55. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth-Century (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1984).
56. Dasenbrock and Mines, ‘ “Quelle vista nova”: Dante, Mathematics, and the Ending of Ulysses’, in Medieval Joyce, ed. by Lucia Boldrini, European Joyce Studies 13 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 79–91 (p. 83).
57. Dasenbrock/Mines, ‘Dante, Mathematics, and the Ending of Ulysses’, p. 88.
58. Reynolds also suggests that Joyce compounded this reference with an allusion to Canto II from Purgatorio, whereby the Pilgrim sees a ship with the souls of the Redeemed intoning the psalm In exitu Israel de Aegypto. See Reynolds, pp. 121–22, for an insightful analysis of Joyce’s use of these Dantean extracts in ‘Ithaca’.
59. Estela Canto wrote an account of her relationship with Borges in Borges a Contraluz (Madrid: Austral, 1989). She also included in this book the previously unpublished love letters that Borges wrote to her during their relationship.
60. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 414.
61. Dante Alighieri, Vita Nova, A cura di Luca Carlo Rossi, Introduzione di Guglielmo Gorni (Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1999), p. 222.
62. Interestingly, Borges quotes this line in his essay ‘Beatrice’s Last Smile’ (see SNF 303). He also states that ‘[...] Beatrice whose beauty increases with each new circle they reach [...] (SNF 302).
63. Edwin Williamson, p. 242.
64. Nuñez-Faraco, p. 163.
65. M. Keith Booker, ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: Dante’s Beatrice and Joyce’s Bella Cohen’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 29 (1992), 357–68 (p. 366).
66. Booker, ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous’, p. 366.
67. Booker, ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous’, pp. 365–66.
68. Booker, ‘From the Sublime to the Ridiculous’, p. 365.
69. Dante, Vita Nova, p. 6–8.
70. Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, trans. with an introd. by Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 29.
71. Calinescu, p. 15.
72. See Calinescu, pp. 14–15; pp. 283–84, n.14, n.15, n.16, n.17.
73. Bell-Villada, p. 223.
74. Rodríguez Monegal, p. 414.
75. It has also been argued that Borges is parodying here the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, particularly his vast poem ‘Canto General’. Nuñez-Faraco points out that Borges may be also attacking the Nicaraguan writer Ruben Darío, the leading poet of the fin-de-siècle movement known as Modernismo (not to be confused with Modernism in English). Ultimately, I concur with Nuñez-Faraco’s assertion in Borges and Dante that: ‘Daneri embodies a complex web of literary references’, p. 45.
76. Thiem, p. 111.
77. See Thiem, pp. 106–19, for a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Borges’s ‘miniature encyclopedia of the Aleph’ and Dante’s Commedia.
78. It is noteworthy that in his discussion of the abstract possibilities of monetary possession, Borges employs the Spanish invariable adjective ‘imprevisible’ [unforeseeable] which semantically and grammatically corresponds with Joyce’s coinage ‘imprevidibility’ [unforeseeability], in his discussion of Bloom’s florin. Both terms share the negative prefix ‘im’, followed by the prefix ‘pre’, which are compounded with the adjective ‘visible’ in Borges (etymologically related, via French, to the medieval Latin form ‘visibilis’), while Joyce directly employs the Latin past form, from ‘vidi’ (‘I saw’).
79. It is important to note that Borges and Joyce became, later in their lives, ardent devotees of Norse legend, particularly of the anonymous Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda. This crucial fact brings a further layer of relevance to Joyce’s presence in ‘The Disk’. In Literaturas Germánicas Medievales (1966) written in collaboration with Delia Ingenieros, Borges offers an illuminating and informative account on the subject (see OCC 861–975).
80. Burgin, p. 166.
81. Burgin, p. 166.
82. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians: Wyatt, Spenser, Synge, Pound, Joyce (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 209.
83. Allen Thiher, Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005), p. 20.
84. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians, p. 214. See also Novillo-Corvalán, review of Line Henriksen, Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics, in The European English Messenger, 17.1 (2008), 86–87.
85. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 249.
86. Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 76.
87. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians, p. 218.
