REVIEWS 61

dim-witted tsar; the impeccable British Corps commander Haig; phlegmatic French general Joffre; young Home Secretary Churchill, and Earl Kitchener, secretary for war, whose blazing eyes and point-ing finger over the legend your country needs you “were to bore into the soul of every Englishman.” From what strange depths of insight did Kitchener make his much- dismissed prediction that the war would last four years, as it did?

Foreboding is at the heart of The Proud Tower (first published in 1966), which captures the era from the Gilded Age to the Great War. The brilliant first chapter depicts the ruling aristocracy, a noble bunch led by the imposing, eccentric, and (literally) shortsighted Lord Salis-bury. “The Patricians” is a vignette of a society becoming ever more re-fined, and apparently a world away from the war in which man would turn out to be a wolf to man.

Barbarity was certainly lurking in the wings. In an excellent episode, set in 1898, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, “the most beautiful and the most melancholy royal personage in Europe”—who spent as little time as possible with her husband, Franz Jo-seph, ruler of Austria- Hungary for sixty years—visits the lakeside villa of the Baroness Adolfe de Roths-child and, on her way to the lake steamer, is stabbed to death with a homemade dagger by the Italian va-grant turned anarchist Luigi Luche-ni. It’s one of the many small strokes in this book that together create a picture of a civilization in its last coherent hours, before the center could no longer hold.

In her 1925 collection, The Com-mon Reader, Virginia Woolf develops Samuel Johnson’s notion of the com-mon reader, a person “guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Tuchman’s histo-ries, along with Gass’s essays and the musings of Barthes, are intended for just this forgotten audience. To one such common reader, books like these are what have made writing this column a pleasure. n

The Book of Songs gave Jorge Luis Borges a formative experi-ence as a reader of literature in

translation. As a teenager he was ex-

amining with “enthusiasm and creduli-ty” a text of Chinese philosophy when he reached the following “memorable passage”: “A man condemned to death is not afraid of walking near a preci-pice because he has renounced life al-ready.” The translator marked this line with an asterisk to differentiate his in-

Edgardo Krebs, a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, was a teenager when he first inter-viewed Borges in their native Buenos Aires.

the purloined borges Translation and traductionBy Edgardo Krebs

Discussed in this essay:

Selected Poems, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman. Viking Penguin. 477 pages. $17.95 (paper).

Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley. Viking Penguin. 576 pages. $16.95 (paper).

On Argentina, by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alfred Mac Adam and Suzanne Jill Levine. Penguin Classics. 192 pages. $15 (paper).

Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

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62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / APRIL 2012

terpretation from that of another sinologist, who had rendered the same passage thus: “The servants destroyed all works of art, so that they would not have to pass judgment on their beauty or defects.” At this point Borges closed the book: a “mysterious skepticism” had entered his soul.

Borges would retain, however, an en-during fascination with such classics of Chinese literature as The Dream of the Red Chamber, which he first read in German. While director of the Argen-tine National Library, he amassed mul-tiple translations and placed them in the special collections, from which they were later stolen. Chinese characters fed Borges’s obsession with symbols, while Chinese grammar interested him for its subjective oddities. The prefixes, he ob-serves, seem to leave words halfway be-tween a noun and an adjective. “They are noun searchers, they precede them, they insinuate them.” “Language,” he wrote when he was twenty-six, “is the efficient ordering of the enigmatic abun-dance of the world . . . we are imposing on reality the nouns we invent . . . every noun is an abbreviation.” These essen-tial matters of grammar and diction Borges understood as challenges for scholars and translators, demanding the best from them; they were also central to the construction of his own work.

For those familiar with Borges in the original, reading him in English can amount to a puzzling constellation of asterisks. In an article in Lingua Fran-ca in 1997, the critic Matthew Howard called attention to “the troubling legacy” of the famous Norman Thom-as di Giovanni translations, character-ized by a “determined tidying up and simplification of Borges’s highly allusive work.” In the first line of “The Circular Ruins,” “unánime noche” is translated as “encompassing night” instead of the more accurate and evocative “unani-mous night.” This unexpected pairing vividly expresses the loneliness of the main character, who has disembarked from a bamboo canoe, seen by no one, enveloped in a darkness populated by “ánimas”—souls.

