Irish genius in Western culture derives not from Celtic racial purity but from a paradoxical condition: to deal splendidly with a tradition to which they owe no special allegiance. Joyce embodies this literary revolution by transforming Leopold Bloom's ordinary day into an endless odyssey.

1.

Ladies and gentlemen, the American sociologist of Swedish descent Thorstein Veblen wrote a paper on the preponderance of Jews in Western culture. Now, this preponderance, or primacy, can be demonstrated statistically and Thorstein Veblen wanted to investigate its causes. He rejected, above all, ethnicity: he did not believe, he denied that there was any superiority or peculiarity in the Jewish race.

He also pointed out that Jews are very mixed, that perhaps one cannot speak of pure Jews, and concluded that the reason for this phenomenon was the fact that Jews, in Western culture, are dealing with a culture that is not their own. In other words, one to which they owe no loyalty and within which they can act without superstition and often in a revolutionary way.

Now let us move on to a similar problem, which is what interests us today: the case of Ireland, the case of the Irish in British culture and in Western culture. Well, in the 19th century, the difference between the Saxon race and the Celtic race was insisted upon: there is a novel by Meredith called Celt and Saxon, but later, delving deeper into the subject, it was seen that it is not a racial difference.

In the 19th century, it was thought that all English people were of Saxon descent, that being Irish meant having Celtic blood. It is now thought that the English and Irish are racially heterogeneous, and that is only natural. Let us consider that there was a Celtic population in England, which was then invaded by the Romans, who were then invaded by the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes – the latter coming from Denmark – and then we have the Danish invasions, and then the Norman invasion, by Scandinavians who were conquered by French culture…

We can already see that English culture is quite heterogeneous. As for Ireland, we only need to look at some of the great Irish names to see that many come from English stock. Thus, the theory of the Celtic race would not be sufficient to explain these things.

Now, what is curious is that Ireland has given the world a series of famous names, and this has nothing to do with the fact that Ireland is a small, poor and sparsely populated country. However, we already have the famous mystic John Scotus in the 9th century, and then – well, I do not intend to exhaust the catalogue of illustrious Irish names, I will just mention those that have accumulated, those that come to mind – let us think of Oscar Wilde, let us think of William Butler Yeats, the man whom T. S. Eliot said was perhaps the greatest English-language poet of our time, let us think of George Moore, let us think of Bernard Shaw, of Sheridan… in another field, of the Duke of Wellington. In other words, there are plenty of illustrious names. And then let us also think of James Joyce.

I think that the theory, the Thorstein Veblen conjecture, could be applied to the Irish, regardless of any racial character. So we could say that the Irish live within English culture. They deal – sometimes splendidly – ​​with the English language. And yet they know that they are not English, that is, they do not owe any special allegiance to English tradition – or traditions. So they can look at what they do from a revolutionary point of view.

And, if you'll allow me to make a digression, this is, or could be, or has been, in some cases, our attitude as Americans. We participate in Western culture, we deal with a Western language – Spanish – and yet we know that we are not Europeans, we are not Spanish, and in any case, our history begins with the decision not to be Spanish, and perhaps that is why the greatest revolution in Spanish-language literature first emerged in America and then reached Spain. I am thinking, of course, of Modernism, of Rubén Darío, Jaime Freyre and, not least, in Leopoldo Lugones.

2.

Well, let us now return to the case of James Joyce, which is what interests us today. I do not know exactly what Joyce’s ancestry is, but I know that his father was a tax collector, that the family was Catholic – that is why James Joyce was educated by the Jesuits. As for his Celtic ancestry, I know that Joyce, unlike his fellow generation, was not particularly interested in it at first. When the Irish were studying their ancient Celtic language, James Joyce remembered that Dublin [Borges pronounces it in English] had been a port of Vikings, of Danish Vikings, that there had already been Scandinavian dynasties.

That is, at the root of Ireland was not only Celtic but Scandinavian, and James Joyce studied Norwegian, and wrote a long letter to that great playwright to whom another Irishman, Bernard Shaw, was drawing the attention of England, Henrik Ibsen. And in James Joyce's last book, the enigmatic and dizzying Finnegans Wake, there are, we are told, many Scandinavian words, many tomes made with Scandinavian words.

