Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges & Thorton Wilder
Wednesday, October 08, 2014
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| Jorge Luís Borges - Photograph Giselle Freund |
Salomon saith. There
is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all
knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty
is but oblivion.
Francis
Bacon: Essays LVIII.
Mediante su
memoria el poeta puede descifrar lo invisible.
Jorge Luís Borges - El inmortal
Through memory the poet deciphers the invisible.
Judging by the date on my first Borges book, Ficciones, 1969 I made up for some lost time. In 1969 I had been married to my Rosemary for one year and both of us were giving English lessons at several American companies. One of then was Colgate Palmolive. I remember distinctly in using Ficciones in one of my classes that featured intelligent marketing executives. Once a week we would do simultaneous translation from Spanish into English of one of the stories in Ficciones. Since equality of the sexes was not something I thought about in those days I used a different technique in a class, also at Palmolive that involved executive secretaries (not yet called by the improved epithet of assistants). In that class for several months I taught them to use their nasal passages in such a way that without them knowing I was teaching them to speak with a Texan accent.
These days, in fact
today, when my Rosemary noticed that I was in a pretty low fit of depression
she told me, “The problem with you, Alex, is that you spend too much time
thinking about the past, of your childhood, of your mother and father, of your
Buenos Aires garden, of your grandmother, of all your dogs and cats and
parrots, of your Melián friends, of Mexico, of the Argentine navy, of the Pampa
and prickly pear cactus in the state of Mexico and palm trees in Veracruz. She
didn’t go on with the litany of my memories. I thought about it.
If I am to understand
correctly the ending of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (an Osimous Theatre
production we saw on Saturday night) the tragedy of the living is that they
take everyday occurrences lightly and only remember their importance
(particularly the ones that are not when happening) when they are dead. And the
dead, in preparation for whatever follows death do their best to forget.
I feel that in spite
of Rosemary’s criticism I am doing well in remembering and savouring all that
past while at the same time attempting to reconcile it all with my present and
a shortened future to come.
In the last few years
I read a poem or a short story by Borges once a week. We know that for a time, beginning in 1955
Borges was the Director of the Argentine National Library.
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| Roberto Baschetti, El Viejo Faro, Sept 2013 |
In September of 2013 I
met Roberto Baschetti, who works at the Argentine National Library. Since then,
knowing of my interest in Borges, he sends me packages including books,
pamphlets and magazines on all things Borgesian. Baschetti’s interest lies in
the period when Juan Domingo Perón and wife Evita where in charge in Argentina. But
that does not prevent him from scouring the National Library for stuff that
might (and it does) interest me.
I live in a city of
the Northern Hemisphere. Of late I feel, as my friend Argentine painter Juan
Manuel Sánchez used to say, like a penguin in the arctic. But if I slip a CD of Argentine Tango (my fave is Mi Buenos Aires Querido with Daniel
Barenboim and Rodolfo Maderos and yes it has a six tangos by Piazzolla) in my Malibu I
am far away into a past but paradoxically a present, too, not here, but over
there. I seem to live in several worlds at the same time, all interconnected by
memory. A labyrinthian memory of which Borges would approve.
The sound of Spanish,
like the sound of those other Romance languages, Italian, French and Portuguese
has a music to my ears. Even shouted obscenities, in Spanish can sound like
poetry.
Consider to remember and its not too close
variant (with a different meaning) to
memorize. A person with a good memory could be memorious but that word is
seldom used. And yet it is used as translation to one of Borges’s most famous
stories (from Ficciones) Funes el Memorioso, translated as Funes the Memorious.
Spanish is kinder to
memory. We do have memorizar to memorize and recordar to remember. In fact
recordar is used most of the time because it sound prosaic and it is. Marcel
Proust’s famous En busca de tiempos perdidos (translates as in search of lost
time). In Spanish there is another word for memory and to remember. That word
is memorar (to remember) and to do it over and over there is the beautiful
rememorar.
The story Funes el memorioso
has a wonderful sound and meaning in Spanish that will not translate.
Funes el memorioso is
about a young man in Uruguay,
19 who has fallen off a horse and has become paralyzed. In exchange for that
Ireneo Funes has instant and all inclusive memory for everything. He is able to
see the minute difference in clouds seconds before and after. He suffers
constant insomnia as he cannot stop from noticing the details of the wall by
his bed.
Funes, we are told, by
the protagonist who stands in for a young Borges, is incapable of Platonic
ideas, of generalities, of abstraction; his world is one of intolerably
uncountable details. He finds it very difficult to sleep, since he recalls
"every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surround
him".
Funes quotes a passage from Pliny the Elder
to Borges:
ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur
auditum.
This is from Pliny's Naturalis Historia,
Book VII, Chapter 24, on memory. The full passage is:
ars postremo eius rei
facta et inventa est a Simonide melico, consummata a Metrodoro Scepsio, ut nihil
non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum,
which means that an art of memory was
devised by the poet Simonides and perfected by Metrodorus of Scepsis, so that
nothing heard is not repeated in the same words.
In Spanish Borges
writes:
Pensar es
olvidar diferencias, es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes
no había sino detalles, casi inmediatos.
To think is to forget
differences, to generalize to abstract. The overflowing world of Funes could
not contain but details immediate one.(my translation)
Borges also tells us of a project of Funes to remember the moments of his youth. They pile up. He gives up.
In a recent email, the library man Roberto Baschetti has told me that the corner café in Bellavista where we would have our morning coffee with medias lunas (by the train station to town) has closed its doors. I can remember a lot about it and our good times chatting about politics, Boca Juniors (a football club) and yes, Borges.
Baschetti's packages, like the memories of Funes are piling up. Some of the magazines have photographs of Borges as a very young man and many more rare ones I had not seen before. It seems now as I get into bed to read Ficciones that the man I never crossed paths on Avenida Corrientes is so much part of my life now that my memory of him is so real. I have many recordings. I can hear his voice as I read. And best of all I now know that Marcel Proust's In Search of a Lost Time with its plural in its Spanish translation to Tiempos Perdidos is an apt reminder that being a memorioso isn't all that bad.
In a recent email, the library man Roberto Baschetti has told me that the corner café in Bellavista where we would have our morning coffee with medias lunas (by the train station to town) has closed its doors. I can remember a lot about it and our good times chatting about politics, Boca Juniors (a football club) and yes, Borges.
Baschetti's packages, like the memories of Funes are piling up. Some of the magazines have photographs of Borges as a very young man and many more rare ones I had not seen before. It seems now as I get into bed to read Ficciones that the man I never crossed paths on Avenida Corrientes is so much part of my life now that my memory of him is so real. I have many recordings. I can hear his voice as I read. And best of all I now know that Marcel Proust's In Search of a Lost Time with its plural in its Spanish translation to Tiempos Perdidos is an apt reminder that being a memorioso isn't all that bad.
