Preface to the First Edition
* Evaristo Carriego: Carriego (1883-1912) was in fact a popular poet and playwright, and the "particular biography" was the one Borges himself wrote of him (published 1930). Carriego was only a mediocre poet, perhaps, and he left but a single volume (Misas herejes, "Heretical Masses") upon his early death by tuberculosis, but his ties to "old Buenos Aires," and especially to the lower-class (and mostly Italian) suburb of Palermo, made him an important figure for Borges. While it is probably exaggerated to say that much of JLB's fascination with the compadre (see the note to the title of "Man on Pink Corner" below) and the knife fights and tangos that are associated with that "type" can be traced to Carriego, there is no doubt that as an example of the literary possibilities to which such subject matter can be put, Carriego was very important to JLB and JLB's imagination. Carriego was also the first professional writer Borges had ever run across, a man who made his living at writing, and not some "mere" amateur; he held out therefore the possibilities of a true literary "career" to match Borges's clear literary "calling."
Preface to the 1954 Edition
* Baltasar Gradan: Gracián (1601-1658) was a Jesuit priest and a writer (and sometime aesthetician) of the baroque. His name is associated with a treatise called Agudeza yarte de ingenio ("Keenness of Mind and the Art of Wit"), and with the Spanish baroque poets Francisco Quevedo and Luis de Góngora.
The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell
* Pedro Figari: figari (1861-1938) was a Uruguayan painter "who used fauvist techniques [Rodriguez Monegal, p. 194]," (this perhaps explains his success in Paris, where he lived from 1925 to 1933) and who spent an important part of his life in Buenos Aires (1921-1925). Borges knew the painter rather well and wrote an introdution to a book on him; Figari was also feted by the literary group associated with the review Martín Fierro, of which Borges was an important member. His work "was inspired by the life of Negroes and gauchos" (Oeuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Jean Pierre Bernés [Paris: Gallimard, p.1489].
* Vicente Rossi: Rossi (1871-1945) was the author of a volume titled Cosas de negros ("Negro Matters" [1926]), to which this mention surely points, but he also produced the first reference book on the birth and development of Argentine theater and an important book on the gaucho. He was, then, something of a folklorist and literary historian. In Evaristo Carriego, Borges calls Rossi "our best writer of combat prose."
* Antonio ("Falucho") Ruiz: "Falucho"(d.1824) was a black Argentine soldier who fought in the wars of independence. His statue once stood near that of General San Martin near the center of Buenos Aires.
* The stout bayonet charge of the regiment of "Blacks and Tans"... against that famous hill near Montevideo: On the last day of 1812 a troop of soldiers made up of Negroes and mulattoes (the reference to the English military group organized to fight the Irish independence uprising is the translator's, but it is almost inevitable, and the irony of the situation would not be lost on Borges; see the story "Theme of the Hero and Traitor" in Fictions), under the leadership of the Argentine general Miguel Estanislao Soler, defeated the Spanish troops at the Cerrito, a prominent hill overlooking Montevideo.
* Lazarus Morelclass="underline" This particular rogue's true name seems to have been John A. Murrell (Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain's America [Boston: Little, Brown, 1932], pp. 16-17 et seq.) or Murell (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, intra. James M. Cox [New York: Penguin, 1984 (orig. pubi, in United States by James R. Osgood in 1883)].) Interestingly, Twain never gives the rogue's first name; it is possible, then, that JLB, needing a name, took "Lazarus" to fit the ironic notion that Morell gave a second life to the slaves he freed.
* "I walked four days.. .my course for Natchez": Here Borges is quoting/translating fairly directly from Twain's Life on the Mississippi, pp. 214-215 (Penguined.cited in the note just above). Throughout this story, JLB inserts a phrase here, a sentence there from Twain, but then, when he says he is quoting, as in the case of the preaching and horse thieving, he is in reality inventing the quotation and imagining a scene that Twain only suggests.
The Widow Ching—Pirate
* Aixa's rebuke to Boabdiclass="underline" Boabdil isAbu Abdallah, the last Moorish king of Granada (r. 1482-1492); Aixa was his mother. The reproof that supposedly was given Boabdil by Aixa upon the Moors' defeat and expulsion from what had been Islamic Spain is substantially as Borges reports it here, and the words here given Anne Bonney are substantially those given in Gösse's History of Piracy, p. 203. (See the "Index of Sources" p. 64.) p. 21: Rules for pirates: These may actually be found, as quoted, but in a different order, in Gösse's History of Piracy, p.272. (See "Index of Sources," p. 64, for bibliographical information.) * Quotation on peace in the waters of China: Gosse, p.278. Note also that the widow's new name, while indeed given in Gosse, is attributed to another personage who learned a lesson from the emperor. This is but one of countless examples of the way JLB changes things, even dates, to fit his purposes, purposes that one must confess sometimes are enigmatic. Why change the date of Tom Castro's being found guilty from February 26 to February 27? Monk Eastman's death from December 26 to December 25? The spelling of Morell/Murrell/Murell's name? Here the theory of translation must needs be a theory of artistic creativity.
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
* Resigned: Borges uses this curious word, which I have not wanted to "interpret," apparently to indicate the fatedness, or ritual aspect, of this duel. It is as though the word indicated "resigned to fate." This aspect of violence, of duels, can be seen throughout Borges; I would especially refer the reader to the story titled "The Encounter," in the volume Brodie's Report, p. 364.
* Junin: Site of a famous battle in the wars of independence. The Battle of Junin took place in the then department of Peru; on August 6,1824, a cavalry engagement was fought between Simón Bolivar's nationalist forces and the royalist forces under José de Canterac. The tide was turning against the independence forces until the royalist rear was attacked by a force of Peruvian hussars under the command of Isidoro Suárez—one of JLB's forebears and a man who in varying degrees and under varying permutations lends his name to JLB's fictions. The royalists were routed.
* The Death of Monk Eastman: This story is taken, as JLB indicates, from Asbury's The Gangs of New York, generally pp. 274-298, but also, for the quotation about "nicks in his stick," p. xviii. Where JLB has clearly borrowed directly from Asbury and it has been possible to use Asbury's words, the translator has done so; in other cases, the translator has just borrowed the appropriate terminology, such as the "Mikado tuck-ups" and the "stuss" games.
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
* Always coiled and ready to strike: One of the sources that JLB gives for this story is Frederick Watson's A Century of Gunmen, though the truth is, there is not much there that JLB seems actually to have used. With, that is, the possible exception of this phrase, siempre aculebrado in the Spanish, which the translator has rendered conjecturally in this way. "Aculebrado," from the Spanish culebra, "snake," calls to mind in the native Spanish speaker the notion of "coiled, like a snake" and also of "snakelike, slithering." On page 77 of his book, Watson quotes an old western novel, which says this: "It's not the custom to war without fresh offence, openly given. You must not smile and shoot. You must not shoot an unarmed man, and you must not shoot an unwarned man.... The rattlesnake's code, to warn before he strikes, no better, [i.e., there's no better extant code for a man of the West] : a queer, lop-sided, topsy-turvy, jumbled and senseless code—but a code for all that." Thus it seems that JLB may have wanted to paint Billy the Kid as an even worse "varmint" than the rattlesnake, since the rattlesnake at least gives fair warning, unlike Billy, who, as we see in a moment, shoots the Mexican Villagrán before Villagran knows what's happening. Perhaps, in fact, that was what made Billy the Kid so dangerous—so dangerous that his friend Pat Garrison shot him in cold blood. But whatever JLB's motivation for this word, it is a very mysterious one to use here, however related to all the other animal imagery used throughout this volume.