Therefore – since it is convenient to fix James Joyce in time – it is worth remembering these few dates: James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He published the work that would make him famous and scandalous in the world, Odysseus, around, I think, 1922, and dies in 1941. Now, James Joyce's life is spent far from Ireland. He himself says in the Portrait of the artist as a young man, an evidently autobiographical novel, which proposes to leave Ireland and work with three weapons, these three weapons being silence, exile and cunning: silence, exile and cunning, are the words used by James Joyce on the last page of Portrait of the artist as a young man.

James Joyce's work is a work that, beyond our likes and dislikes, is very important for our time. I once participated in the so-called ultraist movement, and I believed in the possible renewal of literature, and if I had to point out a work that represents, that magnificently represents everything that they called and continue to call modern, that work would undoubtedly be James Joyce's.

In other words, there were, there are hundreds, thousands of young men in the world who are rehearsing a work that corresponds to what Guillaume Apollinaire called “the adventure”, opposing order. Well, the symbol of this adventure, of our adventure, is clearly the work of James Joyce. I mean that if all that is called modern literature were to be lost, and two books had to be saved, and these two books had to be chosen, let’s say from all over the world, they would be, first of all, Odysseus, and then, Finnegans Wake of Joyce. I mean that there is a kind of adventure, an adventure that young people undertake all over the world; the best mirror of that adventure is the work of James Joyce.

Well, James Joyce, from the very beginning, knows himself to be Irish, feels deeply Irish – this is a passion for him – and perhaps more than Irish, Dubliner, a Dublin man. Now, when Joyce becomes famous, he returns to Ireland for a few days and then returns to Paris, and then returns to Zurich, where he dies, destroyed by long and obstinate work, already blind, in 1941.

Martínez Estrada said that William Henry Hudson was able to leave the Argentine Republic when he was young, and he never returned because he took it with him. He didn't need to go back: his memory was as vivid as, let's say, the sensitive intuition of things. And we could say the same about James Joyce. Joyce took Ireland, his Ireland, with him. Besides, he once said that exile is a weapon. That is to say, perhaps in order to write these two books that are so profoundly Irish, Odysseus e Finnegans Wake, nostalgia was needed, stimulus and encouragement were needed, and Joyce knew this, for he wrote something like “Silence, exile and cunning".

3.

Well, James Joyce starts by writing a book of short stories, Dubliners. Then there is a play called, significantly, Exiles; all these works are read now because they reflect, because the glory of Odysseus falls upon them, otherwise they would be – deservedly, it seems to me – forgotten. And then we have the novel, A portrait of the artist as a young man, James Joyce's most accessible book. And then we have this book of short stories, Dubliners.

It seems that James Joyce decided to add a short story to the series, but he had already been interested in the evolution of European literature. In other words, Joyce studied in depth the two great French movements of the time: naturalism, whose greatest or most famous name is that of Émile Zola, and symbolism. Symbolism produced a great poet in Ireland, as we know, the poet Yeats. These are two opposing schools; in France, the symbolists were enemies of the naturalists, but James Joyce was interested in both. And we will address them now, since this is necessary for understanding Joyce's work.

Let us first look at naturalism. Naturalists proposed to offer their readers the pieces of life, slices of life. There is also an expression that was common at that time, and that expression is “transcription of reality”. That is, the naturalists, although some of them – especially Émile Zola – had a powerful imagination, or a visionary imagination, said they only wanted to transcribe reality. And let us analyze this expression. Surely, one only transcribes what is oral, one only transcribes what is written, or what is called a transcription.

On the other hand, much of reality is not oral, so that even in this seemingly modest program of transcribing reality, there is something that is impossible. That is to say, it is possible to transcribe what a person says, or a writer can deal with a style that is confused, or seems to be confused, with oral style. But most of reality is not oral.

There is a part of reality that is oral, another is olfactory, another is tactile, another is gustatory, and then we also have memory, memory made of images, and we have passions. None of this can be transcribed directly. It would be possible to transcribe reality if it were simply verbal, but it is many other things: it is memory and passion and nostalgia and desire. So many things that are not words.

Now, James Joyce is also interested in symbolism. Symbolism wants to be the opposite of naturalism; symbolism believes that nothing can be expressed, that the writer must proceed by suggestion. And in this sense, symbolism is closer to the eternal tradition, the eternal traditions of literature, than naturalism.

Let's see what words are; words are symbols, but for these symbols to work they need to be shared symbols. For example, if I talk about Constitution Square, it awakens an image in all of us, because we know it, but if I talk to you about the street Congress in Austin, for example, this may not paint any accurate picture.

