To the Franz Kafka Society

BORGES - KAFKA

& OTHER POINTS OF VIEW

 by Miroslav Scheuba 
The translation of the Borges´s poems into English belong to Miroslav  Scheuba 

I SACRA MONSTRA

Sacred monsters. Who are the monsters?  -Some times are the geniuses with mustaches such as Nietzche, Marx and Freud, "the three masters of suspicion" as said Paul Ricoeur. Sometimes, are the questionable concepts.  Power and weaknesses in war, the Friedrich problem and a monster: the tragedy.  Capitalism and misery in conflict, the Karl problem and a monster: the economic crisis. Drugs and sex in the market, the Sigmund problem and a monster: the repression of the unconscious.  

Now we move from philosophy to literature with no moustaches and a little more optimistic where it is possible a Shakespeare, a Borges and a Kafka. The former does not know about the other two fellows, but all three are poets and have come to this world for improve it.

We are the world, we are the writers” should say the song. Here in Prague, we can say: We are the writers, we are the golem: one word of more, one word of less, reduces us to dust. And speaking about dust, we can remember the Shakespeare words in Hamlet: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
 
As everyone knows, "The Golem" of Borges is a famous poem that generates labyrinths –because he is still in a labyrinth– in the same way, the golem of Kafka is in a castle, is in a process and is also in that morning Mr Gregor Samsa discovered that in his bed he had been changed. In the literature of the twentieth century Mr Samsa was the first transformer. By the way, there are poems that change us, poems that transform us like this poem by Borges "The Golem".

Thus begins: 

"If (as the Greek says in the Cratylus)

The name is archetype of the thing,

In the letters of "rose" is the rose,

And all the Nile flows through the word Nile.

From this verse “In the letters of “rose” is the rose”, Umberto Eco wrote his most famous novel: "The name of the rose".

In the book "The cipher" Borges left a poem titled "Blake". Over there he said that "the true rose is far away, may be a pillar or a battle, or a terrible archetype that it has not the shape of a rose."

I have a little poem about this rose:

What I mean? I want to tell you that sometimes the beautiful and the awful go together; be careful.

Der Golem , a 1915 silent movie written an directed by Paul Wegener.

We continue with "The Golem" by Jorge Luis Borges:

Thirsty of knowing everything the God knows,
Judah Loew gave himself to permutations

of letters and to the complex variations

and he pronounced the Name which it was the Cipher.

The Door, the Echo, the Guest, and the Palace

upon a body formed with clumsy hands

working hard for teaching the secret in the stands

of Symbols of Time and all the Words of the Space.

...

The rabbi explaining to him the universe

"This is my foot, this is your foot"; educating gentle

to the wicked. With years he learned to know first

to take the broom and sweep up the temple.

...

Held his eyes on his Golem bad and well

at the hour of anguish and light vague.

Who will say the things that the God felt

at the sight of his rabbi in Prague?

II  BORGES ET SENSUM HUMOR

In a note to Bernard Shaw ("Other Inquires") Borges suggests that humor is a sudden favor by talking, not a thing written. He claimed that the real intellectual work must be supported by a good dose of sense of humor. Our writer, author of a "Universal History of Infamy" has a quarter of English blood because his paternal grandmother was British, so British that she had not stomach, as she said. It is true that after so much Shakespeare, Dr Johnson, Swift, Hawthorne, Swinburne, Da Quincey, Oscar Wilde, Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, Kipling and Elliot, Borges became more laconic and indolent, and about the skillful use of the unexpected adjetive, more maniac and lonely. We have an example, Borges wrote that "Edward Fitzgeral devotes his life as an indolent, lonely and maniac man". Borges's humor had some guilty responsible friends, one of them was Macedonio Fernández, a domestic philosopher who gaves his keynotes at bars and taverns of Buenos Aires. Macedonio in the middle of talking changed some argument of Don Quixote waiting for some unsuspecting friend would refute that he was told. Then, Macedonio came out in defense of his version saying. -"Yes, I agree but Cervantes wrote what you said in order to get along with the police." 
When Macedonio died, Borges spoke in front of his coffin before being placed in his tomb. After that, some friends wrote in the newspaper that people laughed a lot in the cemetery because the Borges speach. In addition, Borges was inventing epitaphs all the time, such as the epitaph of an actor; on his stone one can read: "Many times I played dead but at this time, never". The wise and sublime sense of humor of Borges reaches its zenith in his "Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel". Here some of them:

33. Give what is holy to dogs, cast your pearls before swine; the important is to give.

34.  Looking for the pleasure of looking for, not that of finding.

39. The door is the one that chooses, not the man.

40. Do not judge the tree by its fruits nor the man by his works, can be better or worse.

41. Nothing is built on the stone, everything on the sand, but our duty is to build as if sand were stone.

47. Happy are the poor without bitterness or the rich without arrogance.

48. Happy are those who are brave, those who accept defeat or applause in good spirit.

49. Happy are those who keep in their memory words of Virgil or Christ, because they will be torches at their nights.

50. Happy are the loved and the lovers and those who may live without love.

51. Happy are happy.

 

 

III   IN LABYRINTHORUM BORGES ET KAFKA 

About the most undeniable virtue of Kafka, Borges said it was invent unbearable situations: "For etching in the memory a few lines are enough, by example: leopards break into the temple and drink the wines from the calices; this happens repeatedly. After a time is expected to happen ans this is incorporated into the temple ceremony."

