PER.'ONALHIJTORY

NERUDAAND BORGEJ No tzuoLatin-Anerican writers couldbe more important. No tttso ztsriterscould bemore diferent. Hou did the authorbecorne the friend and translatorof both? BYALA.'TAIR REID

f f TuoN I first went to , in country, to Andalusia, to Gibraltar and l/l/ 1953.I knew little about l'4orocco, to Pornrgal-looking and lis- Y Y thelivingcountryandbarely tening a lot, and I wrote the fust of a se- a word of the language.But my senses ries of chronicleson Spain for The New were in good working order, and I was Yorker.Soon after it appeared,I had my instanth' drarvn in by Spain'srhythms Spanishpress credentials withdrawn, but and its landscapes-the burned, sun_.- that made little difference,for Spain ex- stainedearth, the silver-blueclarig,of istedthen on rumor and speculation.Liv- Nlediteranean light, the warm s,rle.nnity ing there felt like belonging to an exten- ofthe peopie,the sparenessofvillage life. sive whispered conspiracy against the Existencewas honed down to its essen- Franco regime. Spain was at something tials,making the dayslonger, time more of a standstill,still in shockfrom the Civil abundant.So I returnedto Spain,and re- War and the long isolation that followed turned, and eventu'allywent to live there it, threadbarecompared to the rest of Eu- in 1956, setting out to learn thg country, rope. Censorship,both moral and politi- and slowly absorb the Spanish senseof cal, hung heavy over the press,over the time. Spaniardshave a gift fbr exiranding universities,and overwriters and publish- the present,around a meal or a conver- ers, and the police had sharp antennae sation; and they are mastersof the cos- out for any sign of dissidence.The writ- mic shrug that shedsall preoccupations ers I knew complainedthat yearsofcen- exceptthose immediatelyat hand. But sorship had instilled in Spaniardsthe living in Spain meant, aboveall, entering habit of censoringthemselves. Newspa- the Spanishlanguage, for in those early perswere gray and evasive,written opin- daysI felt separatedfrom the spokenlife ion was sparseand guarded, and literature around me, a baffiementhard to bear. was thin and soare. Spanish,at first encounter,is welcoming: Among my friends in Barcelonawas you enter it by way of the market and the a young poet and pubJishernamed Car- kitchen, but you soon find yourself los Barral, lean, birdlike, throaty-voiced, stranded on that plateau of daily needs. and given to infectiousenthusiasms. Car- The languagelies still beyond. Living in los's imprint, Seix Barral, published the anotherlanguage means growing another work of new Spanishwriters and of Eu- self, and it takes time for that other self ropeanwriters in translation, and conse- to becomea familiar. \\4rile I went about quently was always battling the censor. learning the machinery and the music, I Carlos's enthusiasm at that time, how- reaJizrdat the sametime that the Soan- ever,was for the writing that was b.gtn- ish I wasacquiring was as devoid of con- ning to appear from the countries of text asthat of a young child, for I had no SpanishAmerica. In 1962,he published past in the language.I was lucly, how- Mario Vargas Llosa's novel "La Ciudad ever,in having wise friends, and, follow- y los Perros," later translated as "The ing their counsel,I entereda continuum Time of the Hero." The book was re- of readingand listening. ceivedin Spain with an excitement hardly There is nothing like immersionin an ever generatedby the Spanish novels of unknown-new places,new landscapes, the day, and it led Carlos to proclaim, new preoccupations,new loves, a new with remarkable prescience,that it was language-to sharpenthe edgeof atten- from the countries of Spanish America tion. From Majorca, where I first landed, that we should expect not just the next I moved to Madrid and then to Barce- literary flowering but the renewing of the lona. I travelled all over-to the Basoue Spanishlanguage. 57

In those days, the attitude of Span- When Mario Vargas Llosa came to eruption, however,very few writers from iards toward Spanish America most Barcelona,Carlos introduced me. Mario Soanish America had earned interna- resembledthe way the English used to had left Peru behind and lived in Paris, tional attention. Foremost among them regard the ,with an insuffer- working for the French radio network: were the Chilean poet and able condescension.Europe was much he broadcastto Latin America at night the Argentine masterJorge Luis Borges. more immediateto them than the South and wrote by day. He had a kind of flash- They were, eachin a quite separateway, American continent, and their knowledge ing intensity to him, and a single,burn- the forerunnersof the writers ofthe Boom. of itwas vague.So was mine. I had in my ing ambition: to live by his writing. It was I had been introduced to Borges's heada mixture of schoolgeography, Hol- nearlyimpossible, he said,to make a liv- writing a few years earlier, by Pipina lywood epics,Carmen Miranda with fruit ing asa writer in Latin America: editions Prieto, a vivacious Argentine who had on her head, peons asleepunder huge were small, readerswere sparse,and few known him in Buenos Aires and who

Neruda in Isla Negra, 1969.Hisfriend v.tassought out and shot,and everynthereabout htm Mruda saut Spain broken. The zoar brougbt about in him a deeppolitical conaersion. sombreros,the bossanova, and the cha- writers were read beyond their own bor- spokeof him with such fervor that when cha. It may have had something to do ders, since tariff barriers in many coun- shepressed his "Ficciones"on me I would with the stasisof Spain at the time, but, tries madebooks hard to comeby. While not havedared not read it. The effect on through the books and manuscriptsthat the separatecountries of Latin America an unsuspectingreader of encounteringa Carlos passedon to mrbooks like Juan all had their writers, it made little sense, work of Borges'can be alarming enough Rulfo's "Pedro Pdramo" and Alejo Car- Mario said,to speakof a "Latin American" almost to justi$' a publisher'swarning on pentier's "The Lost Steps"-I began to literature.As yet,there was no bodyofwrit- the book jacket. His storiesinduce a kind take an impassionedinterest in South ing that had found its way through of vertigo in his readers,an eerieafter- America, and to readits turbulent history translation into other literatures and so effect that can invest small happenings, with some amazement.More than that, achievedinternational recognition. \Atthin like breaking a glass or missing a train, I found in the literature a loosening of a decade,that was to changeutterly, with with ominous significance.Pipina was a Spanish from its Castilian restraints,an the surgeof memorablenovels, popularly bewitching talker, and could practically intenseverbal energy.I noticed the same referredto asthe Boom, that appearedin perform Borges'sstories. We talked them thing in the few Spanish Americans I the aftermathof the Cuban Revolutionof over,endlessly, and beforelong I kept the came acrossin Barcelona:they had more 1,959and receivedgreat acclaimin many halFdozen slenderbooks that contained exuberancethan we were usedto in Spain languages:novels by Vargas Liosa, Julio most of his writing then-poems and es- p and, given the occasion,they turned con- CortLzar, Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez, Jos6 saysas well as stories-always at hand. Qversationonitsear,makingaplayground Donoso, Alejo Carpentier, and Guil- I had been coming acrossthe poetry 3 of the language. lermo Cabrera Infante. Prior to that of Neruda piecemeal, mostly in the 5B THENEV YORKER,JUNE 24 T"JULY 1,1996