Now, the Symbolists wanted to proceed by suggestion, and metaphor is, to a large extent, a suggestion. And perhaps the happiest metaphors or images are not those that declare things, but those that suggest them. I remember, for example, at this moment, an image by Mallarmé, and it is curious that Mallarmé is a Symbolist, and yet I will cite an image by Mallarmé that is the opposite of the Symbolist, that marks things too much, it seems to me. Mallarmé speaks of a couple of lovers, so he calls them white couple swimmer, the white swimming couple. Of course this is vivid, but at the same time it is too vivid.

Here, Mallarmé was not much of a symbolist. On the other hand, I remember a fourteenth-century poet, Chaucer, and Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida it says "O lovers ye that bathe in gladnesse”, “Oh, lovers who bathe in joy”. Here the word “bathe” suggests nudity. The word “bathe” also suggests what Mallarmé says explicitly. That is, in this verse, that distant poet from the 14th century was a better symbolist, he acted according to the rules of symbolism certainly more than Mallarmé, whose image is so explicit that it is strange that we immediately notice the differences between, well, between swimming and embracing, let's say.

4.

Well, James Joyce was interested in both methods. You could almost say that Joyce was interested in everything that was literary. Joyce was not an important thinker. Joyce – James Joyce’s life – was an ordinary life. He had, let’s say, the political passion that was in his time. He was consciously, and sometimes aggressively, Irish. He deliberately sought models in France rather than in England. James Joyce’s ideas are ordinary ideas. What sets him apart from all other men is his literary passion, the fact that he gave his life to literature.

James Joyce had written Dubliners and then he thought of adding a short story to the series. The plot of this short story was quite simple, or it seemed simple, or it seemed simple at first sight. Joyce thought of a very common character, Leopold Bloom, a Jew who was quite lost in Dublin, and of one of these men's days. Now, what interested James Joyce was that this man knows that his wife is cheating on him, he knows that his wife is going to cheat on him that day, and he has to fulfill his obligations – he is a businessman – and so he goes around the city of Dublin, talks to various people, sometimes he forgets about this worry, but really this idea, that his wife is going to cheat on him – he knows the time and the place – is haunting him, and it casts a kind of shadow over him, and then he goes back home, he knows what has happened, and he goes to sleep.

And now Joyce thought of dedicating a short story to this day, this day of failure, of loneliness, this day of a man who is living a tragic destiny but who does not want to admit it to himself, who wants to live this day indifferently. So James Joyce said to himself, I will write a short story in which Leopold Bloom's day is present, from the moment he wakes up until the moment in the middle of the night when he falls asleep.

And then James Joyce began to look back on that day, and it occurred to him what happened to that ancient Greek Zeno of Elea, who wondered about the problem of something in motion that has to go from here to this other end of the table. So Zeno of Elea said to himself, well, first it has to pass through this intermediate point, but before it passes through this intermediate point it has to pass through this one, before this one, before this one, and so on to infinity. So Zeno of Elea saw in an extension, any extension, the infinite. The same thing happened to James Joyce.

We can think of James Joyce looking back at Leopold Bloom’s day and seeing that this day, to be faithfully recorded, contained thousands of things. Let us think of the number of visual perceptions that accompany us from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep: there are certainly thousands. Let us think of tactile perceptions, of gustatory perceptions. Let us simply think of what it means to cross a street, or enter a house, or meet a person and recognize them. Let us think of the context of memories that our actions bring.

For example, when I came to La Plata today, I thought about the many times I had come. I thought, momentarily by chance and without intention, about friends of mine who had died. I thought about López Merino, and I remembered verses from Almafuerte. Well, everything that fits into a day. And then James Joyce realized that if he wanted to fulfill this apparently modest program of writing a human day, he would have to write an almost infinite book. And Joyce dedicated many years, in Paris and in Trieste, and in the city of Zurich, in Switzerland, where he would die, to writing this book.

Now, among the traditional characters, there was one that always attracted James Joyce, and that was Ulysses. Joyce compared him with other characters who live in the memory, in the imagination of men—with Faust, Don Juan, Hercules—all of whom seemed to him much less significant than Ulysses, and he thought that in this story of a modest Irish-Jewish merchant the adventure of Ulysses might be somehow encoded.

