LK, I think people are referring either to the old
Dutton Selected Borges or the recent Viking Penguin
Selected. (The latter does not contain any of John
Hollander's or Richard Howard's or Richard Wilbur's
translations: those poets withheld their versions in
protest against what had happened to Dick Barnes & me.)
As for Simpson, he is a fool to call Borges a fool. I
would agree that part of Borges' adulation of warriors
had to do with compensation for his own timidity, but
he was well aware of that and made no secret of it.
That's why he identifies so strongly with the
Icelandic scholar and poet Snorri Sturluson [1179-1241],
who also came to realize that he was a coward. Here's Borges' touching sonnet about him:
You, who left to posterity an unsparing
Tribal mythology of ice and flame,
You, who made fast in words the violent fame
Of your forebears, their ruthlessness and daring,
Were stunned to feel, as the mythic swords towered
One dusk, your sorry flesh, your insides churning,
Trembling. And in that dusk that bides no morning
It was revealed to you you were a coward.
Now in the Iceland night the heavy seas
Tower and plunge in the salt gale. Your cell
Is under siege. You have drained to the lees
A shame never to be forgotten. Now
The sword is falling above your pallid brow
As in your book repeatedly it fell.
And maybe Simpson was talking about the Second World
War? Surely he knows there were bayonet charges and
plenty of killing with bayonets in WWI. (There was
some in WWII also,I believe, though maybe not where
Simpson served.) We should also remember that there
was not only Borges' boyhood romance with the famous
knifefighters that had once roamed his neighborhood
(and a few still did), but also his great respect for
his ancestors, his uncles and grandfathers and great-
grandfathers who had fought and died in the wars for
Argentine independence, whose sabers decorated the
walls of the house he grew up in. And his painful
consciousness that he was bookish, and untested, and
nothing like them.
And now that it occurs to me, let me correct that
beautiful Kipling epigram:
I could not look on death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
What a wonderful series Epitaphs of the War is! Do
you all know this one, "The Sleepy Sentinel"?
Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep.
I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep.
Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept---
I sleep because I was slain. They slew me because I slept.
And "Hindu Sepoy in France"?
This man in his own country prayed we know not to what powers.
We pray them to reward him for his bravery in ours.
And "Raped and Revenged"?
One used and butchered me: another spied
Me broken---for which thing an hundred died.
So it was learned among the heathen hosts
How much a freeborn woman's favor costs.
Wiley, the milongas are in 8-syllable lines (now
and then 7 syllables). I suppose I would hear "El
RIfle y EL cruciFIjo" as a 3-beat line, though it
doesn't matter---it's an 8-syllable line (by elision).
Dick and I worked first on our own. Every few days
I would give him a few I had done and vice versa.
(After about 7 or 8 years I realized with amazement
that we had never assigned each other poems or said
in advance which ones we planned to do, yet not once
did we give each other the same poem.) Then we worked
on each others' drafts and met once or twice a week,
for an hour or two or three or four, to argue about
them and revise them further---every poem went through several drafts, sometimes twenty or thirty. We were
both looking and listening for what sounded like
Borges voice in English, and because we knew each
other's work so well, we could spot and delete lines
that sounded too much like Barnes or Mezey. Some
revisions we did together in those sessions,and then afterward alone, & maybe again in the next session,
and so on. We were always open and blunt in our
responses, yet somehow never quarreled. It took us
about 12 years to do the 420-some poems. I was very hesitant about any changes after Dick died, but I came
to realize that he would trust my judgment, as I would
trust his, and I did do a number of revisions and will probably do more. I think the best thing about our translations is that no one could point to a line or
phrase and say that it was Dick's or mine---to me they
look seamless. (I may end up dropping the initials.
They mean to indicate which of us did the most work on
any particular poem, but they don't always; sometimes
they indicate who first undertook the poem. For
example, both "The Moon" and "Ariosto and the Arabs"
are marked RGB/RM because Dick did the first drafts
and they are long and difficult poems, but they could
as easily be marked RM/RGB, since I probably wrote
most of the final version of "The Moon" and maybe
half of the other one. But it doesn't matter. None
of them would be what it is without the two hands,
and none of them is exclusively the work of either
of us.)
Tim, I liked your ballad when you first showed it to
meand I like it even more now; the last two quatrains
are especially Borgesian. (Did you ever see the ballad
Dick wrote about Borges' first sexual experience?)
Christopher obviously meant to give a very literal
version of the knife ballad, so it shouldn't be judged
as a poem. But Eric McHenry's version, the one in the Penguin book, is very inept. You'd think he'd never
read or heard a ballad before. He starts in three-beat lines, then he shifts to four, but it doesn't matter
since he sounds bad both ways. And the rhymes are
strained and sometimes ridiculous. For instance, there
were no "casinos" in old Buenos Aires---men gambled in whorehouses and bars and general stores. None of the
Viking Penguin translators have very good ears, and
most have no ears at all.
Ah, enough.
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