Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 245

Two Takes on Borges'
"Death and the Compass"

Note

Borges' memory was legendary. An American Professor of Romanian origin reports that, during a chat with Borges in 1976 at the University of Indiana, the Argentine writer recited to him an eight stanza Romanian poem which he had learned from its author, a young refugee, in Geneva in 1916. Borges did not know Romanian. The power of his memory was also peculiar in that he tended to remember words and works by others, while claiming to have completely forgotten texts that he himself had written. (Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, ed. by Călin Mihăilescu. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000, 148-9, n. †)

C.M. wrote this note based on his recollection of the story told to him by Matei Călinescu a few years before, perhaps in Santiago de Compostela. Upon reading Borges's Craft…, M.C. wrote an article in Romanian, "Borges and the Kobzar Songs" (Revista 22 [Bucharest] 12.30, July 2002: 13-4), where he pointed out the mistakes which pester this note, while delicately leaving out the editor's name. The Romanian translation of the Craft…, which C.M reviewed in August 2002, altered the note following M.C.'s article. It translates as

… M.C. tells that, upon meeting the Argentine writer at the University of Indiana in 1976, he heard him recite, in the French into which Hélène Vacaresco had translated it, a Romanian "kobzar song" that Borges had read sixty years before in Geneva!...." (Arta poetică, translated by Mihnea Gafiţa. Bucharest: Curtea Veche Publishing, 2002: 113, n. 98)

It was not usual for C.M.'s memory to betray him so thoroughly. He concluded, wrongly, that his memory had been overwhelmed by the recollection — or the dream — of someone else, an intruder. Not only the unfathomable design of this forgetting prompted C.M. to go back to Borges' detective story "Death and the Compass," which had obsessed him for a long while and on which he had published a piece the same Summer of 2002 ("Pure Line: An essay in Borgermeneutics," Semiotica 140.1-4 (2002): 141-52). In doing so, he was perhaps trying to rent a clue to solve the mystery of his slip of memory. This turning was not unnatural for Matei Călinescu either: Borges and his "DC" had interested him for a long time, too (Rereading, Yale UP, 1993). In November, 2002, M.C. and C.M. had a public duet on "DC" at the University of Western Ontario. M.C.'s lecture is printed here, together with C.M.'s subsequent musings.