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Abstract
This article studies ‘Poema conjetural’, a dramatic monologue by Jorge Luis Borges and his best known poem. In particular, it questions the extent and the form of the influence of the poetry of Robert Browning on this piece. This work proposes that perhaps the dramatic monologues of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, an author who has not been studied in relation to Borges' literature, played a greater role in shaping this poem. The article also proposes that the ‘destino sudamericano’ famously stated in this piece reflects Borges' reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Finally, this study suggests the possibility of the presence of the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters, another author who has not received the attention of Borges scholars.
Notes
1 Jorge Luis Borges, El otro, el mismo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1969), 10–11 (italics in the original). The prologue was dated ‘October 15, 1969’.
2 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, 1978); Julie Jones, ‘Borges and Browning: A Dramatic Dialogue’, in Borges the Poet, ed. Carlos Cortínez (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, 1986), 207–18; Vicente Cervera Salinas, La poesía de Jorge Luis Borges: historia de una eternidad (Murcia: Univ. de Murcia, 1992); Daniel Balderston, G. Gallo and N. Helft, Borges, una enciclopedia (Buenos Aires: Norma, 1999); Marlene Gottlieb, ‘The Dramatic Monologue in the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges’, Variaciones Borges, 30 (2010), 59–81; Gabriel Linares, ‘Borges, Browning y el lector: los Golems del Golem’, Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies, 3 (2006), <http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu/lusohispanic> (accessed 17 June 2007); and his Un juego de espejos que se desplazan: Jorge Luis Borges y el monólogo dramático (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 2011).
3 In the poem Borges refers to an episode recounted in Purgatorio, and the first time that the piece was published in book form (1943) he explicitly stated that those two verses of ‘Poema conjetural’ were a translation of Dante's work, providing the reference to the original lines in Italian. In other words, it is clear that in the 1969 prologue Borges did not have any intention of being thorough in his declaration of sources.
4 Perhaps the best known of these tricks was performed in his Historia universal de la infamia (1935), in which he invented one of the sources of the short story ‘El tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv’ (an operation that, famously, he tried to hide for a long time, even in the face of critical questioning); recently Carlos García also suggested that Borges falsely attributed a poem to Hélene von Stummer while everything indicates that the piece was his own (Carlos García, ‘Borges y Hélene von Stummer. Un temprano amor desconocido o la traducción que quizás no fue [II]’, El Trujamán, 25 April 2005, <http://cvc.cervantes.es/trujaman> [accessed 24 November 2011]). Beatriz Sarlo said that ‘[l]os cuentos de Borges tienen una erudición dudosa, cuyas pruebas bibliográficas siempre es difícil reconstituir (Beatriz Sarlo, ‘Una poética de la ficción’, in El oficio se afirma, ed. Sylvia Saítta, Vol. IX of Historia crítica de la literatura argentina, ed. Noé Jitrik [Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2004], 19–38 [p. 28]). Commenting on this aspect of Borges' literature, Daniel Balderston says that ‘there is no doubt that most of the references in Borges's work lead somewhere, and often in quite unexpected directions’ (Daniel Balderston, ‘Borges and the Universe of Culture’, Variaciones Borges, 14 [2002], 175–83 [p. 178]).
5 On a couple of occasions Borges said that he published the poem as a protest ‘porque cierto dictador acababa de asumir el poder’ or ‘cuando [Cnel. Juan Domingo] Perón subió al poder’, that is, he tried to turn the poem into one of the earliest (or the first) anti-Peronist expressions. However, the poem was published on 4 July 1943, when Peronism did not yet exist and Perón himself was not even a visible figure in the regime that eventually catapulted him to power. See María Esther Vázquez, Borges, esplendor y derrota (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1966), 180, and Antonio Carrizo, Borges, el memorioso (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982), 102.
6 Sarlo, ‘Una poética’, 29.
7 Daniel Balderston, Innumerables relaciones: Cómo leer con Borges (Santa Fe: Univ. del Litoral, 2009), 11.
8 A small number of manuscripts of Borges' texts are known to exist and only a small proportion of them are easily accessible: most of these documents have a very high monetary value and are in the hands of private collectors who very rarely make them available. Yet scholars who have studied some of these manuscripts have also warned us about the limitations of these documents in throwing light on Borges' process of composition. See Daniel Balderston, ‘Los manuscritos de Borges: “Imaginar una realidad más compleja” ’, Variaciones Borges, 28 (2009), 15–25; Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius/El sur, ed. Michel Lafon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France/Genève: Fondation Martin Bodmer, 2010); and Laura Rosato and Germán Álvarez, Borges, libros y lecturas (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2010).
