Borges and Dante

European Connections 20

Borges and Dante

Echoes of a Literary Friendship

von Humberto Núñez-Faraco

1. Auflage

Borges and Dante – Núñez-Faraco schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2006

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03910 511 3

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Borges and Dante – Núñez-Faraco Introduction

The following study examines three main aspects of Jorge Luis Borges’s reading of Dante Alighieri, namely poetic language, ethics and love. My purpose in undertaking this study is to reveal the ways in which Borges’s interests in these issues manifested themselves in his appropriation of Dante and gained prominence within his work as a whole, paying particular attention to the years c.1920–c.1960. It is true that Dante is only one presence among others in Borges. This is partly due to the voluminous variety of Borges’s reading, which stepped beyond the national and linguistic boundaries of Western literary tradition to embrace world literature. Indeed, one of his characteristic intellectual attitudes was his recognition of literature as a universal asset, one which allowed him to locate his creative activity within a broad literary framework. An Argentine writer has legitimate access to a multiplicity of traditions (so Borges argued in one of his polemical essays against the cultural politics of the Peronista movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s); therefore, he should not confine himself to local or nationalistic themes. 1 This attitude, which may seem paradoxical when set against the aesthetic tenets he held during the 1920s, reflects Borges’s European kinship, a consequence not only of his family background but also of his school years in Switzerland. At the same time, the existence of a large library in the Borges household consolidated from an early age his enthusiasm for books of all kinds (he was particularly keen on English authors), and enabled him to encounter the enchanting world of a collective literary imagination:

The writers whose literary influence I consciously assimilated were Stevenson, Chesterton, Kipling and Shaw, authors I read when I was still a young boy growing up in Buenos Aires and spending a considerable amount of my time in my father's library which contained a remarkable collection of English books [...] This is

1 ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’, OC I: 267–74. perhaps where I first experienced literature as an adventure into an endless variety of styles. The library was like a single mind with many tongues.2

Dante, then, is only one of several influences at work on Borges, whose most elaborate thoughts are registered in two collections of essays: Siete noches (1980) – originally a series of lectures on literary themes delivered in 1977 – which begins with a chapter on The Divine Comedy,3 and Nueve ensayos dantescos (1982).4 Scattered references to Dante can also be found throughout the interviews granted by the author after he had gained international renown in the late 1950s. However, due to their spontaneous and usually autobiographical nature, these do not constitute a systematic reflection from which any overt poetic theory can be extracted. In Nueve ensayos dantescos, however, Borges displays his scholarly erudition, referring to no fewer than thirty sources, including early commentators on the Commedia as well as later writers and critics; thus revealing the extent of his interest in the Italian poet. Years later, when posed the question, ‘Does he mean as much to you as your favourite English [...] and American poets?’, Borges’s reply was unequivocal: ‘Were I to save a whole book [...] I would save the Divine Comedy [...] I think of Dante as being the writer, as being the poet’ (Cortínez 86–87). The question raises a chronological problem which has to a certain extent been clarified by the author himself. Despite the fact that he

2 Cited in Heaney and Kearney 73. Cf. Yates 99–106. 3 See ‘La Divina Comedia’, OC III: 207–20. 4 In 1948 Borges published both in the literary journal Sur and in the newspaper La Nación a series of articles on The Divine Comedy, namely ‘El simurg y el águila’, ‘El seudo problema de Ugolino’, ‘El verdugo piadoso’, ‘El último viaje de Ulises’, and ‘El encuentro en un sueño’ (for the exact publication details of these articles see my bibliography). Three of them were included with slight variants in ‘Estudio preliminar’, an introduction to a Spanish translation of the Commedia published the following year; see La Divina Comedia, Colección Clásicos Jackson, vol. 31 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jackson, 1949) ix–xxviii. These essays were reissued by the author, together with new material, in Nueve ensayos dantescos (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982). The latter includes ‘El noble castillo del canto cuarto’ (first published in La Nación in 1951), and ‘Dante y los visionarios anglo-sajones’ (first published in Ars in 1957). ‘Purgatorio, I, 13’ and ‘La última sonrisa de Beatriz’ were first published in the 1982 edition. See also ‘Mi primer encuentro con Dante’ 91–94; ‘Encuentro con Jorge Luis Borges’ 103–08; ‘La fe poética del Dante’ 1–2.

