And yet Borges’s poetry is the most Whitmanian of alclass="underline" Whitman’s themes are always present in his verse, as are their counterarguments and rebuttals, the reverse and the obverse of history, the heads and tails of the amalgam that is America and whose success or failure is yet to be decided. But that isn’t all he is, which is no small feat.
I began with my first love and with Mircea Eliade. She still lives in my memory; the Romanian has long since been banished to the purgatory of unsolved crimes. I end with Borges and with my gratitude and astonishment, though careful not to forget the lines of “Almost Final Judgment,” a poem that Borges hated: “I have said astonishment where others say only habit.”
BLOOD MERIDIAN
Blood Meridian is a Western, a cowboy novel by a writer who seems to specialize in the genre. Many enterprising types thought that Cormac McCarthy would never be translated into Spanish and they ransacked him shamelessly, abetted by ignorance and a rather curious understanding of intertextuality. And yet Blood Meridian, set in the mid-nineteenth century, isn’t just a Western but also a fevered, ultra-violent novel about life and death, with all kinds of underlying themes (nature as man’s great enemy, the absolute impossibility of redemption, life as inertia); a novel that, in part, tells the story of a group of Americans who launch a murderous raid into the state of Chihuahua and then, after crossing the Sierra Madres, into the neighboring state of Sonora, and whose mission, for which they’re well compensated by the governments of both states, is to hunt down and scalp Indians, which isn’t just difficult but also costly in time and lives, and so they end up massacring whole Mexican towns, where the scalps are ultimately similar enough that it makes no difference.
Blood Meridian is also a novel about place, about the landscape of Texas and Chihuahua and Sonora; a kind of anti-pastoral novel in which the landscape looms in its leading role, imposingly — truly the new world, silent and paradigmatic and hideous, with room for everything except human beings. It could be said that the landscape of Blood Meridian is a landscape out of de Sade, a thirsty and indifferent landscape ruled by strange laws involving pain and anesthesia, the laws by which time often manifests itself.
The other two characters in the novel, Judge Holden and a boy known only as the kid, are antagonists, though they belong to the same gang: the judge is a learned man and a child killer, a musician and a pederast, a naturalist and a gunslinger, a man who yearns to know everything and destroy everything. The kid, by contrast, is a survivor; he’s wild but he’s a human being or, in other words, a victim. According to the distinguished Harold Bloom, Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of the twentieth century.
Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 and his life has been rich in adventure and risk. Blood Meridian was first published in 1985. The edition reviewed here was published by Debate in 2001, in a translation by Luis Murillo Fort.
TROUBADOURS
What do the troubadours have to say to us today? What’s the source of their appeal, their excellence? I don’t know. I remember that I was inspired to read them by Pound, and especially by Martín de Riquer’s dazzling studies. From then on, little by little I began amassing books and anthologies in which there appeared the names of Arnaut Daniel, Marcabrú, Bertrán de Born, Peire Vidal, Giraut de Bornelh. By the nature of their trade, most were travelers and globetrotters. Some only traveled one or two provinces, but there were others who crossed Europe, fought as soldiers, sailed the Mediterranean, visited Muslim lands.
Carlos Alvar makes a distinction between troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers. The real difference is geographic. The troubadours were mostly from southern France, Provençal, although some were Catalan too. The trouvères were from the north of France. The minnesingers were German. Time, which has yet to erase their names and some of their works, will finally erase these national differences.
When I was young, in Mexico City, we played a game in which we divided ourselves into champions of the trobar leu and the trobar clus. The trobar leu was, of course, the light song, simple and intelligible to everyone. The trobar clus, by contrast, was dark and opaque, formally complex. Despite its conceptual richness, however, the trobar clus could often be more violent and brutal than the trobar leu (which was generally delicate), like Góngora written by a convict, or more precisely, like foreshadowings of Villon’s black star.
Because we were young and ignorant, we didn’t know that the trobar clus could in turn be divided into two categories, the trobar clus properly speaking, and the trobar ric, which as its name indicates is sumptuous verse, full of flourishes, and generally empty. In other words: the trobar clus trapped in the halls of academe or the court, the trobar clus stripped of the vertigo of words and life. We knew that without the troubadours the Italian dolce stil novo would never have existed, and accordingly that without the dolce stil novo there would be no Dante, but what we liked best were the misspent lives of some of the troubadours. For example: Jaufre Rudel, who fell in love literally by hearsay with a countess who lived in Tripoli, crossed the Mediterranean on what amounted to a crusade in search of her, got sick, and finally ended his days in a Tripoli boarding house, where the countess, aware that here was a man who had celebrated her in many songs and poems, came and permitted Rudel — who now awaited only death — to rest his head in her lap.
I don’t know what they have to say to us today, the troubadours. So far away in their twelfth century, they seem naïve. But I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I know they invented love, and they also invented or reinvented the pride of being a writer, of gazing fearlessly into the depths.
HERRALDE
Editors tend to be bad people. Not to mention critics and the readers at publishing houses and the thousands of lackeys who travel the dim or brightly lit corridors of publishing houses. But writers are often worse, among other things because they believe in lasting glory or in a world ruled by Darwinian laws or maybe because lurking in their innermost souls is a slavishness even more base.
I’ve had the misfortune of meeting a number of editors who were a burden to their own mothers and I’ve also been lucky enough to meet several, maybe seven or eight, who were and are responsible people, rather gloomy (melancholy is a mark of the trade), intelligent, with guts to spare and a sense of humor, editors who’re determined, for example, to publish authors and books that they know from the start will sell very few copies.
A little while ago the second Targa d’Argento Prize was awarded to the best European publisher, and the recipient was my editor, Jorge Herralde, who beat out many other editors, some about to be wreathed or already wreathed in an aura of legend. Now Herralde has written this book, Opiniones mohicanas [Mohican Opinions] (2001), published by El Acantilado, the house of another remarkable editor and writer, Jaume Vallcorba. To read this book, a collection of assorted pieces and jottings scarcely twenty lines long, is to plunge into the recent history of the Barcelona publishing industry and the European and Latin American publishing world, as well as to step into the circle of Herralde’s friends, his editorial battles, and the political changes undergone in Spain since the end of the dictatorship.