88. Dasenbrock, Imitating the Italians, p. 219.
89. In a 1980 lecture, Borges argued that the notion of infinity is consubstantial with the title The Thousand and One Nights: ‘I believe that it is related to the fact that for us the word “thousand” is almost a synonym of “infinity”. To say a thousand nights is to say infinite nights, several nights, innumerable nights. And to say “thousand and one night” is to add one to infinity’ (OC3 234).
90. Gifford, p. 84.
91. Gifford, p. 477.
92. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 361.
CHAPTER 6
Joyce's and Borges's Afterlives of Shakespeare
Jorge Luis Borges published his Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940)1 one year after the publication of Finnegans Wake (1939) and one year before Joyce’s untimely death in Zurich (1941), a conjunction of dates that is acknowledged by the fact that the name of James Joyce appears twice in the table of contents of his eccentric treasury of ‘fantastic’ literature. Closely resembling Borges’s wide-ranging model of reading and writing, the anthology unconventionally conflates Western, Oriental, and marginal discourses alike, placing the Taoist Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu side-by-side with the English writer G. K. Chesterton; the Argentine writer and humorist Macedonio Fernández next to the English ethnologist James George Frazer; the medieval Castilian prince Don Juan Manuel next to James Joyce; and a story by the emerging Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo alongside a one-act play by the American 1936 Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill. As Emir Rodríguez Monegal has remarked: ‘To this day it is one of the most curious and unorthodox compilations on the subject [...] The anthology was highly personal and (in the best sense of the word) arbitrary.’2 But in spite of its eclectic method of selection, the anthology proved to be a decisive compilation that introduced Hispanic audiences to a wide gamut of literature in translation, as well as legitimizing the lesser-known voices of Argentine and Latin American writers. In an interview with Osvaldo Ferrari, Borges proudly claimed that the anthology proved at the time to be ‘un libro benemérito, ya que la literatura de la América del Sur [...] ha sido siempre una literatura más o menos realista’3 [a praiseworthy book, particularly since South American literature has always been more or less realist]. What Borges is stating here is that in comparison to the fertile mode of fantastic fiction that flourished in the nineteenth century in England and the United States, Argentine literature prior to the Latin American boom was characterized by its realist emphasis, particularly if we consider the development in the nineteenth century of a composition known as ‘cuadro de costumbres’ [sketch of local customs] that largely dominated the literary production of the time. Daniel Balderston observes that the Antología ‘was an oblique attack on the social realist tradition in Latin American writing [...] suggesting that the writer’s first obligation was to tell interesting and challenging stories’.4 As a result of this, The Anthology fostered rich intercultural encounters, in a conscious attempt to renew Latin American fiction by mapping a heterogeneous terrain that offered an unpreced
ented journey through the fantastic. In negotiating a miscellaneous group of texts under the heading ‘fantastic literature’, Borges is performing a cultural transaction through which foreign texts in translation are strategically transferred to a new context and, at the same time, national authors are re-evaluated and integrated not only in relation to Western and Oriental discourses alike, but also within the specific category of ‘fantasy’ that the editors, Borges, Bioy Casares, and Ocampo, were actively seeking to promote.
In this context, it is important to recognize that in the cultural arena of Argentina in the early 1940’s James Joyce’s Ulysses remained the exclusive property of a minority of cultured Anglophone speakers and a French-speaking intellectual elite, such as Victoria Ocampo and the group Sur, who had access to the influential 1929 French translation Ulysse by Auguste Morel, Stuart Gilbert, and Valery Larbaud, with the collaboration of Joyce himself. Therefore, Joyce’s appearance in the anthology would have been credited either to the cultural eccentricity of its editors or, most likely, to Borges’s unique acquaintance with his work from his avant-garde days. As I have argued throughout this study, apart from Borges’s 1925 translation of the last two pages of ‘Penelope’ in the avant-garde review Proa, and of other similar fragmentary translations that appeared in a few Spanish periodicals throughout the 1920s,5 there had been no complete rendering of what was proving to become one of the most revolutionary and controversial books of the twentieth century. Borges’s rendering of the last two pages of ‘Penelope’ as well as his careful reinvention of two fragments of Ulysses (from ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and ‘Circe’) as fantastic short stories, represented the only picture available to Hispanic readers without access to either the English original or the French translation. Undoubtedly, this event constituted a decisive landmark in the dissemination of Joyce’s work in the Hispanic world and, as it will concern us here, it planted the seeds that would later bear the fruits of Borges’s literary conversation with Shakespeare and Joyce.
