Borges and Joyce

by Patricia Novillo-Corvalan

  Notes to Chapter 1

  1. Phillip Herring notes: ‘The highlight of the symposium may well have been the moving tribute to Joyce by blind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges at the Bloomsday Banquet’. See Herring, ‘Preface’, in The Centennial Symposium, ed. by Morris Beja, Phillip Herring, Maurice Harmon, and David Norris (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. xii. Unfortunately, no record of this speech has survived.

  2. Kearney, Transitions, p. 48.

  3. Ricardo Güiraldes, Shadows on the Pampas, trans. by Harriet de Onís with an intro. by Waldo Frank (London: Constable & Co., 1935).

  4. See Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), for an insightful and detailed account of the publishing history of Joyce’s Ulysses.

  5. See Valéry Larbaud, Lettres à Adrienne Monnier et à Sylvia Beach (1919–1933), correspondance établie et annotée par Maurice Saillet (Paris: IMEC, 1991), pp. 85–86. Saillet claims that on 19 June 1922 Güiraldes, his wife and Ocampo collected their three copies of Ulysses. Beach’s records, however, state that only one copy was purchased. See Glenn Horowitz, James Joyce: Books and Manuscripts (New York: Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 1996), pp. 111–16.

  6. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. by Lawrence Venutti, trans. by Harry Zohn (London and New York, Routledge, 2001), pp. 15–23.

  7. Karen Lawrence, ‘Introduction: Metempsychotic Joyce’, in Transcultural Joyce, ed. by Karen Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–8 (p. 1).

  8. Larbaud had also a limited knowledge of Portuguese. See John L. Brown, Valery Larbaud (Boston; MA: Twayne Publishers, 1981), pp. 163–64.

  9. John L. Brown, p. 153.

  10. John L. Brown, p. 160, p. 162.

  11. See The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, ed. by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, 2 vols (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004).

  12. See Fritz Senn, ‘The European Diffusion of Joyce’, review of The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, ed. by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo (see above) in James Joyce Broadsheet, 76 (2007), 1.

  13. Larbaud announced Güiraldes’s promising literary talents in the July 1920 edition of the N.R.F and also introduced him to the most celebrated writers in Paris. Therefore, Güiraldes’s literary reputation changed dramatically after his meeting with Larbaud.

  14. See Barnabooth and Fermina Márquez in Valery Larbaud, Œuvres, avec preface de Marcel Arland et notes par G. Jean-Aubry et Robert Mallet (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

  15. Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 64.

  16. For an example of Borges’s ultraist poetics see ‘Himno del mar’ [Hymn to the Sea] which was published in the December 1919 issue of Grecia (TR1 24–26). Later in his life Borges ironically observed: ‘I am still known to literary historians as “the father of Argentine ultraism” ’. See A, p. 34.

  17. This letter belongs to a private collection. It was consulted in Buenos Aires, February 2005.

  18. See Blasi, ‘Una amistad creadora: las cartas de Valery Larbaud a Ricardo Güiraldes’, in Ricardo Güiraldes: Don Segundo Sombra, edición crítica, Paul Verdevoye (coordinador) (Madrid: Archivos, 1988), pp. 436, 437, 439, 444, 446.

  19. James Joyce, Ulysse, traduit de l’anglais par M. Auguste Morel assisté par M. Stuart Gilbert. Traduction entièrement revue par M. Valery Larbaud avec la collaboration de l’auteur. Hollande Van Gelder N 1 (Paris: La Maison des Amis des Livres, 1929).

  20. On an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded trip to Argentina, I visited the ‘Museo Güiraldes’ in San Antonio de Areco, province of Buenos Aires. The director of the museum, Cecilia Smyth (curiously a descendant of Irish immigrants) showed me this unique copy of the 1929 Ulysse.

  21. This information was also obtained from Museo Güiraldes.

  22. Carlos García (ed.), Macedonio Fernández/ Jorge Luis Borges: correspondencia 1922–1939, edición y notas de Carlos García (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2000), pp. 93–94. All Spanish translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

  23. My description of Xul Solar’s painting is based on the painting entitled: ‘Los lenguaje del arte moderno’ (1925), which belongs to the collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

  24. Robin William Fiddian, ‘James Joyce and Spanish-American Fiction: A Study of the Origins and Transmission of Literary Influence’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 66,1 (1989), 23–39.

  25. Valery Larbaud, ‘Lettres Argentines et Uruguayennes’, La Revue Européenne, 34 (1925), 66–70 (p. 70). All translations from Larbaud are mine, unless otherwise stated.

