Borges and Kafka: Sons and Writers
2018; Penn State University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.55.2.0434
ISSN1528-4212
Autores ResumoThe grounds for comparison of this superb study on Borges and Kafka are incontrovertible. As Sarah Roger's usefully annotated bibliography makes clear, Jorge Luis Borges wrote sixty-five pieces that mention or discuss Kafka, beginning in 1935 and ending in 1995 (131–48). Her first appendix lists all of the stories by Kafka that Borges “mentioned by name, reviewed or translated” (149). In her multiply sectioned bibliography, there are two sections of Borges's translations of Kafka: the first lists eleven translations of Kafka attributed to Borges alone; the second lists seven translations of Kafka attributed to Borges in collaboration with others, usually Adolfo Bioy Casares. She has also done her homework in the secondary literature concerning criticism that focuses specifically on Borges and Kafka. Here she lists thirty-four essays (two of which are hers), seven dissertations, and three books. A more general section on secondary sources lists interpretations of Kafka, general studies of Borges, biographical studies, and books and essays on the question of influence in literature. She includes a section on Kafka that takes in his works published in German, as well as translations into English. She cites from editions of Kafka's works that Borges “would most likely have read” (xiii).Roger begins by stating that she has followed the model set by Humberto Núñez-Faraco's Borges and Dante: Echoes of a Literary Friendship (2006) and by Patricia Novillo-Corvalán's Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation (2011). A more influential model, surely, is a work she does not mention: Riccardo Ricceri's Dante e il dantismo immanente nell' opera di Jorge Luis Borges.1 In the subjects and sequence of the individual chapters, as well as in the subjects and sequence of the various bibliographies, Ricceri's and Roger's books are remarkably similar.In his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin famously asserts that it is the translation, not the original text, which secures the afterlife of the original. I would amend that to say that it is primarily the uses to which the original text is put by later authors that secures the afterlife of that text or author. By using Kafka to the extent he does, Borges secures Kafka's afterlife in Latin America, though that was probably not his original intention. Borges had a similar relationship with the work of Joyce and Dante. He also translated, for example, Whitman, G. K. Chesterton, and Snorri Sturluson, in addition to German expressionist poets, as Efraín Kristal documents in his 2002 book, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Answering a request for biographical information to publicize a lecture in 1953, Borges introduced himself as, first, “the translator of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Henri Michaud” (Kristal xi). The story goes that Borges practiced the art of translation from the age of nine when he translated Oscar Wilde's short story, “The Happy Prince,” subsequently published in the Argentinian newspaper El País in 1910. In my mind, however, Borges is, more than anything else, what I call a “referential author”: he writes by referencing other authors, texts, and ideas.Borges's relationship with his mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, does not receive Roger's sustained attention. She is mentioned by name a total of six times in the book, discussed in two pages and then largely “put to one side” (16). In Buenos Aires, it was generally assumed that Borges's mother was the most important person in his life, all the more so after the death of his father and after Borges fils went blind, for it was she who read to him, took his dictation, worked with him on translations, and accompanied him to conferences and other public events. I myself remember being told by a colleague, before interviewing Borges in the spring of 1976 for Philosophy and Literature,2 that, since his mother had died the previous year at age ninety-nine, he was “depressed” and that I should treat him gently.The subtitle of Borges and Kafka, “sons and writers,” points to the father–son relationship explored in this study. Borges (fils, in Roger's terminology) is the son of Jorge Guillermo Borges, père (1874–1938). Kafka is viewed in some senses as a literary father to Borges fils. Kafka's relationship to his own father was famously dissected in Kafka's long screed, published posthumously, “Brief an den Vater.” Borges père is considered to be, in Vlady Kociancich's essay published in Clarín, Cultura y Nación (August 22, 1999), “El hacedor secreto de un gran poeta.” The hacedor secreto shaped the son as a writer through his magnificent private library of mostly English-language books and the example of his own writing: a novel entitled El caudillo, which Borges fils “improved,” a rendering in Spanish of the “Song of Songs,” a “translation” of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and a number of sonnets. Father and son are physically and symbolically linked through blindness. The father, who half-heartedly worked as a lawyer and occasional teacher of psychology, suffered from an inherited progressive blindness that moved him to retire in 1914. During his father's final illness, Borges was working on a translation of Kafka for the editorial house Losada (see Edwin Williamson, Borges: A Life),3 and ten months after the father died in February of 1938, the son had an accident that resulted in the septicemia that almost killed him. Some have thought that the infection contributed to his blindness, but Williamson disputes that in his biography (238). This inherited blindness eventually and famously linked him to Homer and Milton. Before meeting Borges, however, I had always wondered about the true extent of his blindness. So, in 1976, during one of our conversations, when Borges told me that he could see more than people thought, I stood in front of him at a distance of about two feet and asked him to describe my face. He was able to do so.Asked about “La lotería en Babilonia” and “La biblioteca de Babel” (both written in 1941), Borges said, “I was aping Kafka. But Kafka was a genius, and I am only a man of letters. I couldn't go on being Kafka” (quoted by Roger, 11). Borges often adopted this attitude of literary humility when asked about other writers or great figures in the history of thought. Later in his career, in the 1970s, Borges would speak of a more nuanced relationship to Kafka. In discussing his longest short story, “El congreso,” published in 1971 but almost thirty years in the making, Roger explains (112–17) that Borges both acknowledged Kafka's influence and downplayed it by identifying Whitman as an influence and by emphasizing his debt to Chesterton, both rather different writers from Kafka.Major themes and fictional strategies in Kafka important for Borges are Kafka's obsessions with paradoxes, the notion of infinity, and what Roger calls “subordination” or the “patria potestad” theme (submission to the authority of the father, God, the nation, and the idea of patriarchy itself). In distinguishing her work from new criticism, structuralism, intertextuality, and anxiety of influence studies (4–10), Roger states she has followed primarily the “biographical approach” (3). Thus, Borges's essay, “Kafka y sus precursores” functions as a kind of model for her: it is a complexly refracting prism through which we are moved to think both about how Borges chose Kafka to be one of his precursors and also about the influence that his precursors had on him. The thematic influence from Kafka—whatever is nightmarish, paradoxical, bizarre, or mystifying—is called the “Kafkaesque.” When the influence is stylistic, referring to “something as being written in the manner of Kafka,” Roger prefers the term “Kafkian,” as does Borges himself (11). While both the Kafkaesque and the Kafkian fascinated Borges, it was the Kafkian that was ultimately the more important for him.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, five substantive chapters explore a variety of issues. Chapter 2 (12–33) focuses on the relationship between Borges père and Borges fils. Chapter 3 (34–66) is a historical–biographical recuperation of when and how Borges fils read, translated, and wrote about Kafka. Chapter 4 (67–78) focuses on the two texts most “influenced” by Kafka: “La lotería en Babilonia” and “La biblioteca de Babel.” Chapter 5 (79–111) explores “Kafkian fictions,” that is, Kafka's fictional strategies, in several other short stories. Chapter 6 (112–26) moves toward larger reflections on “The Congress of the World”: on Kafka in general, on the father–son relationship again, and on Borges's answer to the Kafkian influence (that would be, Roger says, Chesterton, 121–26). It is no exaggeration to say that Roger's book is, and should remain, the indispensable work on the Borges–Kafka–Borges relationship.
Referência(s)