This chapter discusses the way in which Borges and Joyce blended an impressive corpus of Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, and contemporary readings of Shakespeare in order to foster their own versions or ‘afterlives’ of the Bard. By means of a detailed comparative reading of — on the one hand — ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, the ninth episode of Ulysses devoted to the discussion of Shakepeare’s art and life, and — on the other — Borges’s concise parable ‘Everything and Nothing’ (1960) and short story ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ (1980), both of which are entirely dedicated to the exploration of Shakespeare’s enigmatic identity, it argues that their affiliation with Shakespeare centres on their conceptions of the playwright as a ghost. Furthermore, this chapter claims that Borges’s and Joyce’s intersections with Shakespeare reawaken the phantom of Shakespeare in a new language, culture, and history, inasmuch as each ‘afterlife’ of Shakespeare — to use Walter Benjamin’s central metaphor in his seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’6 — is conceived as an act of translation. This triple comparative enquiry also attempts to reveal unseen aspects of the relationship between Borges and Joyce through the angle of Shakespeare, whose discourse strengthens and enhances their literary affiliation. It aims to raise several interrelated questions: is it possible to read Borges’s ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ and ‘Everything and Nothing’ — which Jonathan Bate has described as ‘the greatest of all brief allegories of Shakespeare’s life’7 — through the prism of Joyce’s own exposition of Shakespeare in ‘Scylla’ and ‘Circe’? What does Borges’s peculiar translation of two fragments of Ulysses tell us about his subsequent dialogue with Shakespeare? And, finally, how do Joyce and Borges negotiate the cultural influence that the omnipresent spectre of Shakespeare has exerted throughout the centuries?
Ulysses as an Argentine Ghost Story
I begin with a transcription of the two fragments included in the anthology which, for the sake of clarity and comparative purposes, are side-by-side with Joyce’s English version.
FRAGMENT 1 (from ‘Scylla and Charybdis’)
What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners
(U 9.147–49).
DEFINICIÓN DEL FANTASMA
¿Qué es un fantasma? preguntó Stephen. Un hombre que se ha desvanecido hasta ser impalpable, por muerte, por ausencia, por cambio de costumbres.8
FRAGMENT 2 (from ‘Circe’)
(Stephen’s mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)
THE CHOIR Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...
Iubilantium te virginum...
(From the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell, stands gaping at her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)
BUCK MULLIGAN
She’s beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the afflicted mother. (he upturns his eyes) Mercurial Malachi!
THE MOTHER
(with the subtle smile of death’s madness) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead
(U 15.4157–74).
MAY GOULDING
La madre de Stephen, extenuada, rígidamente surge del suelo, leprosa y turbia, con una corona de marchitos azahares y un desgarrado velo de novia, la cara gastada y sin nariz, verde de moho sepulcral. El pelo es lacio, ralo. Fija en Stephen las huecas órbitas anilladas de azul y abre la boca desdentada, diciendo una silenciosa palabra.
LA MADRE
(Con la sonrisa sutil de la demencia de la muerte.)
Yo fui la hermosa May Goulding. Estoy muerta.9
The most noteworthy aspect of Borges’s translation of Joyce is his endeavour to turn two fragments from ‘Scylla’ and ‘Circe’ respectively into self-contained pieces that acquire a new meaning through their immersion in the entirely new context of the anthology. In order to suit this idiosyncratic project of three Argentine devotees of the short story, the fragments acquire independent status as compressed, fantastic vignettes, and therefore adopt their respective titles: ‘Definición del Fantasma’ and ‘May Goulding’. Further, Borges deliberately erased references to other episodes of Ulysses that may act as ‘textual distractions’10 and so interfered with the uncanny tone of the anthology. For example, in ‘Definición del Fantasma’ he excluded the ‘tingling energy’ that the third-person narrator attributes to Stephen Dedalus in order to draw attention to his enthusiastic yet anxious state of mind before his Shakespearean presentation in front of a hostile audience at Ireland’s National Library. On this occasion, Stephen has carefully prepared his public performance in an attempt to win the esteem of an audience composed of Dublin writers, scholars and librarians, particularly John Eglinton, George Russell (AE), and Richard Best, all of whom were active supporters of the Irish literary revival about which Stephen had serious reservations. Stephen’s feelings of alienation and displacement become even more acute when he learns that Eglinton failed to invite him to a literary gathering organized by George Moore.