houses of friends, for Neruda's books sensualist,a poet of physicallove, a man family moved to Europe, where they lived were then proscribed in Spain as Com- of appetites,Borges is an ascetic;where for the next sevenyears-first in Geneva, munist literature. There is an extra- Neruda is rooted in what he has exoeri- where Borges studied and read French ordinary lift that comes from reading enced,Borges seems to havelived almost and German, and then in Spain, where Neruda's ooetrv for the first time: both entirelyin literature,in the mind-travel of he began to write in earnest.When he from its ih..i b."nty on the ear and his reading. Borges acceptedbeing Ar- returned to , in 1,921,fired from its great tumble of images. But gentineas his destiny,Buenos Aires ashis by a new enthusiasmfor his country, he I found not one but many Nerudas. locality,but his preoccupationswere began a literary career-as a poet, an I read his fierce elegieson the Spanish wholly metaphysical.Where Neruda in essayist,and a reviewer,in the world of Civil War, and his tender, whimsi- his poems addressedthe realities of the salons,tertu/ias, and small magazines- cal "Ode to My Socks," his sensual Latin-American presentand lived on in- that continued all his life. lft . "'?:.},]'t n * ;,..i.il,',i _st **{ .,;" fto 0'. i:ir:-:r' '..t : E-J$.;

Borgesin BuenosAires, 1971. The ffict on an unsuspectingreader of encounteringa tuork of Borges' can be alarming enoughalmost tajustfy a publisher'sraarning on thejacket. love poems, and the high incanta- timate terms with the physicalworld, Neruda had his beginningsin 1904, in tory pitch of his "Heights of Machu Borges'swritings often castdoubt on the Paral, in the rainy south of , where Picchu," and I wondered at their accom- very existenceof that world, except as a his father worked on the railroad, on the plished varieqt but had no sense,yet, mental projection, a fiction. frontier of the sreat forests. He has re- of who the poet was among so many createdhis solitary,awestruck childhood, incarnations. flonces wasborn in 1899,in theBue- his discoveryof the secretlife of words, That these two writers should be ac- l-l nos Aires suburbof Palermo,into in a number of enchantedooems. Luck claimed as the quintessentialSpanish- a middle-classprofessional family: his fa- seemedto attendhim earlv.His first oo- American writers of their time was oar- ther was a lawyer and a teacherof psy- emswere brought to the anentionofihe ticularlyintriguing to me, for the more J chology with literary aspirations, his Chilean poet Gabriela , and she read them the more I felt them to be mother a descendantof military heroes helped him gain a scholarship to study about as different from each other, as and Argentine patriots. From an early French in Santiagowhen he was seven- writers and as human souls. as it is oos- age, the son was seen by the family as teen. In the capital, he moved from the sible to be. Borges'swork is ur rp^i. r, destinedto becomea writer, fulfilling the absorbedsolitude of adolescenceinto an Neruda's is ebullient, as dubious and ambitionsof his father,whose literary ca- artist's underworld of close friendships, ironic asNeruda's is passionatelyaffirma- reer had been stayed by encroaching nightlong conversations,sexual love, and fl tive, asreticent as Neruda's is voluble.\Atrere blindness-a hereditary blindness,which the ooemsof Rimbaud and Baudelaire.It -i Neruda is open, evennale, Borgesis ob- was to descendon Borgesgradually from was a headytransformation. Neruda's # lique and skeptical;where Neruda is a his late twenties. In 1914. the whole "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of * ALAJTAIR REID

Despair," published in 7924 (written You will ask why don't his poems in that flush of late adolescence),be- teli us of dreams, of leaves, came. and still are. a kind of touchstone of the great volcanoes of his homelandt Flyto the for fust love, learned by heart everywhere Come and seethe blood in the sffeets. Southof France in the Spanish-speakingworld. "I have come and see been marking the blank chart of your the blood in the streets, right now-in body," Neruda writes in one of them, come and seethe blood "with crossesof fire / My mouth was a in the streetsl spider that scuttlesinto hiding / In you, Back in Chile, Neruda, still haunted Peter behind you, tremulous and thirsty." joined These poems are remarkable in their by his Spanish experience, the erotic intensity, in their startling sensual Chilean Communist Parw. and in 7945 was electedto the Chilean Senate,plung- Maylet directness. Such early fame led to Neruda's be- ing into an active political life. After he new novel ing appointed, in that most enlightened published, in 1947, an open letter criti- of Latin-American traditions, to the cizing President Gabriel Gonzitlez Yi- Chilean Consular Service,and between dela,he was forced into hiding for an ex- the ages of twenty-three and twenty- tended period to avoid arrest, and was eight he was posted in turn to Rangoon, sheltered in different houses until he could escapeover the Andes to Argen- Ceylon, Java, and Singapore. The five years Neruda was away from Chile were tina. Out of that came his "Canto Gen- a difficult time for him, separatedfrom era),,"an enormoushymn to Latin Amer- YKtritW his languageand his roots;yet out ofhis ica-its exotic geography, its cruel lonelinessand alienationcame the cumu- history, its brutal politics, and its present lative volumes of "Residenciaen la Tierra" human wrongs-in a sprawling massof poems.The boo[ publishedin 1950,had ,IIrut ("Sojoum on Earth"Fhallucinatory po- ems in which, deprived of his own coun- an immense impact, more political than tv, he createswildly surreal landscapes poetic. Besidesthe overtly political po- of COted'Azur out of his own private obsessions,with ems, however,it containeda sequenceof capers, panky a poetic density quite stardingly new to visionary cantos he called "Alturas de hanky in ("The Provence& poetry in Spanish.When he retumed to Macchu Picchu" Heights of Ma- bigtruffle Chile, his fame as a poet had spreadso chu Picchu"). He had visited the Inca widely that, posted to Spain in 1934,he shrinein 1943, andthese impassioned in- was acclaimed by the community of vocationscontain Neruda's poetic creed. He sees Spanish poets, Federico Garcia Lorca Machu Picchu as built on the It's pure champagne bones of