Georgie and Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story. Литагент HarperCollins USD
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Borges was travelling to lecture at other universities. Under the terms of the Norton lectureship he was meant to reside in Cambridge.
It was at this time, I suppose, seeing his popularity on other campuses and as well in retaliation or revenge for imagined slights, that Elsa began to taunt Georgie, telling him that this was his quarter hour of fame and that he must take advantage of the moment. By this she probably meant he should quickly hike up his lecture fees. Tomorrow, she would say, nobody will remember who you were. These remarks incensed Borges and he would repeat them to me with surprising frequency and irritation.
Although she had shown no interest in our previous readings, Elsa was not going to miss a chance to visit New York. There was one rub. Borges was adamant and pitiless about Olga’s accompanying us. He flatly would not have it. Elsa begged me to plead with Borges to get him to relent. I felt sorry for Olga. Somehow I managed to get Georgie to agree to Elsa’s request, but there was an iron-clad proviso. Olga had to stay at another hotel and was not to be seen with us.
Galen Williams made it quite clear that the reading at the Y had to go like clockwork. The programme was to last an hour and a half, with one intermission, and everything had to end at a precise moment or else the Y would be in trouble with the unions. Of course Murchison and I had timed the poems and estimated Borges’s contributions to the last second. Jack was one of the readers, I was another, and so were two of our poet-translators, Alan Dugan and Mark Strand. All of us, except for Borges, read from lecterns.
The Theresa L. Kaufmann Concert Hall, where the performance was taking place, was immense. From the stage you seemed to be looking out over an endless prairie. More daunting was the audience. It was packed with Borges connoisseurs, writers and poets, editors and publishers – the elite of the New York literary world.
At the end there was a tremendous ovation. Borges was relieved and elated, so elated that he called Elsa up onto the stage and had her recite one of his sonnets that she had memorized. The audience erupted in applause. Elsa could not have been more pleased.
Then suddenly from below the stage I was staring down into the face of Willis Barnstone, a poet and professor and great admirer of Borges. He was desperate to climb up beside us, wanting to read translations of his own of early Borges poems. He pleaded with me to stop the proceedings – that is, the public’s exit from the auditorium – and grant him the podium. The request was not only beyond my power to grant, but it seemed such an absurd and amateurish thing to do. Incredible how people who should have known better were desperate to bask in Borges’s limelight. Elsa’s recitation had been enough; the public liked it, but I felt Barnstone could have turned the evening into a vulgar circus. Months earlier, before Dugan had persuaded Galen to hire me, Barnstone had proposed to include in the reading a disproportionate seventeen of Borges’s earliest poems, which dated from 1923. Georgie had been outraged that Barnstone was prepared to overlook his far better work of recent years.
The Barnstone fiasco did not end there. Galen had to write him a conciliatory letter the day after the reading. In it she said that I had actually listed him as reader for a first encore. She pointed out that
We had fully expected that there would be at least one, if not three encores; but the drama of the evening was too much for encores. Once Borges had left the stage, it would have been awkward, anti-climactic, and unprofessional-amateurish. This evening shows that poetry can be ‘show business’ – a performance – and that the unexpected occurrences of the stage have to be ‘expected.’ For instance, who would have ever predicted that Borges would want his wife to read a poem and to sit on stage with him? It is unheard of in Poetry Center history, yet it worked beautifully!
Galen got an instant apology from Barnstone and there the matter rested. But at the same time she wrote to me saying that ‘WB is, I’ve concluded, disorganized, paranoic and selfish!’
That night, after the reading, there was a cocktail party at Rita Guibert’s. Two days later I returned to Cambridge with Borges. Mysteriously we lost, or contrived to lose, Elsa and Olga at Logan airport and ended up at an old North End haunt of mine, an Italian restaurant called Stella’s. There we were meeting for lunch two Atlantic editors, Ann Holmes and Phoebe Adams. In the company of these two attractive women, Borges opened up like a sun-kissed blossom. He was particularly enjoying the naughtiness of the occasion. Mum was the word, as he was fond of putting his little secrets.
I wanted to try an experiment to see if the way Borges and I were going about our poetry translations could also be applied to his prose. I wrote out a rough draft of one of his stories, ‘The Other Death’, then sat down with him and went over it. I read him half a line of the Spanish followed by half a line of my English version. At once we saw the plan worked.
I confess that this involved way of making our translations – both the poetry and the prose – proved the most inefficient and time-consuming possible. But our interest – whatever it took – was in giving our work a painstaking linguistic accuracy that we found absent from most earlier translations of Borges’s stories. We also wished to endow our English versions with the true colour of Borges’s voice.
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