Monday, Sep 8, 2008
Jorge Luis Borges went from being an unknown middle-aged librarian to one of the 20th century's most influential writers. So why do so few people read him now?
Aug 27, 2004 | In the middle of Nicolas Roeg's messy 1970 cult classic "Performance," Mick Jagger stops the film to quote from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Jorge Luis Borges' science fiction parody about a planet lacking in physical reality. At the end of the film, when Jagger is killed by James Fox, there is a microsecond flash of a photograph of Borges, the one used on the cover of his "Personal Anthology." Also in 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci released "The Spider's Stratagem," adapted from the Argentine writer's "Theme of the Traitor and The Hero." His reputation bolstered by movie directors and rock stars, Borges became a big name. Translations of his work, many of them bad, soon mushroomed in the English-speaking world.
Borges' recognition by readers in the United States and Britain was an incredible capper to a decade that even so imaginative a writer as he could not have conceived 10 years earlier. In May of 1961, Borges was a 62-year-old balding, frail former librarian with poor eyesight who lived with his mother, a semi-successful author who had written almost nothing of significance in nearly eight years. A decade later, he was internationally acclaimed.
One Sunday, while having lunch with his friend, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges received a call from a French journalist informing him that he had just won the International Publishers' Prize (he would share it with Samuel Beckett). Borges thought it was a joke -- he had never heard of the prize. As it turned out, neither had anyone else. The IPP had been established that year when six prestigious publishing houses from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, England and the U.S. (Grove Press was the American representative) banded together to honor an author "of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, have a lasting influence on the development of modern literature."
For some of the voters, Borges' influence was already profound. The French had known about him for years; the greatest of post-World War II Italian writers, Italo Calvino, had already written of Borges' enormous influence in Italy "on creative writing, on literary tastes and on the idea of literature itself." But it's doubtful that anyone with the IPP knew how right they were. By the time a generation of college kids discovered him, assisted by Jagger and Bertolucci, Borges would outstrip in fame and sales all the writers who had voted for him. By the end of the '70s, it seemed like nearly every new American writer to emerge from a university workshop was using techniques referred to as "Borgesian."
It's truly astonishing to think how close Jorge Luis Borges came to dying unknown. Most of his classic works -- a couple of collections of darkly elegant poems, some provocative and idiosyncratic essays, and a few slim volumes of what he called "ficciones" that defied categorization -- were written in his first 54 years. (Has any other writer of the 20th century had more influence per printed page?) If not for his gradual emergence in the late '50s, largely thanks to a handful of influential European critics, it's doubtful that we would know his name today. The rich mine of Latin American literature might never have been discovered outside the Latin world, or at least not for a few more decades.
Interest in Borges' life and work will be piqued again by Edwin Williamson's massive and assiduously researched new biography. Thanks to Williamson's association with Maria Kodama, Borges' longtime companion -- whom he married shortly before his death and who became sole executor of his estate -- we at last have a definitive biography of Borges. Williamson's "Borges: A Life" renders James Woodall's identically titled 1996 biography obsolete.
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