geneva in . Borges did not know Romanian.The power of his memory was also peculiar in that he tended to re-member words and works by others, while claiming to have com-pletely forgotten texts that he himself had written.

widower of Evita), Borges retorted: “My dreams havetheir style—there is no way I will have him in mydreams.”*


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* Borges—Bioy: Confesiones, confesiones, . Other collections ofinterviews with Borges include Dos palabras antes de morir y otrasentrevistas, ed. Fernando Mateo (Buenos Aires: LC Editor, );Borges, el memorioso: Conversaciones de Jorge Luis Borges con Anto-nio Carrizo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, );Borges: Imágenes, memorias, diálogos, ed. María Esther Vázquez, nded. (Caracas: Monte Ávila, ); and Jorge Luis Borges and OsvaldoFerrari, Diálogos últimos (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, ).

I N D E X

Alfred, King, , America, , Anglo-Saxon. See Old EnglishArabian Nights, , , , , ,

, –, Ariosto, Ludovico: Orlando

Furioso, Arnold, Matthew, –Augustine, Saint, Azorín: La ruta de Don Quijote,

Barbusse, Henri: Le Feu, “Battle of Brunanburh,” , –,

–Baudelaire, Charles, ; Les

Fleurs du mal, Benjamin, Walter, Beowulf, , –, , Berkeley, George, –, Bible, , –, , –, –,

–, , Blunden, Edmund, Borges, oral, –Browne, Thomas,

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: Son-nets from the Portuguese,

Browning, Robert, –Buber, Martin, –Buddha, Buenos Aires, , , , Bunyan, John: The Pilgrim’s Prog-

ress, Burton, Richard, , , Butler, Samuel, Byron, George Gordon, Lord:

“She Walks in Beauty,”–

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro,

Campbell, Roy, , –Cansinos-Asséns, Rafael, , Carlyle, Thomas: Sartor Resartus,

–, Cervantes, Miguel de, ; Don

Quixote, –, , –,

Chapman, George, –, Chaucer, Geoffrey, ,

Chesterton, G. K., , , ;“The Ballad of the WhiteHorse,” –; “A SecondChildhood,”

China, , , Christianity, Chuan Tzu, –Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Conrad, Joseph, Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of

Courage, Croce, Benedetto, , Cummings, E. E., –

Dante Alighieri, ; Divine Com-edy,

Darío, Rubén, , De Quincey, Thomas, , Dickens, Charles, Donne, John, Dostoevsky, Feodor, Doyle, Arthur Conan: Adventures

of Sherlock Holmes, , ,

Dujovne, León,

Elizabeth, Queen, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, , , England, , , English language, –, , –,

, ,

Farid al-Din Attar, ; Parliamentof Birds,

Fernández, Macedonio, Finnesburg, fragment of, FitzGerald, Edward, –Flaubert, Gustave: Salammbô, Freire, Ricardo Jaimes,

French language, , , Frost, Robert: “Acquainted with

the Night,” ; “Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening,”–, –

Galland, Antoine, Geneva, George, Stefan: Blumen des Böse,

German language, , , –Gibbon, Edward, Gnosticism, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von:

Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Góngora y Argote, Luis de, –,

Gospels, , –Greece, , –, –, –, ,

Greek Anthology,

Hafiz of Shiraz, Hanslick, Eduard, , Harvard University, Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scar-

let Letter, Hazlitt, William, Hebrews, , , Heine, Heinrich, , ; Lyrisches

Intermezzo, Hengist of Ephesus, , Heraclitus, Hölderlin, Friedrich, Holy Ghost, –, , Homer, –, , –, , , ,

, , , –, , ; Iliad,–, , –, , ; Odyssey,–, –, ,

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Horsa, Hume, David,

India, , , Islam,

James, Henry, ; The Aspern Pa-pers,

Jáuregui, Juan de, Jesus, , , Jews, , , John, Saint, John of the Cross, Saint, –,

Johnson, Samuel, Joyce, James, , , ;

Finnegans Wake, –; Ulys-ses,

Judas, –

Kabbalah, , Kafka, Franz, ; The Castle,

–Keats, John, , ; “Ode to a

Nightingale,” –; “OnFirst Looking into Chapman’sHomer,” –

Khayyám, Omar: Rubáiyát, ,–

Kipling, Rudyard, , ; FromSea to Sea, ; “A Sahib’s War,”

Koran, ,

Lane, Edward William, Lang, Andrew, , Langland, William, Latin, ,

Lawrence, T. E.: Seven Pillars ofWisdom,

León, Fray Luis de, , Lessing, Gotthold, London, Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Lucan, Lugones, Leopoldo, , , ,

; Lunario sentimental, Luther, Martin,

Manrique, Jorge, Melville, Herman, ; Moby-Dick,

–Mencken, H. L., Meredith, George, , –Milton, John, , ; Paradise Re-

gained, , Morris, William, Muslims,

Newman, Francis William, Nibelungenlied, Norton Lectures, –

Old English, –, –, –,–, –, –, , ,, –

Old Norse, , –, Oxford Book of Modern Verse,

The,

Paris, Pater, Walter, Perón, Juan, –Persian language, , –, Plato, ; Phaedrus, –Poe, Edgar Allan, , –, Pope, Alexander, , , ,

I N D E X

153153

Prescott, William: History of theConquest of Peru,

Psycho (film), Pythagoras,

Rabelais, François, , Revelation, Book of, Rome, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, –, ,

Rouse, W. H. D.,

Sandburg, Carl, Scholasticism, Schopenhauer, Arthur, , , ,

Scots, Scott, Walter: Ivanhoe, Seneca, Shakespeare, William, , , , ,

, , –, ; Hamlet, ;Macbeth,

Shaw, Bernard, , , Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,

Skeat, Walter W., , Socrates, –“Song of Songs,” , Spanish language, , –, ,

, , Spengler, Oswald: The Decline of

the West, Spinoza, Baruch, , Stevenson, Robert Louis, , ,

, –, , , ; Dr. Je-kyll and Mr. Hyde, ; “Re-quiem,” –; Weir ofHermiston,

Stravinsky, Igor: Poetics of Musicin the Form of Six Lessons,

Sturluson, Snorri, Swinburne, Algernon Charles, Symons, Arthur,

Tacitus, Tennyson, Alfred, , –,

–Twain, Mark: Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn, ; Life onthe Mississippi, ; RoughingIt,

Unamuno, Miguel de: Vida deDon Quijote y Sancho,

University of Belgrano, Urquhart, Thomas,

Verlaine, Paul, Virgil, , , , Vogelweide, Walther von der,

–, Völsunga Saga,

Watts, G. F., Wells, H. G.: The Invisible Man,

Whistler, James McNeill, Whitehead, Alfred North, Whitman, Walt, , , ;

Leaves of Grass, Wilde, Oscar, Wolfe, Thomas: Of Time and the

River, Wordsworth, William, ,

Yeats, William Butler, , –,; “Leda and the Swan,”

I N D E X

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