The “Conjectural Poem” is one of Borges’s finest. It is delivered as a stream of consciousness by Francisco Narciso de Laprida, one of the drafters of Argen-tina’s Declaration of Independence, as he flees, on foot, the party of mounted

gauchos who will shortly corner him and lance him to death. From the first line, it works at breakneck speed as a musical fugue. As Laprida runs, “La noche lat-eral de los pantanos/ me acecha y me de-mora”: “the lateral night of the swamps/ stalks me and slows me down.” The “lateral night” emphasizes the narrator’s tunnel vision, heightened by an almost supernatural fear. To translate this psy-chologically raw passage as “The night and to my right and left the marshes” is to emasculate it. The darkness in both works is luminous; the obscurity of the translations is defacing.

Fernando Sorrentino’s Seven Con-versations with Jorge Luis Borges in-cludes as an appendix a conversation with di Giovanni in which the transla-tor explains the method he followed to produce English versions of Borges’s poems. First, Borges and di Giovanni made literal, word-by-word translations. Di Giovanni kept around one quarter of these, to tinker with himself; the rest were sent to “some of the best poets in the United States.” Their transfigura-tions were compared against the literal models until “the results were satisfac-tory.” Di Giovanni then “read the poems to Borges for his definitive approval.”

It is unlikely that Borges would have given his blessing to such blunders as this: in “Una Rosa Amarilla” (“A Yellow Rose”), Borges imagines the circum-stances of Giambattista Marino’s death and quotes a couple of lines (themselves translated, from Italian) of one of Ma-rino’s poems:

Púrpura del jardín, pompa del pradogema de primavera, ojo de abril . . .

This is the translation:

Garden’s purple, prairie’s pomp,Yellow yolks of spring and eye of

April . . .

It is a fair translation except for one word, which makes all the difference: “gema” is the Spanish word for “gem”—quite straightforward. That it is translated in the text as “yellow yolks” can be explained only by a straightforward misreading—g’s look like y’s—of “gema” for “yema,” the yolk of the egg. It is unthinkable that Bor-ges would have let such a hoot go to print, or that Viking, republishing “A Yellow Rose” in Selected Poems (1999), could have missed the error.

Borges’s fiction has suffered similar indignities. (Once again Viking is the villain.) One of Borges’s best-known stories, “Man on Pink Cor-ner,” was reproduced in Collected Fic-t ions (1998). The sloppiness of Andrew Hurley’s translation is inex-cusable. Borges’s central character, Rosendo Juárez, is a tough man, short on words and good in knife fights, whose real-life template the author admired. They both lived in neigh-borhoods that stretched past the bor-ders of downtown Buenos Aires to the dismantled edges of the urban grid, where the “horizontal vertigo” of the Pampas took over. Twenty years earlier, Rosendo would have been a gaucho. Borges describes his arrival at a whorehouse: “Sabía llegar de lo más paquete al quilombo, en un oscuro, con las prendas de plata . . .”: “He was wont to arrive at the whore-house sharply dressed, riding a dark horse, its trappings made of silver . . .” (my translation). Hurley’s rendition: “He’d come into the cathouse just as dandified as you can imagine, head to foot in black, with his belt buckle and studs and all of silver.” The translator misses that the “oscuro” in the text is a horse and that “prendas de plata” refers to its bridle and gear, so he eliminates the horse from the story altogether, dresses the charac-ter in black, gives him a cowboy’s buckle, and covers him in silver. This is not merely sloppy; the error occludes allusions crucial to our un-derstanding of the story. Rosendo is, to a degree, still a creature of the un-seen Pampas, the “oscuro” he rides a reminder of the Pampa Indians, who displayed their wealth in the silver trappings of their horses.