centuries and Miguel Hemdndez among them. But of oppressedIndians, and certain to be and he vows to become voice these were the last euphoric days of the a for all things that haveno voice,to speakout for his Sth consecutive Republic.When the CivilWarbroke out, the oppressedofthe past and againstthe Neruda remained in Spain, but the expe- bestseller! oppressionsof the present.In this new rience marked him forever. His friend 2nd big printing . Knopf writing, Neruda abandoned the surreal Garcia Lorca was sought out and shot, extravaganceof his earlier work, and and everywhereabout him Neruda saw thenceforthdeliberately simplified his po- AIso in n LargePrint Edition. Spain broken. The war brought about in etry, to make it accessibleto the people And treat yourself to him a deep political conversion.He was of Chile who gave him shelter in their PeterMayle's now classic askedto resign his consulshipbecause of housesas a fugitive. In Chile, he was now evocationsof Provence his outspoken sympathy for the Repub- a nationalpossession. in Vintage Paperback. lic. The Doemshe wrote at that time are bitter in their anger. /\t-oNcstoa sucha crowdedexistence, Generals, Tbuiours' traitors, .FL Borges'slife appearssingularly Propence lookat mv deadhouse. static. On his return to Buenos Aires lookat brokenSoain: from Europe, he set about rediscovering outof everydead house comes buming his native city, first in poemsand then in insteadof flowers, a seriesof incisive essayson Argentine outofevery crater in Spain themes. His world was a purely literary DPalnreappears, one; he regularlyreviewed foreign litera- child comesa rifle 'rrt;,ttt#r:tad ture, and translatedworks of Virginia everycrime breeds bullets Woo$ Kafka, Joyce, and into that-will.one day find their way Spanish.But his brief literary essayswere A Dog's Life to your neart. often oblique and unconventional:with 60 THE NEV YORKER,JUNE 24 6 JULYI,1996

time, a certainplafn elementshowed it- dictions, even divinities. However "per- obliged to contain not only all actual selF-in quotations ascribedto nonexist- fect" these{ictions might be, reality defies books but all possiblebooks aswell. The ent originals, citations of imaginary au- them by remaining chaotic and unpre- entire world b..o-.. altbrary.In 'The thors. Although Borgeswas not writing dictable.Yet the making of fictions is es- Babylon Lottery," setin an imagined past fiction, he began to intrude fictional ele- sentialto our nature: literature,Borges of Babylon, an apparendyrational soci- ments into his other writings. He usedto insists,is our solace. ety elects to introduce some element of saythat he consideredscholarship merely In 7967,Borges shared with Samuel chanceinto its existenceby starting a lot- a branch of fantastic literature. He told the Prix Internationaldes Edi- tery. Bit by bit, to increasethe excite- me once that asa young man he had con- teurs,which led to immediate translation ment, the numbers of the lottery are templated writing a long dynastic novel of his storiesinto the main Eurooeanlan- made to signify not just prizes but pun- encompassingthe history of Argentina guxges.Anthony Kerrigan,who was ed- ishments-fines, imprisonment, evenex- sinceindependence, until he realizedthat iting "Ficciones"in English,asked me to ecution. The mysteriouscompany ad- he could write, in the spanof a few pages, translate the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis ministering the lottery is eventually a descriptivereview of iust such a work Tertius." Bv then. I had come to know suspectedof being a fiction. Babylon bv an inventedauthor. add- and appreciateBorges's un- givesitself over completelyto chance,and ine his reflectionson the characteristicorose stvle-a order yields iresistibly to chaos. genre.It was not until 1939, srylethat is spare,restrained, following first the death of and carefirllvformal. and uses \lenuoa and Borgesmet only once, his father and then a long something like understate- I \ in July of 1927,in BuenosAires. convalescenceafter a near- ment, not exacdya character- Following the successof "Twenty Love fat'alaccident, that he began istic of written Spanish. Poems,"Neruda, then rurning twenty- to write the disquieting storiesthat were rvVhileI worked I had the curiousfeeling three, was on his way to take up his first published in 1,944as "Ficciones"-1hs that I was retranslatingsomething back diplomatic appointment,as Chilean con- storiesthat brought him fame far beyond into English that had previouslybeen sul in Rangoon.Borges, at twenty-seven, Argentina. translatedinto Spanish.Most crucial to had publishedtwo volumesofpoems and It is somewhat deceptiveto talk of me was to catch the tone-tentative, was an active reviewer in the literary Borges as a storyteller,as a poet, or as an wary uncertain-in which Borgeswrites, magazinesof the day. The meeting was essayist,however, for he blurred thesedi- a manner that constantlyquestions what one that each ofthem describedin later visions by exploring the same p'aradoxes it is telling, sometimesby tone alone. life: they recalled that they had talked in the varying forms of story, poem, and 'Tlcin, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" begins about the unsatisfactorynature of Span- essay.To him they are all "fictions"- with Borges's discovery, through a ish, and the resignationthey both felt at words on apage, constructsof the mind. chanceremark by a friend, of an item in having to write in it. The one enthusiasm Borges concludeshis epilogueto "El a corrupt encyclopedia about an enig- they sharedwas for the poems of Walt Hacedor," a collection he published in matic region calledUqbar. The region is Whitman, whoseworkboth of them had 1960, with the following: apparently fictitious. "Reading it over," translated.The meeting appearsto have been more diplomatic than intimate, and man Borges sayscharacteristically, "we dis- A setshimself the taskof drawing they went to sometrouble to avoid meet- theworld. covered,beneath the superficia-lauthor- ing again. It seemsto have occurred to .Asthe yearspass, he fillsthe,empry,space ity of the prose,a fundamentalvague- wltn lmagesot provtncesand Klngdoms, ness."Some time later, in a remote hotel, eachof them that they had litde in com- mountainlbays, ships, islands, fish,-houses, mon as writers except the Spanish lan- instruments,stars, horses, and people. |ust chance puts into Borges's hands a vol- beforehe dies,he discoversthai the patient ume of another encyclopedia,devoted to guage;as time went on, they were often of linestraces the image-ofhis a vast olanet called Tlon. A trail of askedabout each other, and in their *lt*l furthei clues reveals that a group of resDonsesthev were most of the time Such fictions are Borges'strademark. seventeenth-centurysages originally pofite and reqpectful,no more. Borges regardedtheir From the sixties on, Borges'sreputation conceivedthe idea ofcreating an entirely meeting as essentially spreadwith the speedof a virus through rational -one that would be nonserious.Neruda was more soecific.In the reading world, infecting it with a sly, wholly comprehensibleto its inhabit- a lefter to an Argentine friendie wrotc: humorous skepticism about language, ants-and of disseminating knowledge Borges,whom you mention,seems to me about all mattersliterary. His writings are of it by way of a secretencyclopedia. A over-pleoccupiedwith those problemsof cultuie and societywhich do not attract I deeply subversive-by implication, they postscript to the story, set at a future me, which are not ijuran I prefer the qreat call into question all linguistic versionsof date, describeshow the human race wines, love, suffering,and books as aion- everything.In whateverBorges writes he eventually embracesthe world ofTl