 

The labyrinth of Kafka and Borges are crossed. In the gardens forking path can appear tigers or leopards that they have the habit of desecrating temples. As we read Kafka's books, we find mazes with imaginary creatures and nightmares, with unbearable hospitals, offices and cemeteries, mazes full of satraps and bureaucrats, corridors of madness, and crazy machines, subtle mistakes, twisted myths and fearful legends, mazes and abominable heresies. Meanwhile, the mazes of Borges are the endless mirrors, faces under masks, labyrinths for memory and oblivion, betrayal and tantrums, millenary walls, swords and altars, mazes of battles, misterious heroes, poets and coins, labyrinth with purple water or of the green eternity, mazes so absurd and difficult as this world is, dark worlds of the human misery or the worlds of past splendours. Nevertheless, among this richness and poverty is passing the humanity through the words, where success and failure have a prize: the writing.

 AN ETERNAL DREAM 

On July 3, 1983, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Kafka, Borges wrote An eternal dream  published by the Spanish newspaper "El País": "My first memory of Kafka is the years 1916" -said Borges- "when I decided to learn the German language. Before I had tried Russian, but I failed. The German was much easier for me, an the task was enjoyable. That was when I read one of the first books of Kafka, but I do not remember exactly which book was; I think it was called Eleven Stories. I noticed that Kafka wrote so simple that I could understand him. After that, I had a chance to read and understad The process."  
.
Let's read that Borges wrote for that newspaper:
"The essential difference with his contemporaries writers and even the great writers of the past -such as Bernard Shaw or Chesterton- is this: with them you are forced to take the environmental reference and the connotation over time and place. It is also the case of Charles Dickens and Henrik Ibsen.  In the Kafka texts, specially in his short stories, there is something eternal. One can read Kafka thinking that his fables are as old as history, that those dreams were dreamed up by men of other times without linking them to England, to Germany or to Arabian countries. It is remarkable the fact of having a text that trascends the time of writing. You might think that was drafted in Persia or China, and that is their great value. All the Kafka references were prophetic: the man who is imprisoned by and order, the man against the State, that were his favorite subjects." 
  

 In this report Borges tells us that: 

"I traslated into Sapnish the famous story whose title is The transformation. I never knew why they all gave put Metamorphosis. (Die Verwandlung: the transformation) It is a nonsense. I do not know who came up with that wrong translation. On the other hand, I think his stories and short stories are superior to his novels; the Kafka novels never conclude. Each novel has an infinite number of chapters because its subject in an infinite number of applications." So Borges confesses: "I have also written some stories in which I tried to be Kafka. Theres is one entitled "The Library of Babel" and another, which were exercises with an unique ambition: to write as Kafka did. Those stories interested but I realized that my purpose had failed and I had to find an another way."  Incidentally, Borges makes this interesting observation:  "Kafka did not publish much in life and ordered to destroy his works. This reminds me of the case of Virgil, that also instructed his friend to destroythe unfinished Aeneid.  Disobedience of them was happily for us, the work was retained. I believe that neither Virgil nor Kafka wanted their work to be destroyed. Otherwise, they would have done the work of destroying themselves. My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam,  wrote a lot and burned everything before dying."

And Borges ends his report by saying:

"Kafka has been one of the greatest author of all literature. For me he is the firts of his century. Last year I was at the centenary of Joyce and when someone compared him to Kafka I said that was a blasphemy. Joyce is an important part of the English language and its infinite possibilities, but he is untranslatable. Kafka wrote in a very simple and delicate German. He cared about the work of art not fame, this is certain. Franz Kafka, a dreamer who did not want his dreams be knows, is now part of the most important dream: the universal memory."

IV   BORGES LUDOS

Tigers, chess and blindness were part of the Borges’ fate. He also accepted that the tiger spots were the traces of his fate as a tiger. One of the keys to understanding the fate is in the Borges’ Conjetural Poem: “I longed to be someone else, be a man / of resolutions, of Books, of statements / I will lie between swamps under the stars/ but I feel in the chest the voices of gods / with a secret joy. At last I meet / my South American destiny. / In this noisy evening I had / the labyrinth of multiple steps / that wove my days from a day / from my childhood. At last I have discovered / the hidden key of my years.”

Another key to understanding destiny is in one of the sonnets that Borges dedicates to chess: 

“Fainting King, slanting Bishop, ferocious

Queen, direct Rook and cunning Pawn

On the black and white of the road

Searching and fighting their armed battle.

They know not that the indicated hand

Of the player rules their destiny,

They know not that a rigour adamantine

Holds their will and their journey.

The player also is a prisoner

(From Khayyam is the sentence) of another board

Of black nights and of white days.

God moves the player, and he, the piece.

Which god behind God begins the plot

Made of dust and time and dream and agonies?”

 

In the lecture about his blidness, Borges suggests that "A writer, or any man, should think that everything that happens is a tool, all the things have been given us they have a reason. Everything that happens to us, including the humillations, have been given us as a material for our art, in order to make of this miserable circumtances, an eternal thing or that aspire to be eternal."

V   MOTUS NATURALIS