Collected Fictions (82 page)

* The Maker:
The Spanish title of this "heterogeneous" volume of prose and poetry (only the prose is included in this volume) is
El hacedor,
and
hacedor
is a troublesome word for a translator into English. JLB seems to be thinking of the Greek word
poeta,
which means "maker," since a "true and literal" translation of
poeta
into Spanish would indeed be
hacedor.
Yet
hacedor
is in this translator's view, and in the view of all those native speakers he has consulted, a most uncommon word. It is not used in Spanish for "poet" but instead makes one think of someone who makes things with his hands, a kind of artisan, perhaps, or perhaps even a linkerer. The English word
maker
is perhaps strange too, yet it exists; however, it is used in English (in such phrases as "he went to meet his Maker" and the brand name Maker's Mark) in a way that dissuades one from seizing upon it immediately as the "perfect" translation for
hacedor.
(The Spanish word
hacedor
would never be used for "God," for instance.) Eliot Weinberger has suggested to this translator, quite rightly, perhaps, that JLB had in mind the Scots word
makir,
which means "poet." But there are other cases: Eliot's dedication of
The Waste Land
to Ezra Pound, taken from Dante—
il miglior fabbro,
where
fabbro
has exactly the same range as
hacedor.
Several considerations seem to militate in favor of the translation "artificer": first, the sense of someone's making something with his hands, or perhaps "sculptor," for one of JLB's favorite metaphors for poetry was at one time sculpture; second, the fact that the second "volume" in the volume
Fictions
is clearly titled
Artifices-,
third, the overlap between art and craft or artisanry that is implied in the word, as in the first story in this volume. But a translational decision of this kind is never easy and perhaps never "done"; one wishes one could call the volume
II fabbro,
or
Poeta,
or leave it
El hacedor.
The previous English translation of this volume in fact opted for
Dreamtigers.
Yet sometimes a translator is spared this anguish (if he or she finds the key to the puzzle in time to forestall it); in this case there is an easy solution. I quote from Emir Rodriguez Monegal's
Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary
Biography,
p. 438:"Borges was sixty when the ninth volume of his complete works came out-----For the new book he had thought up the title in English:
The Maker,
and had translated it into Spanish as
El hacedor,
but when the book came out in the United States the American translator preferred to avoid the theological implications and used instead the tide of one of the pieces:
Dreamtigers
so a translation problem becomes a problem
created
in the first place by a translation! (Thanks to Eliot Weinberger for coming across this reference
in time
and bringing it to my attention.)

* Title:
The title of this story appears in italics because JLB used the English nonce word in the Spanish original.

* That spotted "tiger":
While there are many indigenous words for the predatory cats of South America—puma, jaguar, etc.—that have been adopted into Spanish, Peninsular Spanish called these cats tigers. (One should recall that Columbus simply had no words for the myriad new things in this New World, so if an indigenous word did not "catch on" immediately, one was left with a European word for the thing: hence "Indians"!) Here, then, JLB is comparing the so-called tiger of the Southern Cone with its Asian counterpart, always a more intriguing animal for him. Cf., for instance, "Blue Tigers" in the volume titled
Shakespeare's Memory.

*
Recoleta:
The "necropolis" near the center of Buenos Aires, where the elite of Porteño society buries its dead. See also note to "The Aleph" in
The Aleph.

*
Federalists/Unitarians:
The Federalists were those nineteenth-century conservatives who favored a federal (i.e., decentralized) plan of government for Argentina, with the provinces having great autonomy and an equal say in the government; the Federalists were also "Argentine," as opposed to the internationalist, Europe-looking Unitarians, and their leaders tended to be populist caudillos, their fighters in the civil wars to be gauchos. The Unitarians, on the other hand, were a Buenos Aires-based party that was in favor of a centralizing, liberal government; they tended to be "free-thinkers," rather than Catholics perse, intellectuals, internationalists, and Europophile in outlook Unitarians deplored the barbarity of the gaucho ethos, and especially sentimentalizing that way of life; they were urban to a fault. This old "discord between their lineages," as Borges puts it in this story, is the discord of Argentina, never truly overcome in the Argentina that JLB lived in.