16 assigned his reading of the Commedia to a rather late period in his life (the late 1930s),5 Borges’s first allusions to Dante in a critical vein can be found in the essays he wrote during the previous decade, after returning to Argentina from his second visit to Europe in 1924.6 Yet these do not show a substantial knowledge of the Italian poet; for the most part, they are limited to general remarks which do not imply a thorough engagement with his work. Nevertheless, given that such references provide evidence of an earlier acquaintance with Dante, I have been particularly attentive to certain passages which indicate a coincidence with Dantean themes. It is true that in a comparative study of this kind one is inclined to overemphasize such parallels. In general, I have tried to distinguish those cases where there is a concordance of thought between Borges and Dante (without this implying a direct influence) from those where a certain word or image suggests a more intimate connection. Touching the latter, there is an instance in Borges’s early lyrics that indicates his familiarity with Canto V of the Inferno. Indeed, through close textual analysis I have discerned an echo of the famous episode of Francesca da Rimini in the poem ‘Llamarada’, which Borges composed as early as 1919. This in itself does not mean that he was entirely familiar with the Commedia at that time. Given the immense popularity of the episode (especially among the English romantic poets Borges read in his youth), it is not surprising that he knew of it. Furthermore, the fact that in his later essays on Dante Borges cleaves to a romantic interest in the figures of Paolo and Francesca, as well as those of Beatrice, Ulysses and Ugolino, suggests that his reading of Dante may well have been mediated (at least in its beginning) by nineteenth-century writers, and that this initial contact left a lasting impression on him. My conjecture is that by 1919 Borges had acquainted himself with a few Dantean episodes (which he may have read in a selection of Dantean passages in English translation), but that his declarations regarding the

5 See ‘La Divina Comedia’, OC III: 208–09; ‘Mi primer encuentro con Dante’ 91; Sorrentino 72. See also Paoli, ‘Borges e Dante’ 190–91; Terracini 124–25; Davidson 44–45. 6 I refer to the literary essays included in Inquisiciones (1925); El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926) and El idioma de los argentinos (1928).

17 poetic encounter with Dante in the late 1930s refer to a systematic reading of the Commedia.7 One way of assessing the presence of Dante in Borges is by looking at the issues to which Borges gives prominence in the essays. These include: (1) the relation between rhetoric and an authentic movement of feeling and thought; (2) the association between art and reality; (3) the question of free will and moral responsibility; and (4) the nature and significance of Dante’s love for Beatrice. These are, in a nutshell, the issues I propose to develop in this book. Several points about Borges’s critical appraisal of the Commedia emerge from the essays. These are marked in the first instance by an aesthetic evaluation, one which stresses the reader’s emotional response to the poetic (as opposed to the doctrinal or philosophical) essence of the text.8 Indeed, the imprint left by critics such as De Sanctis, Croce and Momigliano in the appreciation of Dante’s poetics is clearly discernible in Borges’s appraisal, although writers such as Thomas Carlyle and T. B. Macaulay also exerted an important influence on him. Among the English translations acknowledged by him is the one by Longfellow.9 This includes, at the end of each cantica, an appendix under the title

