The Two Twilights of a Poet

THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS by Jorge Luis Borges. 256 pages. Dutton. $6.95.

Jorge Luis Borges is a quiet, delicate, blind old man who lives in Argentina. Though he has been writing for nearly 50 years, hardly anyone in the U.S. had heard of him until a decade ago. Today, especially among the literate young, he is recognized all over the world as a brilliant, exotic and curiously endearing literary figure. Borges is a poet as well as a prose master. But his most characteristic creations are unique short stories, which he calls ficciones. They can be unmistakably identified by their brevity, clear, laconic style, humor, and dependency on such devices as mazes, mirrors, odd beasts, and men who are really other men. In short, they deal in one way or another with the conundrums of art and identity, the treacherous nature of reality, and the silvered labyrinths of myth and imagination.

Like Samuel Beckett, whose name is often coupled with his own as an influential modern writer, Borges enjoys a reputation based upon a very slender body of work. Unlike the reticent, reclusive Beckett, however, Borges is personally accessible. Though he is 70, and deaf in one ear, in addition to being blind, he willingly talks about himself, his work and the world. In recent weeks, he has been drawing standing-room-only audiences on a speaking tour of U.S. campuses. The visit coincided with the publication of the first English translation of The Book of Imaginary Beings. An alphabetically arranged, cross-cultural bestiary of both famous and faintly known monsters and apparitions, Beings is a spin-off from Borges' vast scholarship. The reader is invited to consider such symbolic creatures as the Basilisk, a remote cousin of Medusa, which kills with its stare. Closer to home is the Pennsylvania Squonk, which dissolves in its own tears when captured. There is also that symbol of incongruity--or sheer perversity --the Hippogriff. It is half horse and half griffon. But that is only half of it; the griffon itself is already half eagle and half lion.

Perhaps the most pathetic imaginary being is the Lamed Wufnik of the Jews. One of 36 just men whose existence and virtue is supposed to protect the world from Jehovah's wrath, the Wufnik must justify the ways of the world before God. It is a hard but absorbing job, which lasts as long as the Wufnik does not know that he has it. Once a man discovers that he is really a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately drops dead and the title passes to somebody else.

Beneath the book's attractively arcane surface, Borges makes some fine distinctions. The dragon, for instance, he classifies as a "necessary monster" because in some recurring way "it appeals to the human imagination." The book, moreover, provides an unprcs-sured look at the tastes and concerns that Borges began to develop as a child browsing in his father's well-stocked library in Buenos Aires, and an insight into the grotesque, haunting and often touching forms man has made of his fears and infatuations.

As a student in Europe during World War I, Borges was greatly influenced by the Symbolist poets and Ultraism, a literary offshoot of Dadaism. Later, back in Argentina, he wrote poetry and essays for avant-garde journals, and edited anthologies of Argentine literature, including a book of detective stories. But it was not until the late '30s that Borges wrote Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, one of the first and perhaps best known of his short fictions.

Like the subsequent stories brought out under the title Ficciones, the short story Tloen is a form of metaphysical bemusement. In Tloen, a whole new planet is willed into being by a group of scientists, artists and philosophers. One of the instruments of the creation is an encyclopedia that they compile to cover every aspect of Tloen's existence. The entries and extrapolations are so logical and convincing that Tloenian artifacts start showing up on Earth.

In effect, Borges creates literary logarithms that raise base ideas to exhilarating heights. Funes the Memorious posits a man crippled by a memory so perfect that he must devise a system of enumeration to handle the infinite series of indiscriminate recollections that play on his mind. Funes is incapable of generalized thought because, as Borges explains, "to think is to forget differences." In The Aleph, omniscience takes the form of a small spot of light where everything going on in the world can be seen simultaneously from every angle. And in an imaginative murder mystery called The Garden of Forking Paths, time is envisioned as a complex network of planes on which spatial events may occur independently of one another--unless, of course, the planes happen to intersect accidentally.

In such stories Borges is playing with philosophy--Schopenhauer's concepts from The World as Will and Idea, Bishop Berkeley's assertion that existence is dependent upon individual perception; Hume's denial of the existence of absolute space. For Borges' admirers, the delicious point is simply that he takes reality with a grain of salt. Great events, vast trends, the pompous certainties implied by the French phrase grands mots --all these are not for Borges. History, that troubling angular presence that the middle-aged invoke to prove to the young that nothing ever really changes or can be changed, may not exist at all. In a typically brief but suggestive essay, significantly entitled The Modesty of History, Borges rejects "the influence of Cecil B. DeMille" and self-serving nationalism, asserting that the truly essential events of history have probably gone unrecorded. Everyone knows the paltry date upon which Columbus first set foot in the New World, but who knows, Borges asks, the really important and prophetic moment when Aeschylus added a second actor to his stage--opening possibilities for dialogue and dramatic interaction.

Alternating currents of metaphysics and machismo, and an elegant pared-down style, may be Borges' most obvious literary attractions. But it is a profound charm and personal modesty that make him endearing in person. His face lights up when anyone praises his work; yet he habitually conveys the deep stillness of a man with few illusions about himself or the world. He also conveys sweetness and wisdom, those refinements of perception that sometimes accompany old age. "Beside real short story writers," he says, "my stories hardly exist." Then he adds an overly modest bit of self-appraisal: "As Latin American writers go, perhaps they are not so bad."

Borges has never been a political figure, but he deplored the Nazi influence in his country during World War II. By 1946, his satiric comments on the pro-Fascist Argentine government and the accession of Juan Peron to power brought him a demotion from a state job as librarian to the post of chicken inspector in Buenos Aires. Today, at home, the aging poet's days are full of calm work and study. Lately he has received special assistance from a young American, Norman de Giovanni, who is translating all Borges' writing into English.

Like Hamlet, who claimed, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space," Borges seems completely at home with his years and his blindness. By 1955, his sight was nearly gone. "I stopped wasting time at movies," he jokes. But he actually began an intensive study of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse to enjoy the odd lore about monsters and dragons as well as recurrent poetic devices--known as kennings--"whale's path" and "swan-road" for sea. For relaxation he is read to, mostly from favorite writers whom his intellectual admirers disdain: Kipling, Conrad, Stevenson. "Time flows differently for the blind," he admits. "It flows easier. I am not bored when I am alone. Circumstances are easily forgotten. A sleepless night is made up only of time, not thinking. I know two twilights: the twilight of the dove [morning] and the raven [evening]. One is blindness, the other is old age."

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