obsen'ations,about himself in panicular, manner that when we find the samedis- a lot of questions,but mostly I listened. are remarkablyclear. He remaineden- maying twists in writers who preceded In mid-February, I landed into a tirely a poet of the physicalworld, a ma- him in time we refer to these twists as golden summer in Chile. Someone had terialist, actually as well as politically: Borgesian. given me a letter to Jorge Elliot, a painter he had no interest in metaphysic'alques- It may well havebeen the intenseap- and art critic in Santiago,and I called on tions, and disliked literary talk. He did peal of Borges'swritings to academicsin him soonafter ariving. He welcomedme not write his poernsfbr literary circles:he all languagesthat made him such an in- as though I had been expected,and in- wanted them out in the street,read by trusive literary figure. Books about him vited me to a summer househe had in everydayinhabitants of the language. abound, thesesand critical studies mul- Isla Negra, the village on the Pacific He achievedjust that, in his own time, tiply: unravelling Borgesis something of Coast where Neruda then lived. as has no other poet I can think of. He an industry. Neruda, to the contrary, has Isla Negra was litde more than a string accomplishedwhat Whitman only as- attracted comparativelylitde critical study of housesbuilt along a low cliff above a oired to: he becarnewhat Whitrnan had the great massof his poetry is simply broad beachwhere the Pacific thundered irooed to be. there, always accessible,like the ocean. incessantly.The families who lived there Borges,orr the other hand, remained knew each other well, and the place had remote,indecipherable to many: it re- more I read my way into Span- a well-worn, easygoingair. Neruda had 'Tt"t quires a certain nerve even to try to fol- I ish America,the moreI felt my ig- settled there in the fifties, in a house low the ouirks of his mind. In a cele- norance of it as a living place. When a perchedon the clifl and he had added to brated esiay, "Kafka and His Precur- pieceof time suddenlyopened for me in it eccentricallyas money came in, book sors,"he mirkesthe point that after read- early 1964, I bought a round-trip ticket by book. Besidethe house stood a ship's ing Kafka we recognize foreshadowings from New York to Buenos Aires that yardarm, and as we approachedit Jorge of him in the work of writers who pre- allowed me an unlimited number of lin- pointed out a small blue flag flying from cededhim in time, and we referto them ear stops. I made many. I met a whole it. "Pablo'sat home,"he said. as Ka{kaesque.As Borgeswrote, "The web of writers, and they passedme on Neruda's garden was dominated by a fact is that every writer createshis own from one country to friends in the next. steamrollerthat he had rescued,painted, Drecursors.His work modifiesour con- I made solitary pilgrimages.to shrines and installedas a shrine.Under the yard- ception of the past, as it will modif, the like Chichdn Itz6 and Machu Picchu, arm, a boat was grounded, geraniums future." This is preciselywhat has hap- but otherwise,wherever I went, I found growing from its stem, and beyond it lay penedin Borges'scase. Certain intrusions myself in the middle of a seemingly an anchor, all of them like props from of disouiet that undermine a believedre- endlessconversation that ranged all the Neruda'spoems. We went inside, and aliw aie so much a mark of his mirrd and way from pure play to high art. I asked into a high-ceilingedliving room with stonewalls, a fireplaceframed by granite t:-' .t boulders from the beach, and a wooden '/,-, gallery with stairs descending.Objects z/l' ': were everywhere:ships' figureheads lean- ing out of the corners;drifrwood; shells; 11 tackle;books. On a long, heary table un- der a wide window that framed the Paci- --,:.' fic lay more objects:a ship under glass;a ',,'-\ sextant;a telescope;odd-shaped bottles; agatesgathered from the beach. The light in the room wavered with the white of the breaking waves below. The house might havebeen afloat. Suddenly, Neruda calledout, and came down from the gal- lery, a captain descendingfrom his bridge. He was a large man-portly, even- but majesticand deliberatein his move- ment. His eyeswere l'argeand hooded, rather fike thoseof a bemusedlizard, and seemedto take in eve5,thing,but slowly. He moved slowly, turned his head slowly, blinked slowly; and when he spoke his :- -//+ ./;; voice, mellowly resonant,was close to languid. His words had the weight of stones.I noticed, then and wheneverI 'r;64.*;?7-+ ' -t,t,(,^/ later met him, that, since he was gener- 'allythe centerof attention, he had away of slowing down everything around him, 'Jasonis my sumnxerreading." pacing the conversation.As he talked, he 6+ THE NEV YORKER,JUNE 24 T"JULY 1,1996

moved about the room, touching a sur- of the carpenter'stools. They exude the well-stocked bookstores I bought the face here, picking up an agate from the touch ofman and the earthas a lessonto the books forbidden us in Spain-princi- tormented poet. Worn surfaces,the mark table and gaing into it, entranced.The pally Neruda's "Collected hands have-left on things, the aura, some- Poems," a objects were a kind ofvocabulary: the col- times tragic and alwaysi,istful, of theseob- Losadavolume, on India paper, of a lections of shells, of ships in bottles, of iects lend to realitv a fascinationnot to be thousand nine hundred and thirty- French postcards,ofclocla and hats and iaken lightly. two pages. Very little of Buenos Aires The flawed confusion of walking sticks; a huge wooden shoe he human beings shows in them, the proliferation, materials seemedSpanish. Listening to conversa- had badgeredfrom a bootmaker; a firll- used and discarded.the orints of feet and tions in that assuredp orteno accent,I felt sizedpapier-mAch6 horse. fingers,the permanentmark of humanity on that the Spanish ianguagehad now de- Thinking of Neruda, I still seehim in the insideand outsideofall obiects. tached itself from Spain, and had taken Thar is the kind of poetry"weshould be that house: it was an externaltzationof his after, poetry worn away as if by acid by the on many different modes.After a day or whole being. He used to saythat he had Iaborof