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).