OTHER TRADITIONS
By John Ashbery
Harvard Univ. 168 pp. $22.95
THIS CRAFT OF VERSE
By Jorge Luis Borges
Edited by Calin-Andrei Mahailescu
Harvard Univ. 154 pp. $22.95
These two handsome volumes bring to mind one of the special pleasures of university and big-city life: The chance to attend public lectures by distinguished artists, scholars and scientists. Think of hearing Northrop Frye meticulously outline the symbolism of the Bible, or Michel Foucault analyze the nature of prisons, or Ralph Ellison expound the unity of American literature. As I can vouch, such talks, by such exhilarating minds, can become turning points in a life.
Over the years the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard have been delivered by some of the most eminent figures in world literature, (Italo Calvino, Czeslaw Milosz, Nadine Gordimer). Nearly all have been published, but few are likely to be as winning, not to say winsome, as Other Traditions and This Craft of Verse. John Ashbery is arguably one of the two or three greatest living American poets; Jorge Luis Borges is inarguably the most influential Latin-American essayist and short-story writer of our time. To spend a few hours in their company, even on the page, is a civilized entertainment not to be missed.
Other Traditions engagingly opens, for example, with Ashbery speculating on just why he was asked to deliver these lectures. He suspects that "since I am known as a writer of hermetic poetry, in the course of lecturing I might 'spill the beans,' so to speak: that is, I might inadvertently or not let slip the key to my poetry, resolving this vexed question once and for all. There seems to be a feeling in the academic world that there's something interesting about my poetry, though little agreement as to its ultimate worth and considerable confusion about what, if anything, it means."
Yet rather than reflecting on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or revealing the secrets of Flow Chart, Ashbery instead discusses six minor poets who have influenced and energized his work: the 19th-century romantic John Clare, who spent 30 years in a madhouse, and his near contemporary Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who imitated Jacobean drama in "Death's Jest Book" before killing himself in his mid-forties; the enigmatic French writer Raymond Roussel, given to elaborate and intricate wordplay (and who, according to one admirer, "has nothing to say and says it badly"); Laura Riding, who lived with Robert Graves and inspired the young Auden, before abandoning poetry to devote herself to the study of language and "rational meaning"; the immensely difficult John Wheelwright and the paranoid schizophrenic David Schubert. All these poets were, to say the least, a trifle unbalanced, but each at his or her best created a distinctive verse-music, a heard melody that haunts even when the actual meaning of the words remains elusive. Ashbery fans will recognize this feeling.
Each of the lectures in Other Traditions provides a concise biography of the chosen poet, Ashbery's remarks on what he finds appealing in the work, and usually one or two complete poems, generally followed by a page of commentary. "The typical Schubert poem has the appearance of something smashed, not too painstakingly put back together again, and finally contemplated with both remorse and amusement." John Wheelwright evokes ocean waves, whitecaps, as "climbing never, always mounting/ slipping always, never sinking." Riding's difficulty results from her obsessive quest for accuracy. Three lines by Schubert, Ashbery notes, offer a "magnificent" definition of poetry: "But the poem is just this/ Speaking of what cannot be said/ To the person I want to say it."
Throughout, Ashbery emphasizes the serendipity of literary reputation. The poets "who become known and are remembered and put in anthologies are there as much from happenstance as intrinsic merit. Perhaps it is a little truer of poets than of others because poetry is a somewhat neglected art to begin with; it has trouble making its way in the best of circumstances, and there are not too many judges monitoring the situation to make sure each one gets what he or she deserves. Poems get lost more easily than paintings do; even their authors tend to forget them in drawers or sometimes destroy them in a fit of rage, as Schubert in fact did with a large body of his work, including a novel whose first sentence alone survives: 'Outside it was Tuesday.' "
Like Ashbery, whom he otherwise little resembles, Borges also emphasizes the power of poetry to work its magic--through "the hospitality of the imagination"--even when we don't understand its meaning. Sounds, images, the juxtaposition of unexpected words--these can be enough to provoke an aesthetic shiver. First presented in 1967-68, when the Argentine master was already blind, This Craft of Verse offers meditations on "the riddle of poetry," metaphor, "the telling of the tale," translation, and "Thought and Poetry," before concluding with Borges's own artistic credo. Throughout, the approach is one of extreme courtesy and simplicity, both in the bare, declarative sentences and in the seeming modesty of the points made. In fact, much of Borges's presentation may be likened to intelligent rambling, with interruptions to discuss favorite lines from Old English laments, Middle High German lyrics, and Victorian and modern verse. Still,the most appealing lecture here must be the last, in which Borges considers "a poet whose works I never read, but a poet whose works I have to write."
Though charmingly expressed, Borges's reflections are, to my mind, seldom particularly original. "I know for a fact that we feel the beauty of a poem before we even begin to think of a meaning" paraphrases a famous observation of Eliot's; "I do not think intelligence has much to do with the work of a writer" recalls Proust ("Each day I attach less and less importance to intelligence"). What I like best here are the casual observations that suggest unwritten Borges stories, for instance, the notion that Plato composed his dialogues about Socrates "in order to hear once again the voice of the master he loved," or that Gibbon, like a great novelist, "must have thought of himself as having created, in a sense, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire."
In passing, Borges also tells us that John of the Cross is the greatest poet in Spanish, that his own three favorite books are dictionaries (Samuel Johnson's classic, Skeats's Etymological, and the Shorter Oxford), and that a writer needs to be loyal to his dream. "Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this: I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do--when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful." To explain why reading is more important to him than writing, he says: "For one reads what one likes--yet one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write."
Ultimately, for Borges, the test of poetry lies in its memorability. Strangeness, basic metaphors (girls as flowers, life as dream), words playing off their root meanings, authorial conviction, a certain music--all these contribute to a poem's sense of inevitablity, and to the way it lodges so lastingly in our minds. As Borges reminds us, the most poetic language, that fundamental to men and art, "did not come from the libraries; it came from the fields, from the sea, from rivers, from night, from the dawn."
Those familiar with Labyrinths or Other Inquisitions will not be surprised to find these lectures alluding to The Arabian Nights, Anglo-Saxon kennings, Chesterton, Sherlock Holmes, Kipling and Don Quixote. Still, as fine a book as it is, This Craft of Verse may yet serve readers best by sending them on, or back, to Borges's even greater work, stories and essays like "The Aleph," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Kafka and His Precursors." Knowing this, I still would have given a lot to have been at Harvard in the audience when this courtly man of letters looked "upward with a gentle and shy expression on his face, seeming to materially touch the world of the texts" and spoke about the poems and books he loved most.
Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