hands,impregnated wirh sweaiand two of exploring, I telephonedBorges at a secondaryprofession, as a surrealarchi- smoke, smelling of"lilies and of urine, the National Lrbraq where he had been tect, a transformerof houses.He required splashedby the variety of what we do, le- director since 1955. Pioina had written gally or illegally. of his housesthat they be in remarkable A poetry as impure as old clothes,as a ahead to him, and had given me his places, that they have spacefor all the body, with its foodstainsand irs shame,with number. multifarious objects he brought back wrinkles,obsewations, dreams, wakefulness, He came on the line, and, on identi- prophecies, of love from his travels, that they have a work- declarations and hate, me, he changedto his very courte- stupidities,,shocks,idylls, political beliefs, S'ing room for his writing, and that they be negxtlons,doubts, afnrmatlons, taxes. ous English and asked me to call on comfortable,humorous, and accessibleto him in the library that afternoon.When his friends. Each house was his private I went back along the sand path to I arrived, I was directed by a guard to theatre, where he had designedthe sets Neruda's house several times. He and I Borges'soffice. I must have misheard, and always played the lead. combed the beach for agates at the ebb, for I found myself in the deeper twilit Neruda was then in his sixtieth vear. laughed a lot, talked a lot, ate and drank recessesof the library, lost. I might ai- and, in anticipation of his birthday, he exuberandy well. Since I wore no shoes, most have expectedit. An assistantres- had written 'Memorial de Isla Negra," an Pablo and Matilde called me, then and cued me and ied me to where Borgessat, autobiographyin the form of more than ever after, Patapel| (Barefoot), and when at the end of a long library table, a pile a hundred poems, divided into five sec- I said my farewells Pablo gave me a vol- of books at hand, in a pool of light tions, each covering a stage of his life. ume of his, "Estravagario." We made castby the 1amp.He roseto greet me, his The galley proofs were draped along the promises to meet again, somewhere, face upturned toward the sound of my back of a sofa. He was also translating sometime. Such a meeting seemedto me volce. "Romeo andJuliet" for performancelater improbable; but then so did being in That meeting, the first of many, so thatyear, and he askedme severalques- Chile, that long, thin, bountifirl country. imprinted itself on me that each time I tions about the text. Neruda was glum \44len I left, I flew to Mendoza, at the met Borges I felt I was reenactingit. It about his translation; English and Span- foot of the Andes on the Argentine side, came in part from his blindness, which ish did suchdifferent things, he said,they and, with two days to wait for the train meant that one had to find one's way were really misfits. After sometranslation acrossthe pampas to Buenos Aires, I to him, a presence,waiting patiently. To tinkering, we moved outside, to a long made notesand read,Isla Negra still vivid exist for him, people had to come within table adjoining the kitchen, where in my head. The trees in Mendoza's el- his earshot.into the pool of his atten- Neruda's wife, Matilde Urrutia, came to egant small squareswere shedding their tion, a pool that encompasseda library of join us. leaves,and under a limpid blue sky the blind volumes, all of Borges's memory, In the presenceof food and drink, dark wall of the Andes towered in the all he had read and thought, all he had Neruda alwaysexpanded visibly. On this piercingclarity of the air. It felt to me like written and would write. To meet him occasion,he brought the sheafofgalleys ShangriLa. was to be admitted to the universeof to the table, and at a repletepause he read his blindness,to the crowded soiitude to us, in that mesmerizingvoice, carefully UENOSATRPS has always struck me he inhabited, to the still pool of his phrased, that seemedto float the poem as the most sumptuousof cities: attention. in the air. I had no inkling of it then, but the abundanceof its shops and restau- There was something frail about his seventeenyears later I was to translate rants made Madrid and Barcelonathen company-the soft, quiet voice, the con- that book in its entirety, poem by poem. seem frugal by comparison,and in its cededvulnerability of his blindness. He Later that night, I talked with Jorge mostly spoketo me in English, which he about Neruda. He found for me a coDv had learned as a child from his oaternal of Neruda'sbrief prosemanifesto "6n grandmother, an Englishwoman of Impure Poetry": Northumbrian stock-Borges's English had a faint northern cast to it. As he ex- It is very appropriate,at certaintimes of plained once in an interview, 'TVhen I the day or'night, to look decplyinto obiects was talking to my paternal grandmother at resi: wheelswhich have'tiaversedvasr dusty spaces,bearing great cargoes,ofveg- I had to speakin a manner that I after- etablesor mlnerals,sacks trom the coxl wards discoveredwas called English, and yards,barrels, baskets, the handlesand grips when I was talking to my mother or her 6C) THENEV YORKER,JUNE 24 T,JULY 1,1996

parentsI had to talk a languagethat af- into the lablrinth of that inexhaustible terwardsturned out to be Spanish."It city, ofwhich he oncewrote: was in English that he readfirst, in his Hard to believeBuenos Aires had father's library. He thought of English anybeqinnirrq. ever after as the language of culture, I feelii to 6eas etdmal as air and water. Spanish as the languagehis mother Although I then spent some days in spokein the kitchen to the servants,the Brazil, I realized that I had reached a

7he f .or/.qe a/ l{ne/e languageof the street and the outside kind ofsaturation, that I had enough to wodd. He spokeEnglish with the respect occupy my mind for a foreseeabletime. due a languagehe knew well but did not So I made my way, by stages,back to live in: he sookein the carefulcadence of Spain,where I unpackedmy book hoard. books.On other occasions,in Spanish- In the late seventies,I was to do the re- speaking company, he would become verse: Dack and send books from the much more mischievous,less solemn. Yet newlv bemocratic Soain to friends in ': er/zznd I think it was the very fact of his bilin- Chile andArgentina, both then in politi- gual upbringing that gave him his acute cal darkness. senseof the arbitrary and deceptivena- ture of language:a bilingual is much fltrr at this time itwas Spainthat had /a*r' more awareof the gulfbetween word and I-l become politic'ally uncomfortable, thing than someoneconfined to a single and in late 7966 I returned to Britain, language. moving to London with my son,Jasper, cr"an>ehd Irony accompaniedBorges like a fa- to live for the next three years on a miliar, presentnot only in everl."thinghe houseboaton the Thames at Chelsea wrote but alsoin so many of the circum- Reach. Fastenedto London onlv by our stancesof his life: in the family's under- mooring, we felt ourselvesto b. ro-.- standingthat he would becomea writer thing of an offshore island. We found and yet would probably succumbto the many Latin-American friends in Lon- congenitalblindness that had affiictedhis don at that time, Mario Vargas Llosa father and five precedinggenerations; in and Guillermo Cabrera Infante among