Another nod to that tantalizing region beyond the city can be found in the title: those ubiquitous one- story pink buildings that figure in Borges’s poems and stories are rosy from more than the glow of an intense Pampas sunset. It was common in the country-side to mix whitewash with the blood of cattle to make paint. Through eth-nographic details such as this one, Borges introduces the reader to a crio-llo world, where characters, time, and space take on the rhythms of a rite of passage. His words and scenes sum up more than a century of Argentine

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REVIEWS 63

literature, reflecting a radical depar-ture in sensibility, language, and themes from the literature of Spain. Borges imagined a new literature in Spanish with the same surgical preci-sion and philosophical mischief critics have seen at work in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Circular Ruins,” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

It is therefore dismaying to read in “The End” the term “moreno” rendered as “nigger.” Borges dedicated one of his tango lyrics to the morenos. The term, which was used in Argentina to refer to people of color, derives from moro or morisco (“moor”) and dates back to the Muslim conquest of Spain. It bears no equivalence to “nigger,” a loaded term culturally specific to American history. In José Hernández’s two-part poem “Martín Fierro” (1872–79), which Bor-ges is glossing in “The End,” the gau-cho Martín Fierro returns to the scene of a “payada”—a contest of improvised songs—in which he competed against the unnamed moreno. The moreno had patiently tracked Fierro, seeking ven-geance for the death of his older broth-er, killed by the gaucho in a knife fight seven years earlier. As the two play their guitars and taunt each other with verses, the moreno’s motives become clear. Onlookers then step in to avert the imminent knife fight, and Fierro leaves. Despite their animosity, the two men see each other as equals. When Borges has Fierro return to address the moreno’s grievance, it is the black man who comes out the winner, killing the gaucho hero. As always with Borges, “The End” is much more than a short story. It is a defiant, even shocking re-writing of a national myth.

These examples of mistranslation are not isolated or exceptional; they can be found wherever one looks closely. They have shaped, in part, the view readers of Borges in English have of the author and his work. His supposed detachment from history and reality owes much to these faulty versions—in other words, to the detachment of the translators.

Borges, as he himself pointed out, is nowhere more present than in the pages of his own

books. But the flesh-and-blood per-son, the creature in the map, cer-tainly was memorable. A shelf ’s worth of books written by friends

and acquaintances of the author have appeared in the past few years. None of these is a proper biography, or even a full study, but together they offer the documentary value of direct testimony. The massive Borg-es, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is a dis-appointment; it reads like an over-whelming Invention of Morel, in which Borges shows up in every scene—for fifty years. More interest-ing is the volume Borges, libros y lec-turas, produced by the Argentine National Library, which catalogues 496 books he donated to the institu-tion, over which he presided from 1955 to 1973. Covered in his margi-nalia, and representative of the au-thors, ideas, and languages that most fascinated him, these books were packed away, destined to rot or to disappear into the general popula-tion of the library, until a worthy li-brarian discovered their existence.

A distinct local tradition, of which Borges was well aware, runs through nineteenth-century Argentine litera-ture. Esteban Echeverría, a leading writer of the first generation of patriots, declared that Spanish was not a lan-guage in which one could communi-cate intelligence, by which he meant that Spain had fallen behind the Eu-rope of the Enlightenment and that it lacked the idiom, or idioms, to express the thoughts and realities urging his fellow revolutionaries. In Borges’s words, until 1810, Spanish literature was Argentine literature; after inde-pendence, Argentina began producing its own. Borges was a brilliant analyst of that emerging tradition, and his own work is a culmination of its major themes and linguistic peculiarities.

The “literatura gauchesca” was cen-tral to that tradition. He edited an anthology of this defining Argentine genre with his friend Bioy Casares, and from the beginning of his career assiduously recast and recombined its symbols. He was drawn to its stark realism, to some of its “admirable cruelties,” opposing them, in an essay on Hawthorne, to the allegorical fic-tion produced by nineteenth-century American writers. Many years before the term was coined—and would be brandished against him—Borges was placing American literature in the “magical-realist” fold.

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Even Borges’s most celebrated fan-tastic fiction is not sui generis; it was preceded by the stories of Leopoldo Lugones, another Argentine he was never sure whether to love or to hate. In two books, Las fuerzas extra-ñas and Cuentos fatales, Lugones at-tempted what Borges would later perfect: stories taking place in a dis-tant land or the remote past, told in an assured, erudite voice that lent them credibility. I can still remember the thrill of reading, as a teenager, Lugones’s “The Alabaster Vase” and its sequel, “The Eyes of the Queen,” stories set in Buenos Aires, in streets and neighborhoods I knew. They in-volve a mysterious Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut (“the Lady of the Gaze”), who is resurrected when her tomb is profaned, and a cohort of men, sworn to secrecy and to the enact-ment of fateful dramas anchored in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Even so, the queen takes rooms in the Plaza Hotel (a few blocks from my child-hood home), and the victims of her fierce time-traveling SWAT team are well-known figures of public life. Borges particularly admired “Izur,” named after its main character, a chimpanzee. The scientist-narrator of the story believes that chimpan-zees are possessed of an intelligence they cannot express because of a de-fect in the muscles of their throats and mouths. He is determined to overcome these anatomical barriers, but as the experiment progresses Izur’s health and morale begin to fail. Just as he is dying, he seems to be murmuring something. The scientist puts his ear to Izur’s mouth to hear him say, he thinks, the word “mas-ter.” Lugones’s inventions would an-ticipate such works as “The Circular Ruins” and “The Immortal.”