  26. Borges’s review of Ulysses was subsequently included in his first non-fiction collection, Inquisiciones [Inquisitions] issued in 1925 by Güiraldes’s publishing house Proa. In the December issue of La Revue Européenne Larbaud enthusiastically greeted the volume as, ‘le meilleur livre de critique que nous ayons reçu, jusqu’à ce jour, de l’Amérique latine’ [the best critical book we have received from Latin America to date]. Larbaud defined the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires as ‘plus cosmopolite qu’aucune de nos capitales européennes’ [more cosmopolitan than any of our European capitals], and insisted that Borges’s creative expression was both ‘européenne et américaine’ [European and American] and ‘très large, très libre, très hardie’ [wider, freer, and more audacious] than any perspective that could emerge from Europe. Valery Larbaud, ‘Lettres Argentines et Uruguayennes’, p. 70.

  27. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Invocation to Joyce’, trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in Poems for James Joyce, ed. by Bernard Benstock (Kildare: The Malton Press, 1982), pp. 41–42.

  28. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 200.

  29. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 266–67.

  30. Heaney, p. 267.

  31. See Novillo-Corvalán, ‘Literary Migrations: Homer’s Journey through Joyce’s Ireland and Walcott’s Saint Lucia’, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, 5.3 (2007), 157–62. Also available online at: http://www.irlandeses.org/0711novillo1.htm.

  32. The upper case is Borges’s.

  33. See Antonio Marichalar, ‘James Joyce en su laberinto’, Revista de Occidente, 17 (1924), 177–202.

  34. Jason Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 73–74.

  35. Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003), pp. 104.

  36. Vegh, p. 88.

  37. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, foreword by David Norris (London: Lilliput Press, 1999) p. 110.

  38. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934), p. 123.

  39. Interestingly, Borges’s equation of Joyce with Góngora marks the beginning of a negative affiliation between the baroque seventeenth-century Spanish writer — renowned for his obscure linguistic games — and Joyce’s Modernist experiments. He reiterated this analogy several times in his literary career. For example, in the prologue of The Self and the Other he observed: ‘The writer’s individual experiments, in fact, have minimal effect except when the innovator resigns himself to the construction of a verbal museum, a game, like Finnegans Wake or Góngora’s Soledades, made up for discussions by literary historians or simple notoriety’ (SP 147). For a similar comment see the prologue of Borges’s translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hojas de Hierba (Barcelona: Lumen, 1991), p. 8, and his 1937 essay ‘Kipling and his Autobiography’, OC4 272. In a 1981 interview with O. Nayarález Borges reinvents Góngora as a ‘little Joyce’ (TR3 366), thus applying his radical theory of literary influence in which Joyce becomes the precursor of Góngora.

  40. See Salgado, ‘Barroco Joyce’, p. 66.

  41. Further to this, Anthony Cordingley claims that Borges was the unofficial ‘interpreter of Anglophone literary
culture to the Argentine and Latin American literary community’. See Cordingley, ‘Keeping their Distance: Beckett and Borges Writing after Joyce’, in After Beckett D’après Beckett, ed. by Anthony Uhlmann, Sjef Houppermans, and Bruno Clément (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 131–45 (p. 131).

  42. The fact that the first complete translation of Ulysses into Spanish was undertaken by another Argentine is still a remarkable event. Salas’s translation of Ulysses was published in Buenos Aires in 1945 and included a prologue by Jacques Mercanton. It remained the only Spanish version for more than thirty years until the appearance of the second Spanish translation by J. M. Valverde in 1976. See Ulises, trad. de José María Valverde (Barcelona: Lumen, 1980). A third complete Spanish version of Ulysses, translated by Francisco García Tortosa and María Luisa Venegas has been published in Madrid in 1999. See James Joyce, Ulises, trad. de Francisco García Tortosa y María Luisa Venegas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999).

  43. Some dubious sources credit Borges with the unlikely role of supervisor of Salas’s translation. In an article in the Spanish magazine Cambio, Mercedes Monmany argues that Salas’s complete version had been ‘ordered and revised by Borges’. See Mercedes Monmany, ‘El Ulises Ilustrado Recuerda la Muerte de James Joyce’, Cambio16, 1008 (18 March 1991), 90–94 (p. 94). Borges had neither supervised nor corrected Salas’s translation, and his only association with this Spanish version is established within the roles of critic and reviewer.