7 Cf. Barnatán’s remark in his introduction to the 1982 edition of Nueve ensayos dantescos: ‘La leyenda dice que fue en esa época en la que leyó la Divina Comedia en el tranvía que lo desplazaba desde su casa hasta el barrio de Almagro, donde estaba su trabajo. De todas formas es muy posible que se tratase de una relectura más detenida’ (46). 8 Just as Borges highlights the reader’s aesthetic response to the Commedia he also questions his capacity to appreciate the religious dimension of the work: ‘The fact that I am not a Christian makes my judgment of Dante to be simply an aesthetic one’ (Cortínez 86). As is well known, for Borges enchantment constitutes the psychological basis of reading: ‘La letteratura è una forma della felicità’, he says, and adds that a book should be read for its capacity to move the reader (‘perché [...] emoziona, perché [...] trasporta’ (Campra 120; I was unable to consult the Spanish edition of this interview). Cf. ‘La fede poetica di Dante’ 80–81; ‘La felicidad escrita’ and ‘La fruición literaria’, IA 45–53, 101–09; ‘La Divina Comedia’, OC III: 208. See also ‘Manuel Peyrou: La espada dormida’, Sur, 127 (1945) 73–74. Borges’s emphasis on the poetic aspect of the Commedia can be seen as an implicit reaction to the moralising attitude of T. S. Eliot, with which he is clearly at odds; see Eliot’s ‘Dante’ (1920), in The Sacred Wood 135–45; id., ‘Religion and Literature’, in Selected Prose 97–106. Cf. Menocal 100–01, 110–12. 9 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1867).

18 ‘Illustrations’, a real treasure of selections from world literature. Several of Borges’s references to and interpretations of the Commedia can be traced to it, not to mention the passage on the cabbala included by Longfellow in the appendix to the third cantica to which the short stories ‘El Aleph’ and ‘La escritura del dios’ may be linked.10 As noted by Roberto Paoli, it is questionable whether Borges had direct access to all his references (‘Borges e Dante’ 195). Their rather imprecise nature (the quotations are few and their source not always cited) and the rarity of some of the works referenced (particularly the medieval and Renaissance commentaries on the Commedia), suggests that he may actually have had a smaller number of texts at hand than the number of references (or allusions, anyway) would indicate. It is true, however, that his economy in specifying sources – a feature not unique to the essays on Dante – may have arisen from external factors such as editorial specifications regarding the availability of space. Be that as it may, it is striking to note that in the Siete noches chapter mentioned above (written almost three decades after the introduction to the Spanish translation of The Divine Comedy published by Editorial Jackson in 1949) Borges’s erstwhile erudite pose has wholly vanished. The themes hardly differ from the earlier essays (some of them actually reappear in identical form), yet there is indisputably a radical change in authorial stance, which has become one of greater modesty and simplicity. Considering the essays as a whole, whether in the 1949 version or in their final arrangement in the Obras completas, one cannot say that Borges achieves a comprehensive analysis of the manifold complexities of the Commedia. This would have required the development of literary, philosophical and theological issues for which he may not have had sufficient space. However, it is always necessary, in dealing with Borges’s critical work, to bear in mind the readership for which it was intended. It is a fact that the essays on Dante were addressed to the general public, and in this Borges was certainly fulfilling a pedagogic function. It is nevertheless improbable that he would have taken enough

10 Ibid., III: 738–41. See Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah 17. As far as I am aware, Borges’s earliest mention of the aleph – the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet – occurs in the essay ‘Ramón Gómez de la Serna’, Inq. 124; cf. ‘Historia de los ángeles’, TE 67. On his reading of Longfellow’s translation, see Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah 5; id., ‘Conversación con Borges sobre la Cábala’ 167– 68. See also ‘Mi primer encuentro con Dante’ 91.

19 philological and exegetical interest in the poem to produce an extensive study of it. Borges may have been a reader of great poetic sensibility and intellectual curiosity, but he was neither an Italianist nor a medievalist, and his approach to Dante is always imaginative, not academic. It is clear that he harboured a very personal view of the Commedia, one dictated by his literary and emotional sensibility to particular aspects of it.11 Borges’s reading of Dante and the imprint thereof on his own poetic and narrative production is a more complex matter. Among the compositions which are directly based on Dantean themes are his poems ‘Paradiso, XXXI, 108’ and ‘Inferno, I, 32’ (from El hacedor, 1960; OC II: 178, 185), and the short stories ‘El Aleph’, ‘El Zahir’ and ‘La escritura del dios’ (from the collection El Aleph, 1949), in which Borges inter- twines allusions to Dante with other literary, mystical and philosophical elements. There are, of course, other ‘types’ or typical ways in which his reading of the Commedia manifests itself. In ‘La intrusa’, a short story dealing with jealousy and uncontrolled eroticism, he makes use of the narrative technique Dante employed in the episode of Francesca da Rimini (Inferno V, 73–142), having one of his characters speak for himself as well as for the other – in this case two rival brothers in love

