Norman Thomas di Giovanni / In Memory of Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

In Memory of Borges 

by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

An Introduction

The reading world, inundated with daily information, is quick to lose sight of yesterday's facts and too lazy or uncaring to track down simple truths. For these past forty years rumours and lies - even spilling over into slander and libel - have been circulating about the years I spent at the side of Jorge Luis Borges. All of it, of course, behind my back.

Borges and Me / Borges Remembered

Jorge Luis Borges

Borges Remembered 

by Norman Thomas di Giovanni

The Borges I knew and worked with - the one still fresh in my memory these twenty years since his death, the one I search for in his myriad biographies and cannot find - the everyday Borges, existed in a rarefied atmosphere. Protected and spoiled by his family, he never had to seek a job until he was close to forty. He always lived at home, and even at seventy-one, when he walked out on a disastrous marriage, he went back to his mother. Borges's inner life was lived in books, in philosophical quandaries, in thinking. He adored women but had no sexual success with them. Nor was he a practical man. Once, in Salt Lake City, as we sat side by side in barber chairs having our hair cut, an attendant approached and asked if I wanted my shoes shined. I nodded a yes for myself and for Borges, who suddenly flared. He didn't want anyone polishing his shoes, claiming that he never did them at home. No, I pointed out to him, his maid Fani always polished them for him.

Borges courted controversy, often heedlessly, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. Whatever made him accept a medal from Pinochet I will never fathom. It cost him the Nobel Prize. He was little interested in politics or world affairs yet would make ill-informed statements on issues he knew nothing about. Once, at Harvard, in an interview with a young journalist, he praised the war in Vietnam, which at the moment all of America was repudiating; another time he emerged from a meeting with Jorge Videla, one of the architects of Argentina's dirty war, and pronounced that the new government a military takeover was in the hands of gentlemen. But to give him his due, Borges had also been a staunch anti-Nazi and defender of the Jews when in Buenos Aires such a stand was unfashionable. His blindness isolated him, and he sometimes used this as an excuse. At home he was surrounded and swayed by members of his own class, the old oligarchy, reactionary dinosaurs who lived in an imaginary past. Borges once refused to accede to Neruda's request for a meeting, despite his mother's and my pleas to the contrary. Neruda, as a Communist, was a leper. It was not that Borges had no sympathy for the downtrodden and dispossessed. He simply did not know they existed.

But one could not help admiring him for his modest existence, for the fact that outside of a few books he had no interest in material things. He would eat a little boiled rice, sometimes with an egg on it. On winter evenings, returning from work, he liked a cup of steaming chocolate. Shamefaced about having accepted membership in the stodgy Argentine Academy of Letters, he fell back on a claim that they served the best hot chocolate in town. He was shy about his false teeth, which he used to rinse after a meal, telling me not to look. We often stood side by side at urinals, and he would ask me to read aloud any dirty graffiti that adorned the walls. The more graphic they were, the more he enjoyed them, for he was no prude. He rarely listened to music, finding it too emotional. He seldom showed feelings and, despite his many adversities, never wallowed in self-pity, proclaiming we had a duty to happiness. For him there were no sacred cows; he made fun of everything and everybody. He chided me with the sobriquet Napoléon whenever I tried to hurry him to appointments. To brush off importuning individuals, he would agree to things he had no intention of doing - writing an article for an encyclopaedia, say, or meeting a top political figure. He admired the ethics, the civic-mindedness, of the Anglo-Saxon, but he himself often lapsed into the South American usage he claimed to despise. Nor was he above telling what he considered white lies in order to explain away actions that later came to embarrass him.

We remained friends and he confided in me to the end, yet stories still circulate about our having fallen out, about his having thrown me out of his house. Alas, being close to Borges came with a price, in my case laying me open to the smouldering envy of petty academics and erstwhile friends, gossipmongers who never knew the real man but to whom, on his pedestal, Borges was a god.

First appeared in Departures, October 2006, under the title 'Borges and Me'.

DI GIOVANNI

Borges / Georgie and Elsa

JORGE LUIS BORGES

GEORGE AND ELSA

A biography of Borges, by his translator.

Jorge Luis Borges, known as Georgie to his friends, married Elsa Astete Millán in 1967. Borges was sixty-eight years old at the time of the wedding; Elsa, a widow, with a son in his twenties, was eleven years younger.

