am often asked to write brief comments or reminiscences about my Borges years. Three such pieces, under the collective title ‘Backward Glances’, have been added here to close this new edition. Their histories are as follows.
‘A Reader’s Life’, commissioned by Erica Wagner as a review of James Woodall’s The Man in the Mirror of the Book, first appeared under the title ‘Trapped inside the house of fame’ in The Times, 11 July 1996.
‘Borges Remembered’, commissioned by Sophy Roberts, first appeared under the title ‘Borges and Me’ in Departures, October 2006.
‘The Other Borges’, commissioned by Khademul Islam, first appeared in the Daily Star, Dhaka, 20 June 2009.
The three were also printed together in the Raconteur, Winter 2010, under the title ‘Backward Glances: Remembering Borges’.
Warm thanks are due to Marcial Souto, to Susan Ashe, and to my son Tom di Giovanni for sage counsel, editorial and otherwise. Finally, for being the Maecenas of this book’s second edition, I want to express my gratitude to Scott Pack, of The Friday Project, an obvious maverick who does not shrink from the company of fellow mavericks.
Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Keyhaven, Lymington Hampshire November 2009
Foreword to the First Edition
The twenty-fourth of August 1999 marked the centenary of the birth of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine’s best known and one of its greatest literary figures.
Some thirty years ago, while he was delivering a series of public addresses at Harvard University, our paths crossed, we began working together on translations of his work into English, and we became friends. Looking back now, I find that the impact of Borges on the course of my life seems to have been only inches short of a miracle. Within a few brief months of our meeting, publishers began to compete for his stories and poems and essays in the new versions of them that we were making. On the eve of his return to Buenos Aires, in April 1968, he invited me to join him in his country, and seven months later I was there, plunged into the thick of his life and into the life of Argentina.
All that is a story yet to be told. Back then, while these events were unfolding, everything was hectic and crowded, and I was offered no leisure for reflection. Yet never once was I unaware of how rich and marvellous was life alongside Borges. So rich and indelible were those days of our close association, in fact, that even now, over a decade after his death, he still inhabits most of my working hours and occasionally, at night, even my dreams.
The little memoir and the essays collected here are in the nature of a homage and a contribution to the celebration of Borges’s life and work. The book is no attempt to deliver the final word on him or on any aspect of what he wrote. Offering simple guidance and a commonsensical approach to reading him, the pieces are more tentative and modest. In most ways, these pages are the close-up view, the record, of someone who worked on a daily basis with Borges at a distinctive and critical period of his life, when he overcame various adversities and experienced a rich late flowering.
The Lesson of the Master has had a singular genesis. At the outset of our association, when Borges and I were working on an English edition of his selected poems, he described me in a letter to his Buenos Aires publisher, the late Carlos Frías, as the volume’s ‘onlie begetter’. It was a term that both men, teachers of English literature, savoured.
Originally, I wanted to publish the memoir that opens the present volume as a tailpiece to Borges’s ‘Autobiographical Essay’, a 20,000-word text that he and I composed together in English, in 1970. The Borges Estate, however, did not look kindly on the idea. No explanation, no reasons, were given for their decision, but somehow my work of 1988 was not deemed worthy of appearing alongside my work with Borges of 1970. An Argentine editor came along, however, and said that he would undertake to publish the two essays separately.
Working with Borges, one had come to appreciate the fact that less was more, but my thirty-odd-page essay, I thought to myself, was about to become the slimmest book on record. Marcial Souto, my mentor in these matters and himself a minimalist in literary creation, was also apprehensive. (It was he who had brought the original project to the Argentine editor’s attention.) Souto suggested that I couple with the memoir some other related piece or pieces of mine. I sent him a further essay, twenty pages long, and he approved. For a month or two after, I was haunted by the melancholy notion that – when all I wanted was to bring out a volume worthy of the master – I was about to become holder of the even less distinguished record of producing the second slimmest book in publishing history. This would not do. Ransacking my papers, I began to turn up the material that eventually made its way into the present pages. It is in this roundabout way, then, that the Borges Estate is the ‘onlie begetter’ of these essays. To the Estate and to Mr Souto, my thanks.
Norman Thomas di Giovanni
October 1999
In Memory of Borges
There is an article, really a piece of photojournalism, in one of those Argentine weekly magazines, in which I can be seen walking down a Buenos Aires street with Borges leaning on my arm. Was the magazine Siete Días or Gente? That I no longer remember, but all the other details I am fairly clear about. It was 1969; we were walking east along Belgrano Avenue, crossing Santiago del Estero or more likely Salta, a block or two from the small flat where Borges was still living with his first wife. I am wearing my brown herringbone tweed suit and a tie, concessions to the demands of sober, formal Buenos Aires. We are crossing or about to cross Salta, Borges clutching my right arm in his somewhat frantic blind man’s vice, and the large photograph in the magazine is a picture of me with him on my arm and definitely not the other way round – it is not a photograph of Borges being led along by some anonymous younger man, a foreigner, an American.
That year, on the dot of four every afternoon, five days a week, I picked Borges up from the Belgrano flat and, his arm firmly gripping mine, we walked the ten slow blocks east to the National Library, in Mexico Street, where our early evening’s work awaited us. By this time, he had been Director of the Argentine National Library for fourteen years. The post, of course, was a sinecure. Borges was not a librarian, much less an administrator, and a loyal assistant director, José Edmundo Clemente, did the real work. Once or twice a month perhaps, like a ritual, a secretary came into the big office where Borges and I sat across from each other at a solid long mahogany table, and she would stand over a thick sheaf of papers, turning a corner of each page for him to initial. Whatever the bulk of paperwork, it never proved much of an interruption. Most of the time he initialled away while carrying on his discussion with me; but if things were going particularly well and he was in one of his playful moods, which were frequent, he might indulge in a bit of good-natured ribbing, poking fun at her to me in English or at me to her in Spanish.
‘You see, di Giovanni, how mercilessly she makes me work.’ Often the woman would be halfway out of the room before Borges would remember himself and, for form’s sake, think to ask exactly what it was he had just signed.
‘Only the usual accounts, Señor Borges,’ she would say assuringly, the epitome of correctness and respect.
‘Ah, yes,’ he would rejoin, as if suddenly reminded of some immutable truth.
It was a game. The secretaries, one or two in the morning, a different one or two in the afternoon, hated troubling Borges about anything, especially when he was working, and to this day I am sure that even after it had been explained to him Borges never had the foggiest notion what he was signing.
‘Borges,’ I’d quip when the mood came over me, ‘I can see from here that that sheaf you’re putting your John Hancock to grants the whole library staff an extra two-week holiday with pay.’
And he would do a comic double-take, feigning astonishment, stop scribbling, look up trying to locate the secretary’s face, and repeat to her my remark in Spanish.
‘No, jamás nunca, Señor Borges; le juro.’ And with her oaths to the contrary and not-on-your-lifes,