9 Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1984), 3; and, by the same author, ‘The Art of Criticism No. 3’, interview with Henri Cole, The Paris Review, 141 (Winter 1996), <http://theparisreview.org/interviews> (accessed 25 February 2011).
10 Jorge Luis Borges, El tamaño de mi esperanza (Madrid: Alianza, 1995), 131.
11 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Clase No 20’, in Borges Profesor, ed. and notes by Martin Arias and Martin Hadis (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2000), 257–70 (p. 259).
12 Borges, ‘Clase No 20’, in Borges Profesor, ed. Arias and Hadis, 266.
13 Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges (Madrid: Destino, 2007), 1157, entry of 28 December 1966 (italics in the original).
14 Borges, ‘Clase No 20’, in Borges Profesor, ed. Arias and Hadis, 266.
15 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jerome McGann (New Haven: Yale U. P., 2003), 338.
16 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Works, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London: Ellis, 1911), 36–43.
17 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. E. Gosse and T. J. Wise (London: Heineman, 1926), 3–49 (p. 37); for Borges' reading of this essay, see Rosato and Álvarez, Borges, libros y lecturas, 326.
18 Rossetti, The Works, 619 (italics in the original; the underlining is mine).
19 Rossetti, Collected Poetry, 411.
20 Swinburne, ‘The Poems’, 36–37.
21 Jerome McGann, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Art of the Inner Standing-Point’, in Outsiders Looking In: The Rossettis Then and Now, ed. D. Clifford and L. Rousillon (London: Anthem, 2004), 171–87 (p. 175).
22 For a general assessment of Browning's dramatic monologues, see Stefan Hawlin, The Complete Critical Guide to Robert Browning (London: Routledge, 2002), 60–65.
23 Jorge Luis Borges, Borges por él mismo: un libro sonoro (Bueno Aires: AMB, 1967). Recording in CD format (emphasis mine). This recording was possibly the first time that Borges mentions in a public venue or in the mass media (including books) his literary debt to Browning; it was recorded in the month of September.
24 Fernando Sorrentino, Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: Pardo, 1972), 94 (my emphasis).
25 Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari, Diálogos (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992), 247 (my emphasis).
26 For Borges the two poets shared similarities and had significant differences as well: ‘[Rossetti es] un poeta muy diverso de Robert Browning, aunque ambos fueron contemporáneos, y aunque al principio Browning ejerció alguna influencia sobre Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (Borges, ‘Clase No 20’, in Borges Profesor, ed. Arias and Hadis, 257).
27 Rossetti, The Works, 39.
28 Rossetti, The Works, 37 (my emphasis).
29 Carrizo, Borges, el memorioso, 102. The effective use of the word ‘conjetural’ in this famous poem has created the impression in some readers that the adjective is one of Borges' trademarks. Hence, it could be argued, Borges did not need anybody's influence to use one of his favourite words and therefore the presence of the term in the two poems is only a coincidence. It could be, but that is not the most plausible explanation. To argue for pure coincidence requires the discarding of all the contextual evidence presented so far. But perhaps much more important to support the argument of Rossetti's influence is to verify that, with the exception of the title of this dramatic monologue, Borges used this adjective only once in his entire poetic production (in ‘El jardín botánico’); in the same vein, he used the verb ‘conjeturar’ only three times and the noun ‘conjetura’ barely twice, which hardly characterizes these words as typically Borgesian. There are words that do deserve to be in that category (such as ‘espejo’—that Borges used 119 times in his poems—and ‘laberinto’—47 times), but ‘conjetural’ is definitely not one of them. See Tommaso Scarano and Manuela Sassi, Concordanze per lemma dell'opera in versi di J. L. Borges, con repertorio metrico e rimario (Viareggio: Mauro Baroni, 1992).
30 Jorge Luis Borges, Poemas (1922–43) (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1943), 170 (italics in the original).
31 Rossetti, The Works, 44–54.
32 Swinburne, ‘The Poems’, 17.
33 Robert Browning, The Poems of Robert Browning (New York: Crowell, 1896), 113–16; Jan Marsh, ‘Sibling Cultures’, in Outsiders Looking In, ed. Clifford and Rousillon, 9–28 (pp. 19–20).