'17tr: .Mrttzr/c flay ,Ff orr'/ his appointment as director of the Na- them. Sometimesthe boat soundedlike tional Library just when he was no longer a Spanish-American outpost moored able to read the volumes he presided to the Chelseaembankment. I{ yor t"li".," purrJir" tegins over.\A/hen we left the library for a walk Earlier that year,I had met Emir Ro- on the Southside. the Buenos Aires of driguezMonegal, a longtime friend and *h"t" tk" -uJdi.rg "roorJ "r.Jr, many of his poems, his one chronicler ofboth Borges and weve the peJect Jestinati.,n. The hand lightly in the crook of Neruda. Emir-dark, sharp- my arm, his stick ever present faced,incisive, and with great sanctity o{ Lonrr'i, .h"." yo.r'll in the other, it was I who was charm-had just been ap- [i,'rJ tvzo tropical resorts rateJ seeingthe city and readingthe oointed director ofa new cul- street signs,but it was Borges iural rer.iew called Mundo alnong tLe be'st itr tL" .o.lJ ty who orovided the footnotes Nueao, which he edited from tlre ,"uJ".s t>l Conr/y'Nast Tra.-e/er. and ihe anecdotes.Some- Paris. Emir came to England times, invoking a text, he oncea weekto give a seminar None witL puorl t"u"L"r, -Lit" pausedas if leafing through a library in at Cambridge, and regularly stopped off mpiotrsLip g"l{, rr.".L"ln4 anJ, his headbefore finding the book and the at the houseboaton the wav. A orodi- "k and haltingly bringing back the sen- reader,Le had real- o{ cuisi'e. page giousand perceptive "o.,.r",.rtrpurull"l"J tence or the line. ized that, at that particular moment It's tLe Ji{1"."r'r"" Letween Around Borges in BuenosAires I in the countriesof SpanishAmerica, a host were having it all, a"J Lavirrgit all senseda of attendantsoirits-wait- number of extraordinarywriters ers and taxi-driverswho knew his wavs. surfacing, and that all at once a Latin- to 1,o.,.."1{.Contact your travel friends readyto read to him or take his American literature was coming into be- o..ull 1-800-32l-1666. dictation, assistantsin the library who ing, more than fulfilling the prediction ".,,.rultont watchedover him-for now that his fame that Carlos Barral had made in Bar- had spreadto Europe and the United celona. Mundo Nuevo, which, under LANAI Stateshe had becomea national treasure. Monegal, ran to just twenty-five issues, I Ia*ari i Passersbyin the street murmured his is often credited with having launched name as a kind of salutation.I returned the Boom. Emir publishedthe work of +dl him to the library,to the guardwho stood CabreraInfante, th; billiant Cuban writer by the door. We said our goodbyes,and who hadjust then soughtpolitical asylum I moved out of the circle of his attention in London, as well as the first fragment ALASTAR REID 67 liir of Garcia M6rquez's "One Hundred ffi Years of Solitude." Garcia Mirquez was l', politically in sympathywith Neruda, and # reveredhim as a poet, yet his book also : shows everywherethe influence of Bor- il ges-in how it regardsodd and magical i happeningsas natural events,and seesev- 11 erywhere the collisions between private ;"" fictions and an unyielding reality. The shadowsof Neruda and Borges hung over the whole generationof writ- ers that followed them-not so much as direct literary influencesbut as forerun- ners. Neruda held out his vision of a South American continent,sharing a tur- bulent history, a singular humanity, and a common plight. Borgesswept awaythe previousrestraints of realismby demon- strating that fiction createsa separate world, where a writer can make his own /€,A laws and createhis own appropriatelan- fB. wurgrKrgl\rD wlllnHr us crorlrrlD Gto 1ro guage.While SpanishAmerica's younger writers mostly took their passion and 3f YOU]R ]HT]EA]D. P]E;RNilA]PS 1I]HI]E A]L1II1ItrI]D]E politics from Neruda, it was Borgeswho reminded them of the magical nature of ii ]HIAS SONII]tr']I]T]I]IN(G 1IO ]DO \V]III]HI ]t']I". ;: their craft. Emir once suggestedto me 3:f: that, just as Don Qrixote and Sancho {/(rrtlolo"e fre'/l),illrrty'= (r/otvtr,,qonnr///r)u/oru'1y''. l1nifr./ttlctt Panza,seen as sidesof the sameperson, ::: ,Vtc ,Zwnt reflect the contradictionsof the Soan- ,yurur/r'r/.t'.'ua,f,i', '//4rlr/oJ/'.%ocrr* our,/trv'txile enfrurrt<.cttntl ish character,so the Spanish-Ameiican ,':l /ol(q to our /teuuty't)/I1 ty'ly'oitla/ett'tzr/titt',gruanl ntottl rur/uu7r.y to il<' psychecould be thought of as embracing ct<,/ttytbe /tetyr/hr , t/,;'truvtr lt r,s rla ,;etkTty,rft)r o the sensualimmediacy of Neruda and the ;1 1y''onr -/intya, /qft't labyrinthine questioningsof Borges. oettrcrule*ury'e'. (|ne, na nuqlt urft/, t/ttrr trutllleuor,yot Borgesand Nerudagave extensive in- s:21q Ll /trvutl/e*r.,Vrtr.tv,s'<'rttrtft'rtdr, u/l your y'ryy'is,rArrrl terviews to Rita Guibert for a book she fi|, pawultunig/l ffi published in 1973 on Latin American lt,tttt'/ utJenl, or. t,tt// rt,y zr1 l-8(X)-\\i\l-lX)RF :- ff#t writers. Of Borges's Neruda politics had i-l this to say: %,Q%%rerr% ll Ifhe thinkslike a dinosaur,that hasnoth- /rttt <'luil .;ttr/t,Jhe

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His family, professionaland middle class, traditionally voted conservative,and when the Second World War broke out they TO VHOEVER IJ READINGME were emphatically pro-British. In 1946, Borges had made known in print his You are inr,ulnerable. Have they not granted you, opposition to Juan Per6n's dictatorship, those powers that preordain your destiny, which he saw as pro-Axis. He was dis- the certainty of dust? Is not your time missed from his post in a municipal li- as irreversible as that same river brary and appointed poultry inspectorin where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol a public market, a post he neverfilled but of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you a humiliation he never forgoe The mili- which you will not read-on it, akeady written, tary governmentthat succeededPer6n, in the date, the city, and the epitaph. 