It proved to be a tempestuous and eventful marriage that would leave an indelible mark on the remainder of Borges’ life, but their relationship has been largely glossed over by previous biographers. This is because the one person who knew all the details has refused to speak about it.

Until now.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked with Borges in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Buenos Aires from late 1967 to 1972 and thereafter sporadically until Borges’s death in 1986. During their first period together di Giovanni spent more time with the couple than did almost anyone else. He was privy to the private side of their relationship and to its sudden decline. It was di Giovanni who helped the demoralized Borges by organizing and arranging his divorce and at the same time rescuing his library and smuggling him out of Buenos Aires to avoid the wrath of Elsa and her lawyers.

The book is based on the author’s extensive collection of original material in the form of diaries, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and photographs, most of which has never before been seen. It provides a unique insight into one of the few true geniuses of literature.

HARPER COLLINS

Norman Thomas di Giovanni / The Borges Papers

Jorge Luis Borges

The Borges Papers

By Norman Thomas di Giovanni

My work with Borges had its origin in a series of accidents and coincidences that took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the autumn of 1967 and continued there through the spring of 1968, when his six-month Harvard lectureship drew to a close and he returned to Buenos Aires.

Our undertakings were launched with a volume of his selected poems, for which I chose poets to make translations under our guidance, supplying several of them with literal drafts. I quickly found a publisher for the project, Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, and it was uncanny how our efforts met with instant success. The poems began to be widely published in magazines, and soon Borges and I were invited to read them on a circuit of Greater Boston universities. In time, we shifted to translations of his celebrated short stories, those that had not yet appeared in English. The activity of these months reached a climax with a reading at the YM-YWHA, an important poetry venue, in New York, in April 1968, and a contract with the New Yorker for translations of hitherto unpublished Borges stories and poems, and immediately thereafter contracts with E.P. Dutton for several volumes of Borges's work. It was an annus mirabilis for him and for me.

On his departure, Borges invited me to Buenos Aires, and six months later I joined him there. I went for five months and stayed for nearly three years. In that time, I even managed to encourage Borges to begin writing new stories and poems. This activity and this period have been chronicled in a memoir, 'In Memory of Borges', published in my book The Lesson of the Master.

I continued working with Borges over the next decade or so during sporadic visits to Buenos Aires. In 1979, I recorded a long programme for Radio 3 on the eve of Borges's eightieth birthday, interviewing him at his home for thirteen hours during the course of a week. In 1982, I co-authored and produced a film, a drama-documentary directed by David Wheatley and shot in Uruguay and in the Argentine, for the BBC's Arena series, with Borges himself appearing in it. These dates are significant because at some point after I left Buenos Aires for Britain, in 1972, rumours and stories began to circulate about Borges having thrown me out of his house.

All of our work, the translations in which he took full part in a joint collaboration, our reading tours, the BBC projects, were well received and highly praised. We even wrote Borges's autobiography together, in English, and published it as a New Yorker profile. According to reviewers and commentators, we had set new standards in the art of translation, and the New Yorker's editor, William Shawn, informed us that he did not regard the work we submitted to him as translation but as elegant works of literature in English.

I was only vaguely aware in the years after I left Buenos Aires and took up residence in Great Britain that a bevy of denigrators was at work, erstwhile friends and academics, individuals who appeared to be jealous of my friendship and collaboration with Borges. Some of them openly confessed their envy to me. Another sent me anonymous letters, threatening in one to destroy me at the New Yorker and at E.P Dutton. My publisher at Dutton once told me that during the preparation of a Borges anthology he had commissioned there were times when he thought that the book's prime objective, as set out by its two compilers, was to keep me and my work out of it. My work, in fact, was my work in collaboration with its author and signed as such. It was therefore Borges's own work.

Sly attacks ensued. Stories mushroomed, and lies about me even began to appear in print. Not one of these perpetrators ever asked for my version of events in what suddenly became a minefield of contention and controversy. A new editor at Dutton informed me that I could not go on translating Borges for them because I was too expensive. I countered by offering to make the required translations for nothing, which was plainly unanswerable because I never got a reply. Then Borges died, and María Kodama, his widow, became executor of his estate. From this point on, surrealism set in. I began to receive letters from her lawyers and agents and from a certain American university insisting that I return manuscripts that Borges had lent me. I had never borrowed any manuscript from Borges; I had never even seen one. Kodama phoned me from Geneva one day to tell me I knew that Borges had a trunk of manuscripts in the cellar of his flat in Maipú Street. I had been aware of no such trunk and of no such cellar.