34 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Dante Rossetti lo han llamado, siguiendo el título de un poema de Browning, “the Italian in England’’ ’ (‘Clase No 20’, in Borges Profesor, ed. Arias and Hadis, 261).
35 Rossetti, The Works, 44 (italics in the original).
36 Rossetti, Collected Poetry, 383.
37 Rossetti, The Works, 620.
38 Borges, Poemas (1922–1943), 170–72.
39 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, 4 vols (Buenos Aires/Barcelona: Emecé, 1974–1996), I, 496 (my emphasis).
40 Rossetti, The Works, 47 (my emphasis).
41 Borges, Poemas (1922–1943), 170–72.
42 Rossetti, The Works, 44 (my emphasis).
43 Rossetti, The Works, 54 (my emphasis).
44 Interestingly, Rodríguez Monegal said that the poem ‘ends almost erotically’ (Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, 376).
45 Emilio Carilla, ‘Un poema de Borges’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 29:1 (1963), 32–45, was the first to point to Recuerdos as the main historical source for the poem. My interpretation of what and how Borges read Sarmiento differs from his.
46 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1992), 263, 264. In the same year (1943) Borges wrote a prologue to Sarmiento's book (see Borges, Obras completas, IV, 120–23).
47 Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincial, 263.
48 Borges' class on Wordsworth at the University of Buenos Aires was basically an explication of the famous prologue (see ‘Clase No 12’, in Borges Profesor, ed. Arias and Hadis, 167–78).
49 William Wordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), 292.
50 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), 97.
51 Nicolás Helft and Alan Pauls, El factor Borges (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 118.
52 Borges, Poemas (1922–1943); Poemas (1923–1953) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1954); Poemas (1923–1958) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1958); Obra poética (1923–1964) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964); Obra poética (1923–1966) (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1966); Antología personal (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1961); Aspectos de la literatura gauchesca (Montevideo: Editorial Número, 1950); and Nueve poemas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Mangrullo, 1955). A partial and somewhat inaccurate history of the publication of the poem is in Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, ed. Costa Picazo, 2 vols (Buenos Aires: Logo Emecé, 2007–2010), II, 522–23. In the 1964 prologue to Obra poética (1923–1964), Borges said ‘yo querría sobrevivir en el “Poema conjetural” ’ (12; italics in the original).
53 The prologue is dated 15 October 1969.
54 See Ana María Barrenechea, La expresión de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (México D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1957) and Carilla ‘Un poema de Borges’.
55 Here I follow Gabriel Linares' identification and reading of dramatic monologues in Borges' work (Un juego con espejos, Table 1, 261).
56 Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia, 264, 265.
57 Borges, Obras completas, IV, 123.
58 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1210. Borges was particularly fond of this line: he recited it to Bioy Casares (Bioy Casares, Borges, 911, entry for 24 June 1963) and also rewrote it in ‘Biografía de Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829–74)’ (1944); in the story he says that ‘todo hombre debe acatar el [destino] que lleva adentro’ and that at that moment Cruz ‘comprendió su íntimo destino’ (Bioy Casares, Borges, 911, entry for 24 June 1963; Obras completas, I, 563).
59 Jorge Luis Borges, Introducción a la literatura norteamericana (Buenos Aires: Columba, 1967), 21; see also Bioy Casares, Borges, 911.
60 Emerson, Essays and Poems, 788 (my emphasis).
61 All references to ‘Poema conjetural’ are taken from Jorge Luis Borges, Poemas (1922–1943), 170–72 (my emphasis).
62 Emerson, Essays and Poems, 778 (my emphasis).
63 Emerson, Essays and Poems, 770 (my emphasis).
64 All references to ‘Fate’, in Emerson, Essays and Poems, 770, 778, 784, 787, 788 (my emphasis).
65 Emerson, ‘Montaigne; or, the Skeptic’, in Essays and Poems, 690–709 (pp. 704–05; my emphasis)
66 Emerson also makes this point in his poem ‘Culture’, in Essays and Poems, 1251.
67 Borges, Introducción a la literatura norteamericana, 45–46; Jorge Luis Borges, Borges en Sur, 1931–1980, ed. Sara del Carril (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1999), 82–85.
68 Borges, Obras completas, IV, 230.
69 Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992), 99 (my emphasis).
70 This aspect of Borges' creative process has also been observed recently by Rosato and Álvarez in Borges, libros y lecturas.