I believe William Blake said that everything happens in the sixty beats of a minute. Blake, in his metaphorical language, speaks of the silver and gold fortresses that exist in every human minute, and James Joyce thought something similar. He thought that the whole enterprise of Ulysses, his nostalgia, his desire to return to Ithaca, that all of this could be in the single day of Leopold Bloom. Leopold Bloom also wants to return to his Ithaca, to his home, and he fears finding a Penelope who has not been faithful to him.

5.

Now, as James Joyce had studied all the literary techniques, and was not satisfied with any of them, he proposed to experiment with them and exhaust them in Odysseus, and took as a scheme the Odyssey. That is, each chapter of the Odysseus of Joyce corresponds to each of the Cantos, to each of the rhapsodies of Odyssey. Furthermore, Joyce sought other analogies: for example, each chapter is dedicated to an organ of the human body; in each chapter, one color predominates; each chapter follows a different literary technique.

Now, there are those who have seen merit in this technique, one of the virtues of Odysseus. I don't think there is any greater merit, I think Joyce did it simply to encourage himself to continue writing. And I think that is, in general, the function of all arguments and all schemes. What matters is the work. Now, the scheme, the argument, has the virtue of persuading the author that he already has something.

In other words, James Joyce, to undertake the gigantic task of writing Odysseus, had to think that all of it was prefigured in the Odyssey. Or rather, I had to think that he, that his work, was suited to the reality of Dublin at the beginning of the century, to all the adventures that Ulysses experiences in the Mediterranean, to all those fantastic adventures, with sorcerers, cyclopes, warriors, gods. I think that this helped, or supposedly helped, James Joyce.

Now, if you are interested in all this kind of scaffolding of Odysseus, all this is in a book, unofficial, let's say, published by Stuart Gilbert, who was James Joyce's secretary.

There we have the Odysseus of Joyce analyzed chapter by chapter, there we have the Homeric correspondences, there we see that in this chapter the color red predominates, that in this chapter almost all the metaphors are taken from circulation, that in another chapter air predominates, that in this chapter almost all the metaphors are taken from breathing, that in another chapter the digestive predominates, in another the generative, and there is also a figure, a rhetorical figure that predominates in each chapter.

And at the end of the work, we have a chapter written in the form of a catechism. There the naturalist method is taken to the extreme. There, for example, we are told exactly the angle from which the characters look, there they tell us the names of the books in the library, it is a chapter full of precise data. And then, in the last chapter, the one that has had the greatest influence on all literature, and it is the long interior monologue of Bloom's wife, what Bloom's wife thinks about before going to sleep. Now, in Odyssey, we have the theme of Ulysses and Telemachus, and in the Odysseus From James Joyce we have a character, Stephen Dedalus, who is Joyce himself, who searches for his father and finally finds him in Bloom. Dedalus is the Telemachus of this Odyssey.

Now, what can we say about the Odysseus? It is, of course, one of the strangest works of our time, but – as Sampson points out in his History of English Literature – has the major defect of being illegible. It cannot be read from beginning to end. On the other hand, it abounds in happy phrases, because Joyce's talent was, and was, it seems to me, above all, verbal. We will see this in some of the poems we will hear in a moment. Now, he writes this book, this book that intends to follow reality.

Now, I don't think I follow it exactly, because I don't think words can follow reality. And James Joyce must have felt that, well, he hadn't accomplished his goal, because shortly after that he started writing the other book, a book that is what Odysseus is for all other books, Finnegans Wake. I mean that Odysseus is more complex than any other literary work, and yet, Odysseus it is clear if we compare it with Finnegans Wake. Odysseus lasts a day, which means it corresponds to waking thought, and Finnegans Wake lasts one night, which means that it corresponds to thought, symbolic thought, the dreams of the night.

Now, Jung speaks of the collective subconscious. This means that in each of us there would be a small area, a surface that corresponds to consciousness, and then a kind of sphere or cone of shadow that corresponds to the subconscious, and this would be represented in dreams. There is also another difference: there are psychologists who say that we live successively, that is, in our entire conscious life there is a before, a during, and an after.

Psychologists have been asking what the present is? The English philosopher Bradley says that the present is the moment when the future becomes the past. That is, we would not live according to the flow of time, but we would be moving against the flow of time. We would be heading towards the source of time, which would be in the future. This is what Unamuno said in “Nocturno the river of hours flows / from its source, which is the future[I] / eternal”. Well, the same as Bradley says. Time comes from the future towards us, and we would advance forward into the future.

