Without his command of multiple languages, Argentina's
most famous author would not have been the writer he was.
BY MARTIN HADIS
Originally published in: The Buenos Aires Herald Magazine. June 2001.
We have grown so used to calling Jorge Luis Borges a universal writer that these words have almost fused in most readers' minds. Known for the breadth as well as the depth of his creations, Borges was at the same time profoundly Argentine and a true cosmopolitan.
His poems and stories can feature compadritos (the rakish figures of Tango lore) from late 19th century Buenos Aires as easily as Vikings from the Norse sagas or long-forgotten Anglo-Saxon kings. Borges's knowledge of literature was nothing short of encyclopedic, and his sources and inspirations continue to be researched by critics. But a fact that is often overlooked is that Borges was only able to approach many of the works that he read through his command of the numerous languages he studied throughout his life.
Raised bilingual, Borges continued to learn new languages during his boyhood, youth and adult years. For him, the study of each new tongue was in his own words, a new adventure, akin to entering "a delicate labyrinth." Each language brought him new sounds and new words, as well as new literary approaches that often influenced his own works.
A VAST LIBRARY OF INNUMERABLE ENGLISH BOOKS
Borges always stated that he felt, from a very early age, that he was destined to become a writer.
He could have scarcely grown up in a more propitious environment. His father was an avid reader. His paternal grandmother, an Englishwoman, Frances Haslam, hailed from Staffordshire and brought both the English language and its literature into the family. Borges' inherited English soon allowed him to approach the hundreds and hundreds of volumes in his father's vast library, and it was through these early readings that he would come in touch with those authors that would later become his favorites: G.K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, to cite but a few.
But it was not just new stories and authors that Borges found in these bookshelves. In nineteenth century England, orientalism was all the rage. Thus, among his father's books, Borges also found numerous volumes dealing with Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and other diverse forms of mysticism and philosophy that would influence his writings.
Blindness ran in the Borges family as an inherited condition. In 1914, Borges' father Guillermo's vision was deteriorating so badly that the family decided to travel to Europe to consult an expert ophthalmologist. But World War I broke out and abruptly changed their plans. The Borges family ended up staying in Europe for seven years. They settled down in Geneva, where Jorge Luis started attending school. There, he learned both French and Latin.
"Latin was the main subject," wrote Borges, "and I soon discovered that if one was good at Latin one could neglect other subjects a bit."
His skills grew with the years and he developed a good command of Latin. As often happens with dead tongues that are insufficiently exercised, Borges' command of the language slowly declined with the passage of time. But his aesthetic fondness for the language persisted through the years. In Borges' own words, Latin had "a dignified air to which all later Romance languages aspired."
When reflecting on its solemn nature, Borges would often recall a verse by Robert Browning: "marble's language, Latin pure, discreet." According to Borges, this verse reflected the notion that Latin words, because of their strict and dignified nature, seem to have been intended to be engraved in marble: "It's as if there were a natural affinity between the two concepts, Latin and Marble," he wrote.
GERMAN: A PERSONAL LOVE AFFAIR
In one of his lectures, Borges stated that, were he forced to choose to keep one language among all existing tongues, he would choose to keep German, a tongue he loved as much for its sound as for its structure. German's open vowels and stark pronunciation made it especially attractive to Borges' ear; the possibility that German affords of spontaneously forming composite words also put German above the rest. It was the first language that Borges taught himself, as a personal undertaking.
Borges began his studies of German in 1916, with the explicit purpose of reading Schopenauer's works in the original. In order to learn the language, however, he decided to start with simpler texts. His choice fell on Heinrich Heine, a German expressionist poet, whose works he started reading with the help of a dictionary. With time Borges' efforts bore fruit: he was suddenly able to continue his readings of Heine unaided:
"There was a moment when I realized that I could go on reading on my own. At that time I cried, because in a modest way I had managed to apprehend the vast German language."
Borges' self-taught German opened up unprecedented vistas: he was suddenly not only able to read Schopenauer, but also to approach many other German authors and philosophers in the original.
OTHER ROMANCE LANGUAGES
Even though he became a proficient French speaker during his stay in Geneva, Borges disliked the language's sound. "I find the sound of French unpleasant, I think that it lacks the sonority of the other Romance languages," he once commented. "But," he hastened to add, "how can one speak ill of a language that has produced verses like this one from Hugo: L'hydre-Univers tordant son corps écaillé d'astres? How can one criticize a language without which these verses would not exist?"
Borges also acquired a good command of Italian, teaching himself by using a bilingual English-Italian edition of Dante's Divina Commedia. "I have read and read the Divina Commedia in more than twelve different editions," he once stated. "I have also read Ariosto, Tasso, Croce and Gentile, but I am incapable of speaking Italian or of following a movie or a drama in that language."
Something similar could be said about his knowledge of Portuguese: "I do not know Portuguese at all," he once stated. "But I have read Efa de Queiroz. Whenever I stumbled upon a sentence that I could not understand, I would read it aloud and through its sound its meaning would be revealed."
LANGUAGES FROM THE NORTH AND THE EAST
Borges began his study of Old English mainly as a reaction to his going blind. "My blindness progressed since the year of my birth like a slow twilight," and "In 1955 I realized that I had lost my sight as a reader. I could no longer read."
To compensate for such an enormous loss, Borges returned to his mythological origins: namely, to his ancestral English side. It proved to be the right decision. Old English provided not only comfort, but also the aesthetic enjoyment of a language whose nature was both sonorous and rough. If Latin's majestic cadence reminded Borges of marble, the harsh consonants of Old English sounded to him "like the clash of swords, the crashing of spear against shield, the tumult of battle-cries."
Even more importantly, the legendary and warlike nature of Old English poetry provided Borges with topics and themes that he would use to great literary advantage during his later decades.
After mastering Old English, and producing his own Spanish translations of many poems belonging to this period, Borges also became interested in Old Norse, a Scandinavian linguistic relative to Old English, with similarly inspiring results. Other languages that Borges tackled in his later years were Japanese – whose grammar Borges found both fascinating and mesmerizing – and Arabic, which he studied during the very last days of his life.
THE MAKER
It is hard to imagine what Borges' works would have been like if he had, for some improbable reason, failed to cast such a wide linguistic net. Borges stories are often autobiographical, and even though he disliked the disclosure of specific information and frequently enjoyed muddying details, his frequent bibliographic references, as well as his prologues and explicit quotations in numerous essays and articles testify to the breadth and scope of his language skills. Sometimes the influence of a language can be felt in Borges' attempting a new genre, such as the tanka and haiku that he wrote, influenced by Japanese poetry; sometimes it's a verse or a topic that inspires Borges to craft a new story, as George Herbert's The Collar did his "The Book of Sand," or a new version of an ancient text, like his "Brunanburh, 937 A.D."
Examples abound; traces of the many literatures that Borges approached can be found all throughout his works. "Each human language," he once stated, "is a way of perceiving the universe."
Without disagreeing with this statement, one could safely argue that this most imaginative of writers was not content with passive observation. In Borges' able hands, each of these languages became in turn the raw material that he used not only to perceive the universe, but also to create new, fantastic worlds of his own.
MARTIN HADIS
Buenos Aires, June 2001.
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