The Review of Contemporary Fiction

This Craft of Verse by Jorge Luis Borges
Thomas Hove

Jorge Luis Borges. This Craft of Verse. Ed. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. 160 pp. $22.95.

This series of six lectures was delivered extempore at Harvard in 1967-68, and Professor Mihailescu has transcribed, edited, and thoroughly annotated them from tapes that were abandoned in a library vault for three decades. Each lecture focuses on a different aspect of poetry, but only loosely so. Whether Borges’s topic is metaphor, epic narrative, or the nature of poetry, his basic aim is to reproduce the experience of wonder that poetry inspires. Accordingly, he shies away from poetic theories and instead allows his examples and personal impressions to speak for themselves. Sometimes he delves into philological matters; at other times, he offers characteristically postmodern insights on literary history: “I no longer believe in expression: I believe only in allusion. After all, what are words? Words are symbols for shared memories.”But on the whole, these lectures warn against the pitfalls of literary-historical awareness, especially when it leads us to approach books not as “occasions for beauty” but as collections of outmoded views and etymological curiosities. Although Borges’s readings betray his own notorious encyclopedic knowledge, he suggests that an overdeveloped historical awareness threatens our openness to the experience of wonder. Today, thirty years after he delivered these lectures, historical awareness (some call it “knowingness”) pervades literary scholarship, and many historicist critics would scoff at Borges’s suggestion that “there is an eternity in beauty.” But to those who want to approach poetry as enthusiasts rather than curators, the value of these lectures lies in their frequent success at conveying the passions and joys in the experience of artfully arranged words. [Thomas Hove]