  44. Richard Brown, ‘Introduction’, in Joyce, ‘Penelope’ and the Body, ed. by Richard Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 11–30 (p. 22).

  45. Kathleen McCormick, ‘Reproducing Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of the Reception of “Penelope,” 1922–1970’, in Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on ‘Penelope’ and Cultural Studies, ed. by Richard Pearce (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), pp. 17–40 (p. 17).

  46. For example, in opposition to Borges’s decision to translate controversial extracts from Molly’s soliloquy, Marichalar opted for less contentious passages from ‘Ithaca’ and ‘Penelope’ that lacked erotic or sexual references. See Antonio Marichalar, ‘James Joyce en su Laberinto’. For further details regarding the larger issue of the reception of Joyce in Spain, see Carlos G. Santa Cecilia, La recepción de James Joyce en la prensa española (1921–1976) (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1997), pp. 58–60.

  47. Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life (New York: Viking, 2004), p. 124.

  48. See Alejandro Vaccaro, Georgie: una vida de Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1930) (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1996), p. 189; María Esther Vázquez, Borges: esplendor y derrota (Barcelona: Tusquets editores), pp. 79–82; and Rodríguez Monegal, p. 215.

  49. Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘Notes to Borges’s Notes on Joyce: Infinite Affinities’ Comparative Literature, 49.4 (1997), 344–58 (p. 356).

  50. Güiraldes’s name was also included in the editorial board of foreign contributors. See Blasi, ‘Una amistad creadora’, pp. 444–45.

  51. Larbaud, ‘Ulysse: Fragments’, Commerce, 1 (1924), 121–58.

  52. Jorge Schwartz, ‘Borges y la Primera Hoja de Ulysses’, p. 721.

  53. Sergio Gabriel Waisman, ‘Borges Reads Joyce’, p. 71.

  54. Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge, p. 136.

  55. Kearney, p. 49.

  56. Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), p. 5. However, as we are going to see in Chapter 2, Borges remained much more sceptical about the translation of Finnegans Wake.

  57. See John Paul Riquelme, ‘The Use of Translation and the Use of Criticism’, in Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. by John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. xxi.

  58. Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, ‘Anna Livia’s Italian Sister’, in Lawrence, ed., Transcultural Joyce, pp. 193–98 (p. 195).

  59. See Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 69.

  60. Borges discusses these two opposite translation approaches in ‘Las Dos Maneras de traducir’ (See TR2 256–59).

  61. Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 621. It is extremely unlikely that Borges would have known this was a reference to a song.

  62. Contrarily to Borges, fellow Argentine Salas Subirat conventionally renders Molly in the customary standard form of ‘tú’. See James Joyce, Ulises, trad. de J. J. Salas Subirat (Buenos Aires: Santiago Rueda, 2002), pp. 727–28.

  63. Vegh, pp. 91–92.

  64. For other pertinent examples see Patricia Willson, La Constelación del Sur: traductores y traducciones en la literatura argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno, 2004), pp. 117–32. Willson persuasively argues that Borges immersed ‘Penelope’ in a primarily River Plate background, but neglects to take into account the Gibraltarian and Andalusian elements which are of fundamental importance in Borges’s translation. I will argue here that Borges fostered a multifaceted version of Molly Bloom that conflated her Hibernian, Gibraltarian/Andalusian and Jewish identities with a new Argentine signification.

  65. For another recent translation of ‘Penelope’ see Maria Angeles Conde Parilla, ‘The Obscene Nature of Molly’s Soliloquy and Two Spanish Translations’, JJQ 33 (1995–96), 211–36 (p. 211).

  66. Schwartz, p. 723.

  67. Waisman, ‘Borges Reads Joyce’, p. 65.

  68. Levine, p. 356.

  69. See Kristal, p. 87.

  70. See Patricia Willson, p. 126.

  71. Gifford, p. 632.

  72. Levine, ‘Notes to Borges’s Notes on Joyce’, 354

  73. See Maria Angeles Conde-Parilla, Los pasajes obscenos de Molly Bloom en español (Albacete: Ediciones de la Diputacion de Albacete, 1994).

  74. See Ulises, trad. Salas Subirat (2002), pp. 727–28; Ulises, trad. Valverde, pp. 459–60; Ulises, trad. García Tortosa y Venegas, pp. 907–08. Conde Parrilla employs Borges’s distinctive translation choice of ‘flor serrana’. See Conde, Los pasajes obscenos, p. 204.

  75. Andrew Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 271.

  76. See Nancy F. Marino, La serranilla española: notas para su historia e interpretación (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1987), for a comprehensive and insightful study of the serranilla.