*
Balvanera:
One can assume that at the time"Borges"had this experience, Balvanera was a neighborhood of "genteel poverty" much as one might envision it from the description of "Julia," but in the story "The Dead Man," in
The Aleph,
Balvanera is the neighborhood that the "sad sort of hoodlum"Benjamín Otálora comes from, and it is described as a district on the outskirts of the Buenos Aires of 1891 (which does not, emphatically, mean that it would be on the outskirts of the Buenos Aires of 1927, the time of the beginning of "Covered Mirrors"), a neighborhood of "cart drivers and leather braiders." Thus Balvanera is associated not so much with gauchos and cattle (though the Federalist connection hints at such a connotation) as with the stockyards and their industries, the
secondary
(and romantically inferior) spin-offs of the pampas life. Balvanera here, like Julia's family itself, is the decayed shadow of itself and the life it once represented.

*
Blank wall of the railway yard... Parque Centenario:
The railway ran (and runs) through Balvanera from the Plaza del Once station westward, out toward the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Sarmiento runs westward, too, but slightly north of the rail-way line, and running slightly northwest. It meets the Parque Centenario about a mile and a half from the station.

*
Chaco River:
In the Litoral region of northern Argentina, an area known for cattle raising and forestry.

*
Plaza del Once
(pronounced
óhn-say,
not
wunce).
This is actually usually given as Plaza Once, but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words makes it advisable, I think, to modify the name slightly so as to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. JLB himself uses "Plaza del Once" from time to time, as in the
Obras completas,
vol. II, p.428, in the story"La señoramayor," in
Informe de Brodie
("The Elderly Lady," in
Brodie's Report,
p. 375). Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square, and now the site of Buenos Aires' main train station for west-bound railways.

*
Quiroga:
Like many of the pieces in this volume ("The Captive,"
"Martin Fierro""Everything and Nothing"),
"A Dialog Between Dead Men" sets up a "dialog" with others of Borges' writings, especially a famous poem called "General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage" ("El general Quirogava en coche al muere
[sic,
for
"a sumuerte, a la
muerte,"
etc.]"). There the reader will find the scene that is not described but only alluded to here, the murder of General Quiroga by a sword-wielding gang of horsemen under the leadership of the Reinafe brothers. Some biographical information is essential here:Juan Facundo Quiroga (1793-1835) was a Federalist caudillo (which means that he was on the side of Rosas [see below]), and was, like Rosas, a leader feared by all and hated by his opponents; he was known for his violence, cruelty, and ruthlessness and made sure that his name was feared by slitting the throats of the prisoners that his forces captured and of the wounded in the battles that he fought. So great was his charisma, and so ruthless his personality, that his supposed ally in the fight against the Unitarians, Juan Manuel de Rosas, began to resent (and perhaps suspect) him. As Quiroga was leaving a meeting with Rosas in 1835, he was ambushed by the Reinafe gang, and he and his companions were brutally murdered, their bodies hacked to pieces; it was widely believed (though stubbornly denied by Rosas) that Rosas had ordered the assassination.

* Rosas:
Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877) was the dictator of Argentina for eighteen years, from 1835 to 1852. His dictatorship was marked by terror and persecution, and he is for JLB one of the most hated figures in Argentine history; JLB's forebears, Unitarians, suffered the outrages of Rosas and his followers. Early in his career Rosas was a Federalist (later the distinction became meaningless, as Rosas did more than anyone to unify Argentina, though most say he did so for all the wrong reasons), a caudillo whose followers were gangs of gauchos and his own private vigilante force, the so-called
mazorca
(see the story "Pedro Salvadores" in
In Praise of Darkness).
He methodically persecuted, tortured, and killed off his opponents both outside
and inside
his party, until he at last reigned supreme over the entire country. See the poem "Rosas" in JLB's early volume of poetry
Fervor de Buenos Aires.