Viking’s best effort at translat-ing Borges is Eliot Weinberg-er’s Selected Non-Fict ions

(1999). Several of the non-fiction pieces are the work of a young, exper-imental Borges writing almost in dia-lect. Esther Allen, a collaborator on the volume, is excellent. She eerily captures the very distinct “breathing” of Borges’s sentences. In his introduc-tion, Weinberger rightly has little pa-tience with the “archetype of the de-

tached and cerebral metaphysician”; he presents a far more real Borges, working in Buenos Aires, writing for newspapers and magazines, excelling as a film critic, denouncing Hitler’s persecution of Jews in the Thirties, publishing devastating critiques of the local nationalists and of the profes-sional left-wingers as well as “coura-geous attacks on the Perón dictator-ship.” The pieces left out of this volume were those that Borges “wrote for Argentines about Argentina.”

In 2010, Penguin Classics put out On Argentina. Its editor, Alfred Mac Adam, a professor of Latin-American literature at Columbia University, has gathered some of these “endogamic” pieces, mostly translating them him-self. As it turns out, the three books Borges wanted suppressed from his complete works contain essays on lin-guistics and literary theory in which Borges addresses the inevitable discon-tinuity between Spanish classical lit-erature and the existential concerns and language of his own country. There are brilliant “deconstructions” of the prose of Cervantes and the po-etry of Quevedo and Góngora. A focus of the essays is the creation of meaning through the manipulation of symbols. The flaw of these books, and the rea-son Borges wanted them disappeared (he would buy copies wherever he could, to burn them), is the deliberate affectation of the language. This is no impediment to seeing Borges at work as a precocious scholar.

Mac Adam’s introduction starts with the poem “Nineteen-Hundred-Twenty-Something.” Written in 1960, it comes to terms with forty years of turbulent Argentine history. The Twenties were memorable for Borges: having spent World War I in Geneva with his family, he had finally re-turned to Buenos Aires. While in Switzerland, he learned German and continued to write and publish. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, he met Macedonio Fernández, a friend he inherited from his father, who had been Macedonio’s classmate at law school. They conceived the idea of starting an anarchist colony in Para-guay, a plan they would only partially execute; Borges Sr. opted out when he got married. The country to which the young Borges returned in the

Twenties was “an insipid territory.” In his oration at Macedonio’s funeral, in 1952, Borges explains:

[I]t was no longer the picturesque wil-derness I had known, and not yet a place for culture. But I spoke a couple of times with Macedonio and realized that this gray man, who spent his days in a poor guest house near Tribunales, discovered the eternal problems as if he were Thales of Miletus or Par-menides. He could endlessly replace the centuries and kingdoms of Europe. I spent my days reading Mauthner, and composing arid poems in the mistak-en, “ultraist” style; but the thought that on Saturdays, at a bar in Once [Buenos Aires’s Jewish quarter], I would hear Macedonio explain what absence or what illusion is the self, was enough to justify the rest of the week.

Macedonio as well as the painter, astrologer, and “inventor of languag-es” Alejandro Xul Solar were Borges’s greatest interlocutors in the Twen-ties—characters as extraordinary and original in their own right as he was. Not a word is said about either in Mac Adam’s introduction, though it was of them that Borges was think-ing when he wrote “Nineteen- Hundred-Twenty-Something.” The poem is also an homage to a provin-cial Argentina struggling with mo-dernity, beset by what Lugones called “the hour of the sword”—an eerie an-ticipation of the Dirty War and Falk-lands conflicts to come. “A man sets out to draw the world,” Borges wrote in 1960. “As the years go by, he peo-ples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, is-lands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

Grown-ups do not covet things, Borges told the Argentine poet Carlos Mastronardi;

they “covet symbols.” This is a vision that runs through Borges’s entire oeu-vre. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is essentially a battle among competing symbolic universes; we are shown the gradually revealed creation of one and how it affects an existing, prevailing other—a process that lays bare the contrivances of both.

