Borges in Spain, Extreme Weather Events, Interviews, JAAM 27, and Summer Flings

Borges in Spain

My brief review of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Poems has been reprinted in the Spanish/English online literary magazine Yareah.com, in their fifth issue, which focuses on the intriguing and apt combination of Borges and the Kabbalah.

This is the third issue of Yareah I have seen, and they are always interesting. Yareah is keen for more contributors, and if you do contribute, you get a rather nice online profile on their site – so, if you are intrigued, check them out.

Extreme Weather Events Reviewed

Mike Crowl has posted a review of my first short fiction collection, Extreme Weather Events, on his blog. Mike chose EWE as the book to take with him on a recent visit to hospital – as you’ll see from his blog post, I did suggest that EWE wasn’t the ideal post-op book, being quite dark and all, but he got a fair bit out of it all the same.

Author Interviews: 2008 revisited, and my first interview for 2009

Within the next week or so, I’ll be posting an interview with New Zealand author Sue Emms on my blog. I will be aiming to run roughly one per month this year, assuming enough willing victims fall into my net. In case you haven’t seen them, or are feeling nostalgic, I ran interviews in 2008 with the following authors:

Helen Lowe
Harvey Molloy
Helen Rickerby
Jeanne Bernhardt
Tania Hershman
Lee and Nogi Aholima

JAAM 27 Reminder

A wee reminder that submissions for Issue 27 of JAAM magazine, edited by Ingrid Horrocks, close at the end of March.

Things I’ve Been Enjoying Lately

A carefree late-summer selection …

Borges and I

This 700-word story is included in my short story collection Transported, which you can buy online from Fishpond and New Zealand Books Abroad. It’s also available in many good bookstores, though many Whitcoulls stores now seem to have sold out of it.

Borges comes round with a six-pack just in time for the game. I tell him he could have got it cheaper down the road. He nods unhappily, as is his way.

Half-time, and the ABs have had a shocker. Borges, of course, has divided loyalties; he says he’ll be happy if Argentina lose by less than twenty points, or the All Blacks win by more than fifty. I tell him I need to go for a piss. Two Exports will do that to anyone.

When I get back, Borges is making himself a coffee. Is it possible, he asks me, that Amphixion of Thebes was thinking of rugby when he wrote that each game played by men is one moment of the game played by the gods?

I tell him he’d better get back to the couch if he wants to see the second half, and besides, only woofters drink coffee at half-time.

The All Blacks win 42-17. Sevens against Thebes? It’s possible.

#

Borges and I go out for a few quiets. I meet him after work in a bar favoured by web developers and business analysts. We sit and watch a small subset of the world go by.

Borges looks glum. “Bad day in the stacks?” I ask. He nods, says nothing, swallows another mouthful of beer.

I nudge him. “Look, over there. I happen to know those women are studying to be librarians. Go and dazzle them with your learning. That’s what it’s for, man!”

He surprises me by draining his glass and walking right up to them. Asks them a question; they look surprised, but make room for him. Turns and waves me over.

“This is Brian,” he says, “he’s something in computers.”

Borges talks to the dark one, I talk to the fair. She’s a bit serious for me. Nothing doing there, but Borges and Krystal are getting on like a house on fire — so well that I say my goodbyes and walk home under the indifferent dome of eternity. Borges, eh? You never would have thought it.

#

Borges and I scarcely see each other nowadays. What with his work and the kid, he’s too damned busy, and besides, all he wants to talk about is how little Pedro took two steps the other day, how Pedro looked at him and said “Mama”, how when Pedro wakes in the night Borges walks him round the house till the little fella settles back down. The bookcases have survived from his old flat, but now they’re full of “Baby and Child” and “Raising Boys”.

“So where are your old books?” I ask him after the grand tour. (Krystal is at yoga.)

“Out the back, in suitcases. Want to borrow them?”

“Choose me an armful.”

They aren’t easy going, those books, but I’ve learned (for Borges underlined the passages) that Goncalves compared eternity to a mirrored sphere, while Basilides was exiled from Mt Athos for teaching that the world would end when the souls of the Elect called God to account for human suffering. It seems to me sometimes, as I wake on my couch to find the wisdom of ages in unsteady piles around me, that the world will end when there is no longer room for all the books in it; but when I suggested this to Borges, he said he had less than four hours’ sleep last night and a meeting of the Library Board next morning, and could I call him later?

#

I have moved into Borges’ former apartment. It had been renovated after Borges moved out, but with heavy drapes across the windows and the lighting turned down low I don’t notice the difference. How I miss those days when we’d lounge around discussing the pre-Socratics and Cameron Diaz! Back then, I used to tease him that he should get out more. Well, he did, and it landed him two kids and a house in the suburbs.

Having quit my job in computers, I am living on my savings. I have decided to become a writer. Borges, informed of this, sighs and tells me I should get a life.

Book Review: Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman (Penguin, 2000)

Jorge Luis Borges is best known in the English-speaking world as a writer of stories and essays, but it was as a poet that he first became known in his native Argentina. His Selected Poems gathers together translations of his poetry by a number of different highly talented hands. I opened it with some trepidation, wondering whether the poetry could possibly be as good as the fiction: I’m delighted to report that it is every bit as good.

The Selected Poems prints the Spanish original of each poem on the left and the English translation on the right. The translators have done a fine job of transporting Borges’ characteristic concerns and his clarity of expression from Spanish to English. Borges’ great interests – time, the infinite, doppelgangers, the mortal hazard posed by mirrors – are as omnipresent in the poetry as in the prose, but are expressed with even greater economy in the poetry, which swoops between the private and the universal with almost dizzying facility.

Borges’ work is at once funny and profound, tragic and comic, mired in dread and rife with beauty. In my opinion, Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest writer of the twentieth century.

Some Borges links