The Maker (Dreamtigers)

The best pieces could lose nothing. “Del rigor en la ciencia” is a single paragraph in which no clause could be cut, and “Borges y yo” turns on its last sentence, “No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta página” (I do not know which of the two of us is writing this page). But the unit is the book, and the book declares its own assembly: the epilogue calls it “colecticia y desordenada”. Several pieces could leave without loss: “Las uñas”, “Un problema”, “Diálogo sobre un diálogo”, and among the poems some of the occasional elegies and the ode for 1960, which read as a public poet doing his duty. Perhaps two thirds of the contents pass the subtractive test. The axis stays well above the floor because the book’s centre, the maker unknown to himself, is in nearly every piece.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the one who makes is not the one who lives, and the made outlasts and absorbs its maker, who finds at the end that his labour has drawn his own face. “Borges y yo” says it of a writer and his public name: “Al otro, a Borges, es a quien le ocurren las cosas” (it is to the other one, Borges, that things happen). “Everything and nothing” says it of Shakespeare, in whom there was no one, and of God, who answers that He too is not. The epilogue closes it. “Poema de los dones” discloses blindness without self-pity, as an irony of gift. Held off the top because the condition disclosed is the writer’s more than the human condition at large, though the book finds it too in a blind poet, a captive and a man in mourning.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The book rises often for its length, in a cool and grave register. In “El hacedor” the blind Homer descends into memory and finds a girl, a dagger and the war that will be his poem. “Everything and nothing” goes from a man with no one in him to God’s voice from a whirlwind in five paragraphs. “Paradiso, XXXI, 108” turns on the lost face of Christ, which may lurk in every mirror. “Poema de los dones” rises on a declaration of the mastery of God, who with magnificent irony gave the poet at once the books and the night, and “Arte poética” rises again on the river made of time and water. Held below the top because the elevation is brief by nature, and a third of the book does not attempt it.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is built, in miniature. The book’s figures are the archetypes of making: Homer, whose blindness is the condition of the poem; Shakespeare as everyone and no one; Cervantes and Quixote, the dreamer and the dream ending in one oblivion; Dante’s leopard, told by God that its captivity will furnish a word in a poem; the poet whose poem contains the palace whole, and who is beheaded for it. The tiger of “Dreamtigers” and “El otro tigre” is made a figure for what language cannot reach. “La trama” builds the pattern of Caesar’s death into a gaucho’s, so that history is seen to repeat a form, and “Ragnarök” and “El simulacro” make myth of Argentine matter. The structures are load-bearing, but each holds a page: held for scale, not depth.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is plain and named: the silva de varia lección of Pero Mexía, the commonplace book, the parable as Kafka had made it, the Modernista lyric of Lugones, to whom the book is offered, and Borges’s own Ficciones and El Aleph, whose devices, the false citation, the mirror and the double, are here at their briefest. The turn is in two moves. A writer famous for impersonal fictions put his own name, blindness and family into the book, and made confession through the mask of the parable; “Borges y yo” is the hinge. And he returned to verse in fixed forms at the height of his fame in prose, which set the course of his later work. The stake was real but bounded: a gathering of brief pieces risked being taken for a sweeping of the workshop. The book departs from his own manner more than from the tradition.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Where the form is the knowledge, it is entirely so. “Del rigor en la ciencia” must be a paragraph presented as a citation, because its subject is the map that grows to the size of what it maps; at length it would refute itself. “Borges y yo” must be under a page, because it is a page that does not know who writes it. The epilogue turns the miscellany into the drawing that becomes a face, and offers the book’s disorder as a self-portrait: a real formal idea, and it lifts the unit. Held down because the idea is announced at the end rather than built through the order, and much of the verse would mean what it means in any other collection: “Ajedrez” and “El reloj de arena” lose nothing read alone.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is concentrated. “Del rigor en la ciencia” has been read by semioticians and philosophers of representation: Baudrillard opens Simulacres et simulation (1981) with it, and Eco answered it with an essay on the impossible map at one to one. “Borges y yo” is the standard text on the author divided from his name, read in theory after Barthes and Foucault on the author. “Everything and nothing” keeps returning in Shakespeare criticism and in theology, and the parables of Dante leave open whether the poem redeems the creature it uses. Held where it is because the depth lies in a handful of pages: the book as a book is less returned to than its pieces.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is literature in Spanish in the mid twentieth century and, through translation, the literature of the West. The intrinsic force is real: the book made the very short prose piece, the parable, the false citation and the prose poem a single instrument capable of philosophical weight, and joined it to a classical lyric in one volume. That is an enlargement, not the reorganisation Ficciones had made some fifteen years before, and much of its force is the earlier book’s applied small. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the map fable entered philosophy, cartography and the theory of simulation; “Borges y yo” became the model for a whole family of texts on the divided self; and the Spanish American minificción, Monterroso and those after him, names Borges’s brief pieces among its sources.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over sixty-six years. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as Borges left it, and has been in print in Spanish throughout. Presence is real and continuous: the book is taught wherever Borges is, translated with his complete works, and two of its pieces are among the most anthologised short texts of the century, read as from El hacedor, by that name. The charge is that presence belongs more to the pieces than to the book. In English the unit is split, the prose carried in Hurley’s Collected Fictions and the poems in the Selected Poems, and few readers meet the book as a book. That is not the charge of a neglected text, and it is taken at a step.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The prose is his most compressed: adjectival, Latinate in its syntax, exact in its numbers and names, with the false erudition carried at the level of the clause, down to the capitals of a seventeenth century book, “Desmesurados Mapas”. The verse returns to fixed forms with command: the hendecasyllables and rhymed quatrains of “Poema de los dones”, whose refrain of ironies turns without strain; the two sonnets of “Ajedrez”; the unrhymed hendecasyllables of “Arte poética” and “Límites”. In the brief prose a single adjective or date carries the turn. Charged for a sameness of device across the prose, the mirror, the labyrinth, the inversion in the last line, and for occasional poems in which the craft is correct and idle. The sound of the verse beyond what is known with certainty is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: “Del rigor en la ciencia”, a mock citation about an empire’s cartographers, and “Alusión a la muerte del coronel Francisco Borges”, for the poet’s grandfather riding to his death in 1874. One law governs both: what is made outlasts its makers and becomes the form in which they are remembered, or replaces them. The map survives in tatters in the deserts of the West; the colonel survives as verse. The same law holds Homer and the blind librarian, Shakespeare and God, Caesar and the gaucho, across parable, false document, metaphysical sonnet, family elegy and political fable. Charged for the few pieces outside the law, “Las uñas” among them, and because a miscellany coheres by temperament as much as by design.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what a short book of brief pieces holds, not charged for being short. Consciousness, fully: the self divided from its name, the blind man’s memory. Literature and its making, the book’s ground. The sacred: God’s answer to Shakespeare, Christ’s lost face, the “Argumentum ornithologicum”, the thief of “Lucas XXIII”. History: Rosas and Quiroga in the “Diálogo de muertos”, the grandfathers’ wars, Perón and Eva in “El simulacro”, the Saxon pagans of “El testigo”, Rome in “La trama”. The family, in “Los Borges” and the elegies; the body, in blindness and the nails. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is missing or thin, labour, the city as lived, the state except as myth, and love, and that each order is held for a page, joined by idea rather than by structure.

Score: 7.3 / 10