Willis Barnstone - With Borges

With Borges

Jorge Luis Borges had already lost his sight in 1968 when Barnstone met him backstage at the 92nd Street the Poetry Center in New York after a poetry reading he had arranged for the Argentine poet. So began the literary friendship of his life. In 1975-76 in Buenos Aires he collaborated with Borges on a translation of his sonnets into English. In his poem “A Blind Man” blind Borges looks at an infinite mirror, false and infinite that he cannot see, but which reveals all:

I do not know what face looks back at me

When I look at the mirrored face, nor know

What aged man conspires in the glow

Of the glass, silent and with tired fury.

Slow in my shadow, with my hand I explore

My invisible features. A sparkling ray

Reaches me. Glimmers of your hair are gray

And some are even gold. I’ve lost no more

Than just the useless surfaces of things.

This consolation is of great import,

A comfort had by Milton. I resort

To letters and the rose––my wonderings.

I think if I could see my face I’d soon

Know who I am on this fare afternoon.

In the States they went together to the universities of Indiana, Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago to give talks (charlas) that appear in Borges at Eighty: Conversations (1982). In his memoir biography of Borges, Barnstone describes the genesis of a short story that would appear posthumously. One morning at dawn he went to poet’s apartment. From there to the airport to fly to the Andean city of Córdoba:

"These were days of the Dirty War with bombs exploding off all over the city. When I arrived, Borges was wide awake, tremendouly excited. He told me his dream. ‘I wasn’t wakened by my usual nightmare, but by a bomb, a few buildings away. So I remembered the dream and knew it would be a story. I was tramping through downtown London, looking for a bed-and-breakfast place. Above a chemist’s shop I found a shabbily respectable place and took a room.
The owner, a tall, ugly, intense man had me alone and said, "I have been looking for you."
His glare paralyzed me but in the hour of my dream I could see him perfectly well.
You can’t get what I don’t have,” I said defiantly.
"I’m not here to steal. I'm here to make you the happiest man in the world. I have just acquired Shakepeare’s memory.”
I took his bundle of papers, read one gloriously lucent page clearly from an unknown play, picked up the phone and wired Buenos Aires for my savings, cleaning out my miserly lifetime account. I heard the bomb and woke. By then I could not remember a word of the burning text of Shakespeare's memory. The words in gold on velum were there, in beautiful script but intelligible. I came out of my Shakespeare business quick, clean, and empty handed. Except for the story."
With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press,1993), 70.

In 1996 Barnstone published a sequence of 501 sonnets, including this poem on Adam and Eve who live the first morning of the globe:

THE GOOD BEASTS

On the first morning of the moon, in land

under the birds of Ur before the flood

dirties the memory of a couple banned

from apples and the fatal fire of blood,

Adam and Eve walk in the ghetto park,

circling a tree. They do not know the way

to make their bodies shiver I the spark

of fusion, cannot read or talk, and they

know night and noon, but not the enduring night

of nights that has no noon. Adam and Eve,

good beasts, living the morning of the globe,

are blind, like us, to apocalypse. They probe

the sun, deathray on the red tree. Its light

rages illiterate, until they leave.

Borges commented: “Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman’s Leaves, Herman Melville’s Whales, the sonnets of Barnstone’s The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, and my daily corn flakes--that rough poetry of morning.”