*
"Chacabuco and junin and Palma Redondo and Caseros":
Battles in the wars of independence of the countries of the Southern Cone.

*
Porpora de' giardin, pompa de' prato, I Gemma dì primavera, occhio d'aprile
... : These lines are from a poem,
L'Adone,
written by Marino (1569-1625) himself (III:i58,11.1-2).

* Ituzaingó or Ayacucho:
Battles (1827 and 1824 respectively) in the wars of independence against Spain.

* Peaches... a young boy... the heads of Unitarians, their beards bloody:
This terrible image captures the cruelty and horror of the civil war that racked Argentina in the early nineteenth century, and the brutality with which the Federalists, when they were in power under Rosas, persecuted and terrorized the Unitarians. In other stories the translator has noted that slitting throats was the preferred method of dispatching captured opponents and the wounded of battles; here the opponents are decapitated. Making this all the more horrific is the fact that it was JLB's maternal grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, who as a child witnessed this scene. In
JLB: Selected Poems 1923-1967
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 316, the editor quotes Borges (without further citation): "One day, at the age of nine or ten, he [Isidoro Acevedo] walked by the Plata Market. It was in the time of Rosas. Two gaucho teamsters were hawking peaches. He lifted the canvas covering the fruit, and there were the decapitated heads of Unitarians, with blood-stained beards and wide-open eyes. He ran home, climbed up into the grapevine growing in the back patio, and it was only later that night that he could bring himself to tell what he had seen in the morning. In time, he was to see many things during the civil wars, but none ever left so deep an impression on him."

* A man who knew all the words ... metaphors of metal... the shapes of its moon:
This is probably Leopoldo Lugones. See the note, above, to the foreword to
The Maker,
p. 291.

* "My Lord Jesus Christ,
... is
this, indeed, Thy likeness in such fashion wrought?":
Borges is translating Dante,
Paradiso,
XXXI: 108-109; in English, the lines read as given. Quoted from
The Portable Dante,
ed. Paolo Milano,
Paradiso,
trans. Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) (New York: Penguin, 1975 [orig. copyright, 1947]), p. 532.

* Title:
In italics here because the story was tided originally in this way by JLB, in English.

* PedroHenríquez Ureña:
Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), originally from the Dominican Republic, lived for years in Buenos Aires and was an early contributor to
Sur,
the magazine dial Victoria Ocampo founded and that JLB assiduously worked on. It was through Henríquez Ureña, who had lived for a time in Mexico City, dial JLB met another friend, the Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes. Henríquez Ureña and JLB collaborated on die
Antología de la literatura
argentina
(1937), and diey were very close friends.

*
Avelino Arredondo:
The assassin, as the story says, of the president of Uruguay, Juan Idiarte Borda (1844-1897). See the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume
The Book of Sand.

*
Ascasubi:
Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875) was a prolific, if not always successful, writer of gaucho poetry and prose. (The
Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hispano-Americana
gives several tides of little magazines begun by Ascasubi that didn't last beyond the first number.) He was a fervid opponent of the Rosas regime and was jailed for his opposition, escaping in 1832 to Uruguay. There and in Paris he produced most of his work.

*
A dictator:
Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). In Borges, Rosas is variously called "the tyrant" and "the dictator"; as leader of the Federalist party he ruled Argentina under an iron hand for almost two decades, from 1835 to 1852. Thus the "vast shadow," which cast its pall especially over the mostly urban, mostly professional (and generally landowning) members of the Unitarian party, such as, here, Pedro Salvadores. Rosas confiscated lands and property belonging to the Unitarians in order to finance his campaigns and systematically harassed and even assassinated Unitarian party members.