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Borges was born a decade before Argentina celebrated its first centen-nial. His understanding of the country was bound by, and inseparable from, a critical reflection on the symbols it produced. These symbols had to be mutually agreed-upon to have mean-ing—as Borges illustrated in his essay on John Wilkins and, more radically, in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Borges profesor: curso de lit-eratura inglesa is a compilation of the twenty-five lectures he gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Be-owulf, ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of “precursors,” cross- cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. It also includes, in an appendix, several translations by Borges of short Anglo-Saxon texts. This is the most surpris-ing and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously. When Borges was inducted into Argentina’s Academy of Letters, in 1962, he chose as the topic of his inaugural lecture an apparently very foreign one: literature in Ireland during the Middle Ages, when the man of letters was at the center of the culture. The teaching of oral literature took twelve years: the student had to retain an entire corpus; by the end he was a sort of magician. In 1962, the proscribed Perónist party was allowed to take part, again, in legislative elections. As he had done in 1943, when military officers staged the coup that would eventually put Perón in power for the first time, Bor-ges was, in his lecture, once again fighting the old fight, the one that had felled Narciso de Laprida the previous century. For Borges it was not only a choice between the rule of law and the appeal of charismatic caudillos; he was defending the Aristotelian value of the examined life, of a critical look at Argentine history.

Writing on Collected Fictions in the New York Review of Books, J. M. Coetzee offered a series of judgments that consistently—and unfairly—move Borges away from any recog-nizable background in Argentine re-ality. In Borges’s Buenos Aires, Coetzee claims, being of Spanish or

Italian descent was not “deemed a social asset”; “Englishness was one part of Borges’s self-fashioning, Jew-ishness another.” Stories such as “The South” and other “more realis-tic tales of gaucho or hoodlum life” show Borges “trying to situate him-self more forthrightly in an Argen-tine literary tradition.” But as the de-scendant on both sides of several prominent figures of the indepen-dence movement and the wars of lib-eration from Spain, Borges had no need to do so. He indeed published a combative piece of satire entitled “I, a Jew” (1934), intended to savage and ridicule the Argentine sympathizers of Hitler, who had accused Borges of being a “crypto Jew.” Coetzee also tells us that “curiously for a writer with an avant-garde reputation, his own reading seemed to stop around 1920”—in other words, when Borges was twenty-one. None of this makes much sense. Borges had a very active life as a book reviewer for literary journals such as Sur, as well as for tabloid newspapers like Crítica and popular magazines like El Hogar. His range is astounding. Contemporary American, Argentine, Bolivian, Co-lombian, Dominican, English, French, German, Italian, Mexican, and Spanish authors are reviewed alongside classical literature of India and the Far East and anthropology books by Frazer, Mauriac, and Paul-Émile Victor. Borges was also a translator of Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and Langston Hughes. In the early Forties he taught himself Italian, reading a bilingual edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy as he rode the tram to his job at a municipal library.

All this reading began in the oft-mentioned library of his father. “When I was a boy,”

wrote Borges, “not to know French was equivalent to being an illiter-ate. Then we moved from French to English, and from English to igno-rance, without excluding ignorance of our own language, Spanish.”

American literature and film were perhaps his closest mirror. The detec-tive fiction of Edgar Allan Poe pro-vided him with a rigorous model he used to experiment with philosophi-cal quandaries. But nineteenth-

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the long goodbyeJames Ellroy tries to let goBy Will Frears

Discussed in this essay:

Clandestine, by James Ellroy. William Morrow. 336 pages. $14.99 (paper).The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy. Grand Central. 384 pages. $7.50 (paper). My Dark Places, by James Ellroy. Vintage. 427 pages. $15.95 (paper).The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women, by James Ellroy. Vintage. 224 pages.

$14.95 (paper).