1955,made amends by appointingBorges Other men, too, are only dreams of time, the director of the National Librarv. not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; which wastantamount to appointinghim the universe is, like you, a Proteus. the national touchstonehe became. Dark, you will enter the darkness that expects you, doomed to the limits of your travelled time. f,anorut the sixties on, I translateda Know that in some sense vou are alreadv dead. I' fair part of Borges'spoetry for various selections of his work; and I -Jonce Ltrs Boncps collaborated in an edition of Neruda's (Transland,from the Spanish,by Alastair Reid.) "SelectedPoems," going on later to translate several single volumes of his. Translating someone'swork, poetry in hind him several very different poetic Then I would turn to the universe particular,has something about it akin to manners and voices. In talking to Rita of Borges. Bringing his poetry into En- being possessed,haunted. Translating a Guibert, he explainedhis protean nature glish was much more straightforward. poem means not only reading it deeply thus: "If my poetry has airy virtue it's Borges made constant use of certain and deciphering it but clambering about that it's an organism, it's organic and English verseforms-rhymed quatrains backstageamong the props and the emanatesfrom my own body. When I and sonnetsin particular--so that trans- scaffolding. I found I could no longer was a child, my poetry was childish, it lating them required mainly a good ear read a poem of Neruda'ssimply aswords was youthful when I was young, despair- and a certain prosodic agility in English. on a page without hearing behind them ing when I was suffering,aggressive In the caseofhis sonnets,I was carefirl that languid, caressingvoice. Most im- when I had to take oart in the social not to torture them into matching form portant to me in translating these two struggle, and there is still a mixture of in English-ingenuity at the expenseof writers was the sound of their voices in all these different tendenciesin the oo- poetry. While Neruda'spoems arewide- my memory, for it very much helped in etry I write now, which may perhaps ranging, in their subject matter, their finding the English appropriateto those be at the sametime childish, aggressive, manner, their gesture,their tone, so that voices.I found that if I learnedpoems of and despairing.. . . I have alwayswrit- they must be taken singly, as separate Neruda's by heart I could repiay them ten from some inner necessity.. . . I'm events, Borges's poems are related to at odd moments, on buses,at wakeful an anti-intellectual, I don't much care one another, not just in their formal times in the night, until, at a certain for analysisor for examining literary manner and their heraldry of recurring point. the translation would somehow currents, and I'm not a writer who sub- symbols-chessboards, maps, knives, iet. The voice was the clue: I felt that sistson books,although books are neces- mirrors, coins, labyrinths, tigers, librar- all Neruda's Doemswere fundamen- sary to my life." His dutiful political ies-but in their skeptical, questioning tally vocative-spoken poems, poems of poems are mainly forgettable,but occa- undertone.They Iet you in on a secret, direct address-and that Neruda's voice sionally the politics and the poetry come as observer,as eavesdropper. Translating was in a sensethe instrument for which together, as in his meditation on food Borges felt to me like learning a private he wrote. He once made a tape for me, and hunger, "The Great Tablecloth," langr.rage:the exactcast ofcertain favor- reading piecesof different poems, in which concludes: ite words of his, like the noun olvido, different tones and rhythms. I played it Let us sit down soonto eat which he usesto mean either death or over so many times that I can hear it in with all those who haven't eaten, sleep or forgetting, and of certain of my head at will. Two lines of his I used let us spreadgreat tablecloths, his vertiginous adjectives,has to be put saliin the lakeso[the world, to repeat hke a Zen koan, for they iet up planetarybakeries, intuited every time. Borges is a much seemedto apply particularly to translating: tables*ith striwberriesin snow, less adventurous or original poet than just and a olate fike the moon itself Neruda: for him, poetry is one of the in this net it's not the strings from which we will all eat. that count several dimensions of language he ex- but also the air that escapesthrough For now I ask no more plored, and his poems are mainly parts the meshes. justice than the of eating. of a larger whole. He did, however, He often wrote of himself as hav- There is so much of Neruda in that write a handfirl of very memorable single ing many selves, just as he had left be- single last couplet. poems, like his "Matthew, 25:30," in 70 THE NEV YORKER,JUNE 24 6 JULYI,1996 RIPRISI|{IIO 8Y PRIt1CISSHOTIIS INIIRllAI OIIAL, ItlC.'} which he irnagines a voice confront- moving original. I knew Neruda much ing him with the vocabuiary of his better now, by way of his poems. He own existence: was alwaysready to answerany questions I had about them, even to talk about "Stars, bread, libraries of East and them, fondly, as about lost friends, but West, he was not rnuch interested in the me- playingc,rrds, chessboards, gallerics, skylights,cellars, chanicsof translation. Once. in Paris. a human body to walk with on the while I was explaining someliberty I had exrth, taken,he stoppedme and put his hand fingern.rils,,growirrg at nighttime CALLYOUR on my shoulder."Alastair, don't just an(l ln deatn, IRAVILAGENI shadowsfor forgetting, mirrors that translatemy poems.I want you to im- 0R800r23-r8rB. endlesslymuTtiplyi provethem." *tt:#rr[:nt., geritlest of all time's W,quaa'd,w In1969, Nerudastood as Communist borders of Braz\|, Uruguay, horses candidatefor the Presidencvof Chile. but ano mofnlngs, after a brief campaignhe dropped out a bronzeweight, a copy of Grettir SaEa, and threw his support behind his friend and"fire,,rhi-charge algebre ar Junin SalvadorAllende; and Allende, once ln vottr Dlooo. daysmore crowdcd than , scent elected,rn7970, appointedNeruda Chil- -ofthe honevsuckle. ean Ambassadorto France.From then love,and the imminenceof 1ove,and on, Pablo and I saw each other fre- intolerable remembering, dreamslike buriedtreesure,-generous quently, for he came to l,ondon everyso luck, often. We had an easyfriendship: in his and memory itself, where a glance eyes,I, as translator,had joined his cast, can malie men dtzq- and, although he becamevery much a all this wasglvel !o you and.,with it, public poet again,especially following his the ancientnourishment ofheroes- Nobel Prize in Literature. in 1971. he treachery,defeat, humiliation. In vain 6aveoceans been squandered would shed his o{ficial self in the com- on vou.in vain pany of friends, as at a backstageparty. the sun, wonderfully seenthrough In the vast Chilean Embassvin Paris. he \A/hitrnan'seyes. ignored voluminous You haveused up the yearsand they the pubiic rooms and haveused up you, furnished a room in his own suite as a and still, rnd sdll, you havenot written French cafe,with tables,wire chairs,and the poem." a zinc bar; it was there that diplomacy, politics, literature, and friendships were pmlo andMatilde rurned up in Lon- all enacted.I hadbeen in Chile in his ab- I don in 1967.and when Pablo heard sence,and, having stayedin his house in that I lived on a houseboathe came Isla Negra, I brought him a full report on straightto inspectit. He decidedhe must the stateofthe garden and on an exten- hold his birthday fiestathere, an evening sion being built while he was away.Then, brimming with Chileans,in the courseof Iatein1972, he wrote me, sayingthat he