Borges’s predilection for ‘Scylla’ is well documented throughout his complex relationship with Joyce. One year after the publication of the anthology, he referred to the pleasurable activity of reading and re-reading his favorite episodes from Ulysses, particularly stressing his fondness for ‘el diálogo sobre Shakespeare’ (S 168) [the dialogue on Shakespeare]. This tendency resurfaced in his 1946 review of Salas Subirat’s Spanish translation of Ulysses, in which the majority of his citations are drawn from ‘Scylla’ (see, for example, TR2 234). In addition, in a comprehensive prologue for a special edition of Shakespeare’s works in Spanish, he notes that Anne Hathaway gave Shakespeare ‘dos hijos, Hamnet (cuyo p
rofético nombre ha sido comentado por Joyce) y Julia’ (Círculo 166) [she gave him twins, Hamnet (whose prophetic name has been discussed by Joyce) and Judith]. This textual evidence foregrounds the crucial fact that Borges’s subsequent dialogue with Shakespeare is mediated by Stephen’s ghostly reading of the Bard. In short, a gothic link becomes the fundamental meeting point in his conversation with Shakespeare and Joyce.
In ‘May Goulding’, on the other hand, Borges excised the stage directions of Buck Mulligan presented in ‘particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell’ (U 15.4166–67) and his customarily mocking speech that refers to the altercation he had with Stephen in ‘Telemachus’. Whilst it may be argued that, because ‘Circe’ is chiefly characterized by its phantasmagorical and hallucinatory histrionics, Borges’s omissions were unnecessary, the episode equally contains, as Matthew Creasy has demonstrated,11 pantomime elements from Shakespearean burlesque, which offer an additional discourse of parody and comic entertainment that Borges probably deemed incompatible with his new version of Joyce. Also deleted from Borges’s anthology is the ‘choir of virgins and confessors’ which foreshadows Stephen’s conflictual relationship with Roman Catholicism and his deeply buried psychological trauma from his unwillingness to pray at his mother’s deathbed.
Borges’s unapologetic subtractions from the source text invite speculation about how the excisions are negotiated in the Spanish text. To begin with, Borges’s translation practice may be examined from the perspective of his 1925 fragmentary rendering of ‘Penelope’, which similarly aimed to turn the last two pages of the book into an autonomous piece intended for the readership of Hispanic audiences. Whereas the two excerpts selected for the anthology belong to two different episodes, ‘Scylla’ and ‘Circe’, they are integrated as interconnected pieces with their own separate titles. In this way, Stephen’s nominal definition ‘what is a ghost?’ is promptly followed, and in some way answered, by the uncanny apparition of May Goulding, his dead mother, who in turn serves as an example of the several ‘ghosts by death’ that populate the anthology. If in 1925 Borges presented to Argentine audiences a fragmentary translation of the last two pages of ‘Penelope’, in 1940 he similarly promoted a miniaturized version of Joyce’s epic proportions filtered through a specific literary predilection: the fantastic short story. This, in turn, goes hand in hand with the revolutionary compressed ficciones he was writing at this crucial historical juncture. His displacement of two fragments from Ulysses into the anthology thus exhibits a translation practice that imaginatively reinvents the translated text in order to make it fit the specific requirements of his compilation. The overall result is what in his 1929 essay, ‘Guido’s Relations’, Ezra Pound defined as the type of modernist translation that ‘falls in the domain of original writing’12 in which the translator offers a new poem or, in Borges’s case, two super-concise fantastic narratives rendered in a manner representative of his aesthetics of brevity.
Borges and Joyce Page 29