In 1947, the body of a young woman was found in a vacant lot in down-town Los Angeles. Her vital organs

were missing, her body had been burned with cigarettes, her face had been cut open from the corners of her mouth to her ears, and, a final indigni-ty, her body cut in two at the waist. There was no blood: the corpse of Eliz-abeth Short had been drained. No one was ever arrested for the crime, which became known as the Black Dahlia murder after a popular Alan Ladd movie, The Blue Dahlia. (Short dressed in black.) Eleven years later, another woman was found, strangled and dumped on the roadside in El Monte, a satellite of Los Angeles in the San Ga-briel Valley. That crime, too, was never solved. The dedication of James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia, reads: to geneva hilliker ellroy 1915–1958 mother: twenty-nine years later, this valediction in blood.

When I was fourteen, I came across a

copy of The Black Dahlia on the shelves of a bookshop near my house where I had gone to get my ear pierced (they had a sideline). I didn’t know that books like this could be published, that writers were allowed to be so foulmouthed and funny and terrifying. I’m not even sure I’d ever seen the word nigger written down. A friend of my mother’s had to explain the dedication. That was an-other discovery: that a person who wrote books had a life, too, and that there might be some overlap between them.

Ellroy has written four books in-spired by his mother’s murder. The first, Clandestine, and sec-

ond, The Black Dahlia, are novels. The third, My Dark Places, takes the form of a murder investigation. The latest, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Wom-en, is a memoir and, to fans like me, a pity. It’s an account of Ellroy’s cursed relationship with women, beginning with an analysis of his (mixed, to say the least) feelings toward his mother. The “Curse” seems to be his convic-tion that somewhere exists a mythical

Will Frears is a theater and film director. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

century American literature also made him appreciate the distinctive realism of the gauchesco genre. Bor ges has difficulty understanding how cowboys are always falling in love and playing the guitar in clean-cut, fancy clothes. In 1938, he wondered why frontier life had not inspired a single good film. That changed a year later with the release of John Ford’s Stage-coach. Another film by Ford, Fort Apache (1948), was a remake of one of the few Argentine films on a gau-cho topic, Pampa Bárbara (1945).

The correspondences between Hol-lywood westerns and Borges’s gaucho tales are striking and meaningful. They place the blind librarian in the company of John Ford, John Wayne, The Gunfighter, High Noon, and Shane. Stagecoach’s the Ringo Kid and The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards are cut from the same mythic block as Martín Fi-erro and Sergeant Cruz: ambivalent, violent yet heroic. Borges’s “magic circle of the Pampas” and John Ford’s Monument Valley are the proper, in-commensurable theaters for their ac-tions. To forget (for a moment) the acclaimed Borges of labyrinths and mirrors for the author of “more realis-tic tales of gaucho or hoodlum life,” one looks to the best westerns. They help to situate the Argentine Borges, the “difficult” and “minor” Borges, so hard for translators to get right—and for critics to appreciate. When, after shadowing each other, Ethan Edwards stands face-to-face with the Nawyecka chief Scar, they have this exchange:

Edwards: You speak pretty good American—for a Comanch’. Some-one teach ya?

Chief Scar: You speak good Co-manch’. Someone teach you?

One thinks of Borges’s “Tale of the Warrior and the Captive,” in which his grandmother, who is English, encoun-ters, in the open Pampas, a fellow En-glishwoman, a captive for many years of the Indians. Facing Fanny Haslam de Borges, she drinks blood in the In-dian (and gaucho) manner from a re-cently killed sheep. It is a story in which Bor ges appropriates his double ances-try, the great theme of The Searchers.

This Borges is best displayed in the collection Artifices (1944), which he deliberately arranged so that it starts

with “Funes, the Memorious” and closes with “The South.” The first story depicts an Indian boy who has developed the uncanny capacity for remembering everything he has expe-rienced. He is an impossible reposi-tory of knowledge rendered useless and nightmarish by his incapacity to interpret it. Funes is incapable of forming symbols; he has endless ac-cess to raw experience, and ultimate-ly this excess overwhelms and kills him. Juan Dahlmann, the protagonist

of “The South,” is his mirror opposite. He is the foreigner who needs an ex-planation for everything. He is the symbol maker, and Borges openly identified with him. Yet the willed culmination of Dahlmann’s life, the supreme act of interpretation, is to seek death by the hand, and knife, of an Indian. At the center of Borges’s Argentine labyrinth, when all the words have been written, Funes kills Dahlmann, the beast kills the hero, or rather, the hero is the beast. n

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