* "Chacabuco and junin and Palma Redondo and Caseros": Battles in the wars of independence of the countries of the Southern Cone.
The Yellow Rose
* Porpora de' giardin, pompa de' prato, I Gemma dì primavera, occhio d'aprile... : These lines are from a poem, L'Adone, written by Marino (1569-1625) himself (III:i58,11.1-2).
Martín Fierro
* Ituzaingó or Ayacucho: Battles (1827 and 1824 respectively) in the wars of independence against Spain.
* Peaches... a young boy... the heads of Unitarians, their beards bloody: This terrible image captures the cruelty and horror of the civil war that racked Argentina in the early nineteenth century, and the brutality with which the Federalists, when they were in power under Rosas, persecuted and terrorized the Unitarians. In other stories the translator has noted that slitting throats was the preferred method of dispatching captured opponents and the wounded of battles; here the opponents are decapitated. Making this all the more horrific is the fact that it was JLB's maternal grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, who as a child witnessed this scene. In JLB: Selected Poems 1923-1967 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 316, the editor quotes Borges (without further citation): "One day, at the age of nine or ten, he [Isidoro Acevedo] walked by the Plata Market. It was in the time of Rosas. Two gaucho teamsters were hawking peaches. He lifted the canvas covering the fruit, and there were the decapitated heads of Unitarians, with blood-stained beards and wide-open eyes. He ran home, climbed up into the grapevine growing in the back patio, and it was only later that night that he could bring himself to tell what he had seen in the morning. In time, he was to see many things during the civil wars, but none ever left so deep an impression on him."
* A man who knew all the words ... metaphors of metal... the shapes of its moon: This is probably Leopoldo Lugones. See the note, above, to the foreword to The Maker, p. 291.
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
* "My Lord Jesus Christ, ... is this, indeed, Thy likeness in such fashion wrought?": Borges is translating Dante, Paradiso, XXXI: 108-109; in English, the lines read as given. Quoted from The Portable Dante, ed. Paolo Milano, Paradiso, trans. Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) (New York: Penguin, 1975 [orig. copyright, 1947]), p. 532.
Everything and Nothing
* Title: In italics here because the story was tided originally in this way by JLB, in English.
Ragnarök
* PedroHenríquez Ureña: Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), originally from the Dominican Republic, lived for years in Buenos Aires and was an early contributor to Sur, the magazine dial Victoria Ocampo founded and that JLB assiduously worked on. It was through Henríquez Ureña, who had lived for a time in Mexico City, dial JLB met another friend, the Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes. Henríquez Ureña and JLB collaborated on die Antología de la literatura argentina(1937), and diey were very close friends.
In Memoriam, J. F. K.
* Avelino Arredondo: The assassin, as the story says, of the president of Uruguay, Juan Idiarte Borda (1844-1897). See the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume The Book of Sand.
Notes to In Praise of Darkness
Foreword
* Ascasubi: Hilario Ascasubi (1807-1875) was a prolific, if not always successful, writer of gaucho poetry and prose. (The Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hispano-Americana gives several tides of little magazines begun by Ascasubi that didn't last beyond the first number.) He was a fervid opponent of the Rosas regime and was jailed for his opposition, escaping in 1832 to Uruguay. There and in Paris he produced most of his work.
Pedro Salvadores
* A dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). In Borges, Rosas is variously called "the tyrant" and "the dictator"; as leader of the Federalist party he ruled Argentina under an iron hand for almost two decades, from 1835 to 1852. Thus the "vast shadow," which cast its pall especially over the mostly urban, mostly professional (and generally landowning) members of the Unitarian party, such as, here, Pedro Salvadores. Rosas confiscated lands and property belonging to the Unitarians in order to finance his campaigns and systematically harassed and even assassinated Unitarian party members.
* Battle of Monte Caseros: At this battle, in 1852, Rosas was defeated by forces commanded by Justo José Urquiza, and his tyranny ended.
* Unitarian party: The Unitarian party was a Buenos Aires-based party whose leaders tended to be European-educated liberals who wished to unite Argentina's several regions and economies (the Argentinian Confederation) into a single nation and wished also to unite that new Argentine economy with Europe's, through expanded exports: hence the party's name. The party's color was sky blue; thus the detail, later in the story, of the "sky blue china" in Pedro Salvadores' house.
* They lived ... on Calle Suipacha, not far from the corner of Temple: Thus, in what was at this time a northern suburb of Buenos Aires about a mile north of the Plazade Mayo. This area, later to become the Barrio Norte, was clearly respectable but not yet fashionable (as it was to become after the yellow fever outbreak of 1871 frightened the upper classes out of the area south of the Plaza de Mayo up into the more northern district).
* The tyrant's posse: The Mazorca (or "corn cob," so called to stress its agrarian rather than urban roots), Rosas' private army, or secret police. The Mazorca was beyond the control of the populace, the army, or any other institution, and it systematically terrorized Argentina during the Rosas years.
* Smashed all the sky blue china: The color of the china used in the house is the color symbolizing the Unitarian party (see above, note to p. 336) and denounces Salvadores as a follower.
Notes to Brodie's Report
Foreword
* "In the House of Suddhoo": Borges often drops hints as to where one might look to find clues not only to the story or essay in question but also to other stories or essays; he gives signposts to his own "intertextuality." In this case, the reader who looks at this Kipling story will find that there is a character in it named Bhagwan Dass; the name, and to a degree the character, reappear in "Blue Tigers," in the volume Shakespeare's Memory.
* Hormiga Negra:"The Black Ant,"a gaucho bandit. Borges includes a note on Hormiga Negrain his essay on Martín Fierro:"During the last years of the nineteenth century, Guillermo Hoyo, better known as the 'Black Ant,' a bandit from the department ofSan Nicolás, fought (according to the testimony of Eduardo Gutiérrez) with bolos [stones tied to the ends of rope] and knife" (Obras completas en colaboración[Buenos Aires: Emecé,1979], p.546, trans. A. H.).