Well, according to some psychologists – I remember Dunne's book, An Experiment with Time (An experiment with time) –, we do not dream successively. According to Dunne, when we dream, we would encompass a zone of time, made up of the immediate past and the immediate future. In other words, tonight we will dream about today and tomorrow. And we will dominate all of this – it would be a small personal eternity – from a height, but, as we are used to living successively, when we wake up we remember successively what we dreamed, even though the dream may have been simultaneous.

For example, when we read, our eyes are accustomed to moving from left to right across the page. One of the difficulties of learning Semitic languages ​​is that we have to retrace this path. Now, according to some psychologists, we dream simultaneously, even if later, when we construct the dream and remember it, we attribute a successive character to it.

6.

James Joyce set out to write a book whose protagonist would be a Dublin tavern keeper, but this tavern keeper would be introduced in his dreams, not in his waking life. Thus James Joyce's book, Finnegans Wake, it would be a simultaneous book. Now, of course, we cannot read it simultaneously; we are condemned to read it successively. We read, first, page one, then two, then three, except that we never get to page three, because we stop at the first page, usually, given the difficulty of the text.

James Joyce said that this book should be read and that it could be seen simultaneously – I don’t know if human attention is capable of all this. Now, James Joyce, given that he moved in the world of dreams, in a world of infinite suggestions, in a world that – according to him – also includes the unconscious. Joyce could not be content with ordinary language, so he decided to write an entire book made up of neologisms, and now let us see what the mechanism of these neologisms is.

I will begin with an example in Spanish that will clarify these things. This example belongs to Marcelo Del Mazo, author of that tango triptych. Marcelo Del Mazo, a friend of Evaristo Carriego. In Buenos Aires there were orchestras of gypsies, that is, gypsies, and someone mentioned a café where an orchestra of gypsies played and asked if they really were gypsies. Then Marcelo Del Mazo said: “Well, not gypsies, gringarians”, let's say. In other words, foreigners who act like zigzags.

And now, well, let's look at this word in which two words come together, gringos and zingaros, gringarians. Now let us look at an example from Laforgue, a symbolist poet. Laforgue speaks of violance. In violance we have the idea of voluptuousness, voluptuousness, and rape, rape. It is given in one word. And there is another example, it is given in a denial of eternity, a joke made about eternity by Jules Laforgue, he does not speak of eternity over eternity, eternity, isn't it? Both things are denied.

James Joyce conceived the purpose, and unfortunately carried it out, of writing a three-hundred-page book in which all the nouns, and all the adjectives, and all the verbs become thus two-word centaurs. For example, in English we have the word noise - noise –, the word Voice – voice –, then he says voiced to unite the idea of ​​noise and voice. Or, in English, we have the English language, but also the word jingle, song, jangle, which is to make some keys, some metals sound, so Joyce, instead of E, speaks of Jinglish jangling.

Now, sometimes the effects are very curious, for example, he talks about glittergates of elfinbone. Glitter it's shine, glittergates gives us, in one word, the image of shining doors. And now let us see elfinbone. In German there is the word ivory, which means ivory, but could be interpreted as “elf bones”. But, of course, that is not the etymology. The etymology comes from elephant, Leg – elephant bone, because of the ivory in the tusks.

James Joyce takes this word, translates it and gives it to us elfinbone, instead of ivory, elf bone, as if the skeletons of elves were made of ivory. And now I will recall another example, an idea of ​​comparing the night to a river; it is not a very original idea. However, let us see what Joyce does with it. He speaks, well, of the night that flows, and Joyce speaks of “the rivering waters of”, the waters, and then we have “rivering”, which is a participle made of river, of river.The hithering tithering waters of”, now hither and holder it's here and there, here and there, but hithering and tittering is a verb, which gives us the idea of ​​a movement in many directions, and so Joyce writes the end of one of the chapters of Finnegans Wake: the rivering waters of, the hithering tithering waters of night, and thus what was said above is resolved. All this is verbally splendid, but I do not know if it achieves the objective, perhaps humanly impossible, that Joyce sets for himself.

Virginia Woolf perhaps found the best definition of Ulysses e Finnegans Wake. He says that these are terrible defeats, glorious defeats. I think that's how we should see them. I mean, I don't think you can go any further than that. It's a kind of reduction to absurdity, of reduction to the absurd of the utmost literary ambition. Croce said that literature, that art, is expression. Well, James Joyce set out to express. Every writer has a dead part of language: we all know that saying “so-and-so went into a room”, “so-and-so went out into the street”, this really does not express anything.

