Argentinian Poet and Writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

I am certain that French literary scholars are raising their hackles because of my interpretation of the term explication de texte. The type of close reading that the term implies includes style and is rarely used with literature that is translated from another language.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote in Spanish, but I have been reading his work in English translation for over half a century. I thought it would be fun to take a paragraph from one of Borges’s stories and, by my own idea of a close reading, give you an idea why the Argentinian is one of my favorite writers.

The story I have chosen is “Three Versions of Judas” as printed in Andrew Kerrigan’s translation of the American edition of Ficciones. Here is the story’s opening paragraph:

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulchre; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Fraharen appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version, called Der hemliche Heiland, executed in 1912 by Emil Schering.)

Whew! The following notes rely heavily on Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes’s A Dictionary of Borges [ADOB] (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1990) and my searches on the Internet.

Basilides: “An early Gnostic from Alexandria who integrated Pythagorean and Cabbalistic traditions with the Christian faith.” ADOB

Nils Runeberg: Fictional character.

conventicles: secret or unauthorized religious assemblies.

fiery sepulchre: Refers to the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno, where heretics were punished by eternal flames.

heresiarchs: Borges loves this word and uses it frequently. It refers to the originators of heretical beliefs.

Satornibus:Could refer to Saturninus of Antioch, “who held that the angels, archangels, powers and dominations were created by the Supreme Unknown, the Father, but that the world and everything in it, including man, was created by seven of the lowest angels.” ADOB

Carpocrates: “A second-century Neoplatonist from Alexandria, the founder of a heretical sect which believed in the dualism of good and evil, denied the divinity of Christ and held that the soul is imprisoned in the body from which it strives to be free.” ADOB

Liber adversus omnes haereses: Translated as A Book Against All Heresies. As Nilos Runeberg is a fictional characters, all his works are nonexistent.

Syntagma: “The earliest collection of heretical doctrines by Justin Martyr. Another text of the same title, also directed against heresy, was written at the beginning of the third century by Hippolytus of Rome….” ADOB

Lund: Lund University in Sweden was founded in 1666.

Swedish and German titles: Runeberg was a fiction, as are his books. As is translator Emil Schering.

Note also the use of subjunctive verb forms: might have directed … would have destined him … might have augmented … might have been preserved … might have perished.

And I have barely begun analyzing this paragraph, which was designed to flummox lazy readers and excite explorers of strange literary byways like me.