11 These include specific passages from the following cantos: Inf. IV; V; XXVI; XXXIII; Purg. I; XXX; Par. X; XIX; XXXI. Scattered references to the Vita nuova, the Convivio, and the Epistle to Cangrande (especially in the initial sections of the ‘Estudio preliminar’ of 1949) are also made. The non-academic tone of the essays is of course well known; see Arce 78–79; Mazzotta, Critical Essays: ‘In our century the dividing line between academic and nonacademic [sic] critics (Ungaretti, Eliot, Mandelshtam, Borges, Penn Warren, and others) is fairly sharp [...] Nonacademic readers clearly tend to be daring in their insights and thereby force on us new perceptions of the complexities of the poem [...] The essays by Ungaretti and Borges are particularly striking because they point toward other, elusive, unpredictable directions. These two essays are, above all, readings – in the strong sense of the word, the sense that academicians do not really understand – and not commentaries or erudite glosses, though Borges manifestly plays with the genre of glossing the text’ (xxi–xxii; my italics). Cf. Alberto Giordano, ‘Borges y la ética del lector inocente’ 70: ‘Borges propone una lectura imaginativa de la Comedia que no reniega de las estrategias de la razón pero que las subordina a la voluntad incierta de imaginar, para ampliar su campo de experimentación o para imprimirle mayor intensidad a sus fuerzas.’ Cf. Borges’s statement: ‘When I am writing something, I try not to understand it. I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer. I think that one of the sins of modern literature is that it is too self-conscious’ (This Craft of Verse 118).

20 with the same woman (OC II: 403–06). Elsewhere, in ‘Poema conjetural’, he makes a direct reference to Purgatorio V (lines 94–102), including a literal translation of line 99: ‘fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano’ (‘huyendo a pie y ensangrentando el llano’, OC II: 245, line 14); a tactic he deploys in the poem ‘El Ángel’ (from La Cifra, 1981), where he inserts the last verse of the Commedia (‘l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’, Par. XXXIII, 145) in order to incorporate into his composition the central moral issue of the Dantean poem:

Que el hombre no sea indigno del Ángel cuya espada lo guarda desde que lo engendró aquel Amor que mueve el sol y las estrellas hasta el Último Día en que retumbe el trueno en la trompeta.12

Under yet another type, the historical character Peter Damian (mentioned by Dante in Par. XXI, 121–23) becomes the pretext for a short story in which Borges toys with the ideas of time and identity (‘La otra muerte’, OC I: 571–75); while ‘La espera’ portrays the psychotic delirium of a traitor who (like the sinful souls of the Inferno) is unable to escape his own moral blindness (OC I: 608–11).13 There is a further type under which we can speak of a Dantean presence in Borges. Allegory – whether by this we mean the strictly fictitious ‘allegory of poets’, or the more complex kind of typological allegory – may not be Dante’s invention, but is unquestionably one of his favourite modes of poetic and historical representation.14 Although Borges favours the poetic features of the Commedia, there is no question that he used allegory as a means of constructing a higher level of meaning in his own stories. Like Dante, Borges expresses throughout his work a concern about the human condition, as well as about the ways in which literature can manifest (or indeed conceal) man’s being in the world. However, his solution to the problem, perhaps in typically modern fashion, tends to be in the negative. Rather than an affirmation of being, what we often find

12 OC III: 320, lines 1–6. 13 For a general survey, see Paoli, Percorsi di significato 9–49, 87–120; id., ‘Borges e Dante’ 189–212; Bonatti 737–44; Bellini 305–19; Marani 89–92. 14 See Green 118–28; Singleton, Dante Studies 1–17, 84–98; Auerbach, ‘Typological Symbolism’ 3–10.