  77. Waisman, ‘Borges Reads Joyce’, p. 67.

  78. See Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (ed.), Antología Mayor de la Literatura Española I — Edad Media (Siglos X–XV) (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1971), p. 859. My translation.

  79. Bonnie Kime Scott, Joyce and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 61.

  80. Gifford, p. 634.

  81. Gifford, p. 633.

  82. Gibson, Joyce’s Revenge, p. 261.

  83. Richard Pearce, ‘Introduction: Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” ’, in Pearce, ed., Molly Blooms, pp. 3–17 (p. 4).

  CHAPTER 2

  Borges's Reception of Joyce in the Argentine Press

  The trajectory of Borges’s reception of Joyce — as we have seen in Chapter 1 — begins in 1925 in a rather turbulent and tempestuous manner, particularly if considered from the standpoint of the rich symbolic meaning conveyed under the title of the avant-garde review Proa. The subsequent course of Borges’s voyage through Joyce’s Hibernian Sea has been characterized by a miscellaneous body of work constituted by notes, book reviews, a condensed biography, and an obituary, which appeared in a number of Buenos Aires periodicals in the late 1930s, as well as a vast number of scattered allusions which conglomerated in his critical work from 1932 onwards.1 Thus, how did Joyce become throughout the 1930s the repeated focus of attention of Jorge Luis Borges? The first answer to this question has a great deal to do with the emergence of a European critical heritage of a Modernist author
of the stature of James Joyce, and the way in which key critical studies, such as Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (1930), had a considerable impact on the Latin American cultural scene. In his 1925 review of Ulysses, Borges anticipated the development of a Joyce industry, predicting that: ‘De aquí diez años — ya facilitado su libro por comentadores más tercos y más piadosos que yo — disfrutaremos de él’ (Inq. 28) [‘Ten years from now — his book having been explicated by more pious and persistent reviewers than myself — we will still enjoy it’] (SNF 14). Consequently he greeted with enthusiasm the arrival of Gilbert’s first book-length study of Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel. This attentiveness to the emerging corpus of Joyce criticism is equally implied in Borges’s ensuing allusions to yet another pioneering study, Charles Duff’s James Joyce and the Plain Reader (1932). At the same time, throughout the course of Borges’s exploration across Joyce’s vast geography we are able to perceive a gradual shift from the youthful tone of the avant-gardist poet and essayist, to the more composed expression of the mature writer, already anticipating his revolutionary compact, classical ficciones, and on his way to become, along with Joyce, one of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth century. The second answer to this question is related to the critical interest and increased speculation that the serialization of Work in Progress and the forthcoming publication of Finnegans Wake (1939) had been receiving in European and American literary circles. In this manner, the mature Borges who continued and developed his role as unofficial publicist to Joyce was a regular correspondent for a range of Buenos Aires reviews and, therefore, offered a reception of Joyce’s work deeply embedded in the historical, cultural, and economic fabrics of Argentina. The aim of this chapter is to offer an informed discussion of Borges’s papers on Joyce which appeared in two contrasting Buenos Aires magazines, the strictly literary and cultural journal Sur and the mass-marketed ladies’ weekly El Hogar. The crucial discursive contexts of these two journalistic mediums, I shall argue, are testimony to a decisive period in Argentine culture which becomes particularly apparent in the various ways in which Joyce is read, discussed, interpreted, and translated. Therefore, Borges’s papers on Joyce are able to operate both as part of the elitist discourse represented by the group Sur, but also as part of the complex socio-economic forces of El Hogar. The process through which Borges charts a map of the reception of Joyce in Argentina is also enriched by the wealth of translations, essays, reviews, and testimonies of Joyce’s life and works by other national and international writers and critics which were incorporated in the review Sur. Equally, it is impossible to discuss the industrious cultural activity of Sur during this effervescent period in Argentina without alluding to the personal and literary relationship between the founder of the review, Victoria Ocampo, and the English novelist and critic, Virginia Woolf. Thus, this chapter also details the seminal role that Borges played in the Hispanic reception of Woolf, particularly through his pioneering translations of some of her most celebrated works. On the other hand, Borges’s contributions to El Hogar may be read as part of a vibrant and multicoloured tapestry that not only interweaved literary, sociological, and economic strands indiscriminately, but also discussed the work of James Joyce in relation to a scintillating repertoire of (super-) concise narratives about other fellow Irish writers such as W. B. Yeats, Oliver St John Gogarty, and Flann O’Brien.