FOREWORD

Jorge Luis Borges is most poignantly and hauntingly interested in what men have believed in their doubt: Siddhartha, Josaphat, the Face of Christ; Duns Scotus, Averröes, Berkeley, Hume; Judaism, its offshoot Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Idealism. His equivocation regarding heresies and dogmas renews them all, though he may be the unique evocative source of his own nostalgic non-belief in Belief or prescient belief in non-belief.

A fundamental theme always close to hand is his own identity. Like Don Quixote, he does not mind being a character in a book, so long as it is in the right book and not the wrong one. Don Quixote objected, in the Second Part of Don Quixote, by Cervantes, to appearing in the (spurious) Second Part of Don Quixote, by Avellaneda; Borges puts the question: “Is not one single term repeated enough to break down and confound the history of the world?” The right book for him to appear in, then, is the one by “Borges.” And no other. As for the present, he merely identifies himself as the “one who swears he has not died.”

(The identity of others concerned in the present book is dimly asseverated by their names at the end of each piece they translated. They are Americans and a Scotsman who have put into American and into English some of the thoughts Borges has had in various languages—even in English—before he wrote them down in Spanish.)

Borges’ concern with “history” is unique. He is not taken with the grandiose Goethean-Romantic pivotal zeniths of Spenglerian cycles, or even with Unamuno's “intra-history” of dim daily existential Everyman routine, as he is moved by the epiphanies of racial and folk evolution. In the story of The Warrior and the Captive, he intuits a barbarian warrior's physic conversion to Rome as a city of light and order, and, conversely, of the Englishwoman's atavistic return to savagery in the vastness of the Argentine waste. Men leave off being wild beasts in one divine moment, or return to the earth to drink the blood of a slaughtered animal in another moment equally divine; enemies become blood brothers in the heat of battle, or a pursuer joins the prey in a paroxysm of blood identification (Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz).

And as for History's periods, those Grand Ages of a Hero or of a God, they die out, period by period, in the physical death of a last survivor (as in The Witness), and the world is the “poorer.”

History is also the epiphany of epigram: six feet of English earth for Ear aid Sigurdson; the odor of horses and of courage; I was proud of the men who had killed my brothers: these are the elements of what Borges calls “true history,” the vocabulary of The Modesty of History.

Among his several obsessions, Borges has counted a knife, The Knife. He is “animated” by the feel of it, he fictionally clutches it on behalf of others, he is atrociously aware of it, altogether frustrated, lying, unfulfilled, in his desk drawer, among his rough drafts and letters. A knife, moreover, the knife in his thoughts, is to kill; it was “conceived and given form for a very special purpose.” In addition, there is, in his verse, “An impossible recollection of having died/Fighting, on some corner of a suburb.” The Knife in his drawer should perforce fulfill its destiny; otherwise “so much hard faith, such impassively innocent arrogance” is rendered vain by non-use. An obsession with dying is proof of being alive; an obsession with a manner of dying, with being killed or killing, even more, is a creatively morbid concern with the diabolic importance of (someone's) being alive. This compulsive instinct is, perhaps, a true measure of Borges: it leads him to think, to assert, that if in the universe—in the entire history of the universe even—there is or has ever been anyone who could be a duplicate of himself, then the meaning of all life, all lives, is altogether suspect.

The present collection is the attestation that no one is, ever has been, his replica. There is “Borges and I,” Borges and The Other, but there is, on the present evidence, no other Borges.

—ANTHONY KERRIGAN

Dublin, 1967

All the pieces presented here in English are complete versions of their originals in Spanish.