This is to suggest to the reader a possibility of images that we do not give him. Instead, James Joyce wanted to express himself continuously. In this play on words composed of Finnegans Wake, one of the difficulties is that Joyce did not limit himself to combining English words, but combined his verbal monsters with English, Norwegian, Celtic, French, Greek, Spanish, Sanskrit words… Well, this makes the book a kind of labyrinth.

7.

Now, what is it that lasts from James Joyce's work? I think that, first of all, we have, let's say, the moral example of having undertaken such a work, even if that work is not successful, it could not be successful. And then, secondly, perhaps more importantly, we have Joyce's extraordinary verbal talent. That is why James Joyce cannot be judged on a translation. Joyce revised and collaborated on the French version of Odysseus. However, if we compare this version with the English one, we see that it is very, very, very deficient.

For example, we have something like a spectral bougies, in the French version. On the other hand, in the English version, we have a compound word, ghostcandle: ghost, ghost, candle, candle, but all this forms a single word. Now, Joyce began by writing poems. These poems are truly extraordinary. It is a pity that Joyce, who significantly took the name of Dedalus, devoted himself to building labyrinths, to building vast labyrinths, in which he himself got lost and in which his readers get lost.

But now, since no judgment of a poet can be equivalent to the immediate hearing, the breathing of a poet's verses, I ask you to listen to two poems, which our friend […] is going to read. The first is a rather short poem, it is simply made of melancholy, made of despair. Perhaps there are no better elements to make a poem. It is called, I think, “She Weeps over Rahoon”. You can read it.

“She weeps over Rahoon”
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling
Where my dark lover lies

I would like, let's see, how beautiful it is "Where my dark lover lies”, “Where my dark lover lies”. Dark, because he is underground, because he is lost, because he is dead.

"Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling / at gray moonrise". "moonrise" rather than "sunrise”, and the gray that is throughout the poem, as you will see.

Love, hear thou
How sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.

Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mold
And muttering rain.

“Whispering Rain,” “Blabbering Rain.” Now, the other poem… – I think it’s simply extraordinary, as a sound, as verbal music, it’s already a lot for a poem to have this verbal music –. And now let’s look at the other poem, which is the poem of vision.

I hear an army charging upon the land
And the thunder of horses plunging
Foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name.

This verse is one of the most extraordinary, I think: “They cry unto the night their battle-name”, the strength that this compound word has, their battle-name, Yes.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear their whirling laughter far away.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame

Of course, “they are breaking through the shadows of dreams.”

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

Very well, thank you very much. Now I would like to add a few words about these poems which our friend read, with good Irish passion, didn’t he? Well, this poem begins as a dream. The poet dreams, or has a vision, of armies, armies which are Homeric, or Celtic, or, better said, both at the same time, which rise from the sea: “I hear an army charging upon the land".

These are very ancient armies, because they are warriors who are in battle chariots. Then they shout their battle names in the night, and fill the earth. And they are armies of gods, of Homeric or Celtic deities, who emerge from the depths of the sea, and fill the earth. They shake their long green hair, so that we understand that they are maritime deities, and then they strike with their hearts, “as upon an anvil”, as if it were an anvil.

And then we have to understand that, in what corresponds to the last two verses, the poet wakes up, and then we see that all this splendor, all this horror of armies that emerge from the sea and invade the land, and that shout their battle names, and that the poet compares to a flame that leaves him blind, are simply a kind of vast metaphor for the desolation in which he has been left by a woman who does not want him.

That is, the entire beginning of the poem is filled with the visionary tumult of these armies. And then, at the end, there is simply a question, like that of a lost child, telling his beloved why she left him.

This is what I wanted to say. [ii]

*Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, translator, literary critic and essayist. Author, among other books, of Fictions (Company of Letters). [https://amzn.to/3R7pV8n]

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

Notes

[I] Borges reads here “future,” although in the original, “Rima descriptiva” number LXXXVIII of the Rosary of lyrical sonnets, Unamuno wrote “tomorrow” (185). See: Unamuno, Rosary of lyrical sonnets. Madrid: Impr. Spanish, 1911.

[ii] We would like to thank Matías Carnevale for transcribing this important lecture. This publication is published with permission from the Andrew Wylie Literary Agency, which represents Borges’s heir.

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