Behind my back, I was being ushered out of the door (if such a mixed metaphor is permissable) and at the same time was being airbrushed out of history, out of Borges's existence. All of my volumes of his work - work to which he contributed and gave a unique voice - were deliberately allowed to go out of print. No publisher, no editor, no agent, no executor of any estate ever wrote to me to explain any of this. New translations appeared. Viking-Penguin had bought up E.P. Dutton, and unilaterally, without a single word to me, they nullified my contracts, an act which experts in the law have told me was illegal. So ruthless was Viking that they even commissioned a new edition of Borges's poems, stealing from my edition, without permission, without payment, a considerable body of my work.

Of the new versions of the stories, one professor from Chicago told me that he could no longer teach Borges in English because he had to spend the whole class unravelling the translation to make the stories intelligible. Paul Theroux wrote to me that a proof copy of the work had been sent to him and that 'It seemed to me like a new translation of the Bible. It simply doesn't work. It is not Borges. You are Borges.'

A culmination seemed to have been reached when I had to place an injunction on a Barcelona publisher for attempting to bring out an edition of Borges's autobiography, in a Spanish translation, without my having been informed. Well, to be fair, I was informed - when the book was already printed, bound, and set to be distributed the very next week. The publisher countered by suing me. It got extremely complicated, but the problem arose in the first instance when Kodama presented the unwitting publisher with the autobiography while failing to explain that I owned half of it. The case took seven or eight years to run the course of the Spanish courts. I eventually won. This too is chronicled in The Lesson of the Master. One of the plaintiff's chief arguments against me was a declaration by Kodama in which she stated that it did not seem to her that I had co-authored the autobiography.

She phoned me out of the blue from Paris a few years ago in what appeared an effort to elicit my sympathy for the bad treatment and racial slurs she was receiving from all quarters in Buenos Aires. She ended the conversation saying she would phone back a few nights later. She didn't. A year and a half passed, and in October 2006 I informed her by letter that I planned to republish the full body of my Borges translations. I got no reply from her but instead received a mildly threatening letter from her New York agent. This did not surprise me as he had been bullying and threatening parties interested in my plans for some time. A few months later, one of Penguin's lawyers warned me that if I persisted I would 'be liable for willful copyright infringement, for which the U.S. Copyright Act imposes statutory damages of $150,000 for each violation.' I was elated. Viking-Penguin had stolen thirty-eight of my Borges poems for an edition of theirs. This meant I could very well be the recipient of a settlement worth $5,750,000.

In recent years - decades after the appearance of our work - I have also begun to be pilloried by academics who, wielding their scalpels and microscopes, have sought to condemn me for translation crimes and transgressions. A lecturer of translation theory from Barcelona cornered me about the fact that a certain short prose piece by Borges contained seven paragraphs in the Spanish and eight in the English version. Why was that, and why were there 677 words in the original and 819 in the translation? Another took me to task over a single phrase, my rendering of Borges's strange and problematic unánima noche in one of his most famous stories, and from this condemned the whole body of my labours. Some told me, I am not sure whether in praise or blame, that the translations were clearer than the originals. Another said that Borges and I should not have corrected mistakes in one of his stories because those mistakes were charming. These mistakes had been pointed out to us by the New Yorker's scrupulous editors, and Borges not only hastened to correct them for our translation but had me engineer the changes for future reprints of his Spanish versions. One reviewer accused me of a Svengali role for having directed Borges to write stories about Buenos Aires lowlife. I must repeat that the translations were all made in direct collaboration with the author, whom everyone declared a literary genius - except, apparently, when he sat down with me to turn his work into English. Beneath it all I saw a tiresome ignorance of editorial standards and practice, to say nothing of an absence of common sense.

I want to use these pages, then, to remove some of the tarnish, to restore the record, and to introduce to new readers - who will be unaware of their existence - the stories and poems I translated with Borges or under his aegis. I want also to share aspects and details of his life that derived from my daily contact with him. I may also turn up a few letters and documents to illuminate aspects of his character. Along the way, some of my remarks may even prove useful to apprentice translators.

The programme will start by the gradual presentation simultaneously of two of Borges's books. The first, a collection of thirty conversations with the Argentine poet Osvaldo Ferrari, dates from 1984 and has never before appeared in English. The second is a version of Borges's earliest and most celebrated stories, the set of eight originally brought together in 1942 under the title The Garden of Branching Paths.

- N T di G

DI GIOVANNI