which a Ulrainian poet had to be rescued was resigningand returning to Chile. His fiom the Thames-mud.I accompanied he'althhad beenfailing, he explained,and Pablo to the street market in Peiticoat he wanted to be attended to at home. Lane and to a ship's chandlerby the The day of his homecoming was cele- docks in a vain searchlbr a ship'sfigure- brated as a national holidav in Chile. but head. He was anxiousto have me trans- already,as he had hinted, ominoussigns late the whole of "Estravagario,"a favor- were in the air-not only of Neruda'sde- ite book of his, and I agreedwith teriorating health but of a menacing op- pleasure.In England, wrappedin a Chil- position emerging in Chilean politics. ean poncho, Pablo looked unnaturally Then, on September1.1., 1973, the mili- cold, but when we gave a reading to- tary coup savagedChile, and twelve days gether in the Elizabeth Hall I lis- Qreen later Neruda died of cancerin a clinic in tened to his voice spreadingitselflike a Santiago.Now only the poemsremained. balm over the English audiencra magi- The tapehe had made me became,sud- cal sound, evenwithout the string of denly, like a precious relic, except that I sense.After the reading,he was courtesy had long sincetransferred it to my mem- itse[ while regularlycasting a sideglance ory, where it never neededrewinding: in mv direction.dinner on his mind. It is time, love,to breakoff that After being closetedfor a spell with sombrerose, the still photographs his I BERMUDA of poems, shutup the.stars and bury the ashin found it a relief to spend time with the the earth; IHI SOUL OI BERMUDA. Il|T HIARI OI YOUR VATAIIO1.l and, in the rising of the light, wake hazardsoftranslation: as he once wrote, with those awaking "Nothing is as consubstantialwith lit- or go on in the dream, reaching the "other erature and its modest mysterv as the shore of the seawhic[ has no other shore. questionsraised bv a translation."On theseoccasions, I would sometimestry \ j[ /ttrr-E Neruda was running for to surprisehim with a question, and as V Y Presidentin Chile, my son and often as not he would sumrise me back. I were living by the seaon the outskirts I grew to know well a iertain move- of St. Andrews in Scodand,and therewe ment of his mind, in which he would receiveda lettcrfrom Borge.announcing first make a straightforward statement a forthcomingstcp on his way to receive abouta bookor awriter andthen, aftera an honorary degreeat Oford. He arrived gravid pause,abrupdy undermine it with with Maria Kodama, a graceful, gentle an ironic afterthought,a subversiveaside, fugentine woman of Japaneseancestry, mischievous,mocking, desolemnizing. who acted as his travelling companion, In 1985, in New York, Borges gave and whom he married, to the grati6.ca- me a copy of a recentpoem. It had no tion of his friends,shortly beforehe died. tide, and after some deliberationhe de- He was much affectedby being in Scot- cided to call it "The Web." It began: land, asthough his readinghad suddenly "Terrifi \Atrich of mv cities c" come to life. He took walks with my son am I dcomel to die in? saysTIME Magazine about besidethe North Seaand oulled Border Geneva, balladsfrom his memory. In those few whererevelation reached me Mark0'Donnell's from Virgil andTac$ unplanneddays, he laid asidethe obliga- -/ GETTINGOVER . tion to be Borges,the public selfto which My translationof dre poem lay patiendy his rvritings bound him, as he described in The New York'"r files until June of "An unusualfywitty it in his shon fiction "Borgesand I": 1986, when it saw the light: I receiveda noVelrtt the TrME reviewby I live, I allow myselfto live, so that Borges copy of the magazine while I was in G.B.continues. "[About] the sort can unwrnclnts wrltrngs,ancl these wrltlngs City. Soon after, coming in from me. . . . Years aio, I tried to frce mi- of figure someone like Jean iustifi, a walk, I switched on the television to ielf from him and I we"ntfrom writing down find the Mexican poet Octavio Paz talk- Rhys might have created had the myths of my district to devisinqqames she written50 years later and with time and irifiniw, but thesesariei hu,'c ing about Borgesin the past terrse.He chosen to focus on the lives of becomepart of Borles by now,-and I wili had died earlierthat day,in Geneva. have to think up so;ething else.. . . I don't A11that time, of occasionalmeetings well-dressed,verbally agile gay know\vl)rch ol usrs u ntrngthrr p;rgc. menorbiting the Manhattan-Fire interspersedwith long periods of im- lsland party circuit rather than By now, Borges was regularly accept- mersion in their texts, gave me a curi- meek turn-of-the-centurywaifs ing some of the many invitations that ous and complex connection to both of searching for love in all the came his way-to lecture, to receive hon- thesemen. dereading them, I seealways wrongoutfits...As much a bitter- orary degrees and cultural decorations, more cleady the interweaving of their sweet love story as it is an in Europe and the United States. Rever- writings and their lives-their poems homageto the epigram.And it is ential audiences came to hear him, as asincarnations. I find nothing at all con- terrificon bothcounts." if to confirm that he existed. Once, visit- tradictory in accommodatingthem both. ing him in BuenosAires in 1978, I asked Borgesused to saythat when writers die "A quirky,funny coming- him about his suddenappetite for travel. they become books-a quite satisfac- of-middle-agetale about '14/hen I am at home in BuenosAires," tory incarnation in his view. With luck, the hilariouswrong turns he told me, "one day is much like an- however,I think they becomevoices. In in the searchfor love." other. But when I travel-and you must many conversationswith Borges, from realtzethat for me, since I am blind, trav- the formal to the fanciful, I realized -Terrence McNally elling means merely changing arm- sharply that to him I eisted only as a chairs-friendly ghosts materialize one voice. That may have led to my deep "Unflinchinglyfunny, by one and talk to me about literature, conviction that voice is perhapsthe most surprisingand ultimatelyvery and about my own writings, most gen- essentialand lasting incarnation of any moving."-Stephen McCauley erously.For a writer, that is great luxury. existence.More than that, it is in voices, I feel blessedby it, I feel lucky." far beyond photographs, that the dead "Who is this guy?He Borges had grown tired of lecturing, continue to live. In the caseof Ne- writeslike a bloody and when he visited New York, in the ruda and Borges, their voices were for late seventies,he would sometimestele- me the crucial, guiding element in m;' phone me and invite me to join him in translating them. I think of their writings giving a charla-a conversationonstage in as encapsulationsof their voices, and printing aiways 2nd ld Knopf which I would ask him auestionsinvit- I hear them often in my head htto://www. randomhouse.com ing to his mind. He lovei to talk of the with awe, and with enduring affection.r