The best part about picking Latin American poetry as a study topic is I get to read books like Jorge Luis Borges’ Fervor de Buenos Aires and legitimately refer to the activity as “working”…it’s “working” the way the guy who tests the ferris wheel at the carnival is “working”. Borges is one of my favourite poets period. He’s one of the few male Spanish language poets who doesn’t write with his penis, always, always a good thing. He writes observational poetry rooted in very complex philosophical ideas and yet uses very accessible language to demonstrate them. This, in particular, is what distinguishes his poetry from his prose, the restrictions which poetry imposes upon language distills the main idea and forces it to the surface.
Fervor de Buenos Aires is one of his major works of poetry and contains, in seed form, the ideas and obsessions which would continue to develop in subsequent poetic works, essays and works of fiction: time and temporality, death, legacy and antique objects, mirrors, labyrinths and Schopenhauer’s philosophies on the world as a mass hallucination. Volumes have been written on each of these obsessions, so I would like to focus on one aspect of this work and on Borges in particular: his relationship to Buenos Aires.
At the graduate seminar yesterday the conversation mostly revolved around the debate between the universal and the local. One student made the comment that Borges’ writing is good writing because it isn’t local at all, in other words, like the Middle Eastern writer who doesn’t write about camels, he’s not an Argentine writer writing about tangos and cooked meat. I object to this suggestion that Borges is exclusively universal, based particularly on the role Buenos Aires plays in this book.
(from) Las calles
Las calles de Buenos Aires
ya son mi entraña
No las ávidas calles,
incómodas de turba y de ajetreo
sino las calles desganadas del barrio
casi invisibles de habituales
enternecidas de penumbra y de ocaso
y aquellas más afuera
ajenas de árboles piadosos
donde austeras casitas apenas se aventuran,
abrumadas por inmortales distancias,
a perderse en la honda visión
de cielo y de llanura.
Son para el solitario una promesa
porque millares de almas singulares las pueblan,
This first poem lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by introducing the city as a mediator between the world of matter and the world of thought. Cities are, generally speaking, multilayered spaces in which humans, objects, and periods of time interact with one another. For Borges, Buenos Aires plays the role of a certain type of labyrinth or series of relics, a collection of material objects and spaces which guide the poet towards contemplation both of himself and those sublime facts which transcend and obliterate him. While the ideas that emerge from these pre-dawn or twilight meditations of streets, alleyways, houses, artifacts and graveyards touch on the universal, they are also solidly anchored in the materiality of Borges’ “suburbio”.
El arrabal es el reflejo de nuestro tedio
Mis pasos claudicaron
cuando iban a pisar el horizonte
y quedé entre las casas
cuadriculadas en manzanas
diferentes e iguales
como si fueran todas ellas
monótonos recuerdos repetidos
de una sola manzana.
“Arrabal”
The poet’s contemplations are initiated by his examination of the material world in which he lives, and this world is not a universal ”anycity” ‘nor is it the emblematic Buenos Aires of tourist brochures. It is a tangible and intimate aspect of the poet’s reality, one which is completely overlooked if one has never been there. Buenos Aires is a city with wide avenues which make the skies very visible, it is also a city of relics, of objects which imply other decades or centuries and which often do outlive their owners (one of Borges’ particular fascinations) These poems could simply not be written in any other city. In an older city such as Rome or Tyre they would be trite, in a newer city such as Vancouver or San Francisco the objects would be far too new to invoke any type ofreflection. Buenos Aires, the city of mixed temporalities, or what Angel Rama calls “multitemporal heterogeniety” is in itself the perfect space to contemplate the nature of time itself.
Cuarenta naipes han desplazado la vida.
Pintados amuletos de cartón
nos hacen olvidar nuestros destinos
y una creación risueña
va poblando el tiempo robado
con las floridas travesuras
de una mitología casera.
“El Truco”
In Rome or Tyre, the artifacts speak of great civilizations and the teluric movements of history. In Buenos Aires the artifacts are domestic, speaking of a ”mitología casera”. The type of objects which immigrants would carry over in ships from Europe, or rich families might have shipped to adorn their houses: clocks, trunks, clothing, mirrors, statues. Borges contemplates time precisely through the domestic elements, the small implements of living that nevertheless, almost treacherously, outlive those who own and use them, zealously guarding some secret of eternity. The poem “El Truco” refers to a card-game that men in Buenos Aires (and the rest of Argentina) play to socialize and pass the time, something passed down from generation to generation. The use of domestic elements have the double effect of making the poems both more universal and more Argentine at the same time. These objects are so under-the radar and yet so intimate that a Bonaerean reader (or at least one who has been there) could identify them and with them immediately, whereas an emblematized artifact would be alienated from the locals and disengaged with its surroundings (how many actually visit the tourist attractions in their own city?)