21 in Borges is doubt and disbelief. Thus, knowledge in Borges’s fiction stands revealed as appearance and illusion, a cognitive state which man is incapable of overcoming. In many of his short stories this results in a radical scepticism permeating all aspects of being. The roots of his conception are manifold, including a variety of classical, Christian and Neoplatonic sources with which Borges had a keen preoccupation during the 1930s and 1940s – Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus and St. Augustine among others. The theme of the journey in search of truth is not absent from Borges’s narrative. Although it would be naïve to relate this motif to his reading of the Commedia alone, it is certain that he found in Dante’s Ulysses a powerful representation of the poet’s quest for knowledge and experience as well as a projection of his creative anxiety. More specifically, in his essay ‘El último viaje de Ulises’ Borges observes that Dante’s real challenge at this stage of the work (Inferno XXVI) lay in completing the Commedia, which awaited public diffusion and a likely political and religious condemnation. Dante, burdened with uncertainty, compared his bold enterprise (the writing of the poem rather than the pilgrim’s journey) with Ulysses’s tragic expedition. As Borges puts it:

La acción de Ulises es indudablemente el viaje de Ulises, porque Ulises no es otra cosa que el sujeto de quien se predica esa acción, pero la acción o empresa de Dante no es el viaje de Dante, sino la ejecución de su libro. (OC III: 355; my italics)

It is an imaginative approach to the episode, one which perceives at its heart the pressing issue of literary fulfilment. Borges must have been very sensitive to this question, for he concludes one of the few poems he wrote during this period with a strong indictment against his own poetic achievements:

En vano te hemos prodigado el océano, En vano el sol, que vieron los maravillados ojos de Whitman: Has gastado los años y te han gastado, Y todavía no has escrito el poema.15

15 ‘Mateo, XXV, 30’ (1953), OC II: 252, lines 24–27; my italics. Cf. Cro, ‘Borges e Dante’ 409–10. In a recent biography, Edwin Williamson links several of the compositions Borges wrote during this period to his emotional insecurity and affective vacuum, suggesting that since the 1930s Borges conceived his own

22 In the first chapter of my study I shall provide an overview of Borges’s conception of poetic language and its correspondence with Dante’s thought on the subject. In order to do this I shall first present an outline of Dante’s position. I shall then consider the prominence of the issue in Borges’s early work, concluding with the outcome of the encounter as dramatized in the short story ‘El Aleph’, undoubtedly one of the richest fictional compositions in the Borgesian repertoire. I do not claim, however, that there is any direct connection between Borges and Dante in his early literary criticism of the 1920s, which shows no substantial knowledge of Dante’s theory of poetry. What we do find is a common concern for certain aspects of language in relation to the creative process. This parallelism prepared the ground for Borges’s later recognition of Dante as the poet. My aim will be to show that at the heart of Borges’s appreciation of the Commedia lies his admiration for Dante’s masterly handling of language, as well as for his absolute fidelity to the transparency of the word; that is, his facility of creating an aesthetic emotion in a perfect verbal equation. It is in this respect that Dante was for Borges a poet of truth – not as a Christian thinker but simply as the maker of images. This distinction is critical for appreciating the satirical element in ‘El Aleph’, with which I shall conclude the chapter. Following the same method of inquiry, Chapter 2 will explore the problem of ethics. It begins with a brief discussion of the issue in Dante. I shall then examine the ways in which Borges tackles the question in his early work. The chapter will conclude by revealing how Borges’s reading of the moral issue in the Inferno gave rise to an allegory of the human condition in the short story ‘La escritura del dios’. In the third and final chapter I shall consider the theme of love, first by presenting in outline the dynamics of love in Dante; then by exploring the subject in Borges’s early lyrics; and finally by analyzing the psychology of love in Borges’s reading of the Italian poet. What distinguishes Borges’s narrative is his inversion of Dantean themes, as in the short stories ‘El Aleph’ and ‘El Zahir’. Regarding the latter, I shall demonstate that Borges’s playful reworking of the theme of lovesickness is connected with specific medieval and Renaissance sources.

writing within a ‘Dantean project of salvation’, one that would confer meaning to his life through the galvanising power of human love. See Borges, A Life 178–79, 242–43, 319, 390 et passim.

23 By developing each aspect in a comparative sequence it will be possible to illustrate both the way in which these issues developed in Borges’s work and, at the same time, provide a general perspective from which the reader can gauge their significance in Dante’s thought.