Borges the Poet

Ed. Carlos Cortinez

Fayetteville: The University of
Arkansas Press, 1986

MARiA KODAMA

Marfa Kodama I 171

search has often been attempted in the East, particularly in Japan and in
the West, and particularly in Borges.
In the West, literature begins with the epic, with poems which
throughout Europe tell the tales of heroes in hundreds and hundreds of
lines. A perfect expression is found in the famous beginning of Virgil's
Aeneid: "Arma virumque cano." "Arms and the man I sing," as Dryden
translated. The mind accepts the word arms" immediately; it refers, of
course, to the deeds of man. In the West those poems throughout the
centuries grow briefer and briefer until they reach the avant-garde
schools, among them Ultraism. In the case of Spanish literature this generated some of the most important changes since the introduction of the
Italian sonnet by Garcilaso, not so much by itself, but by the changes
wrought by its impulse.
Borges' career began with a flirtation with Ultraism, and then followed in his own personal way, a way that led him, in a wide circle, to
Japan. He, the maker, even as God Himself, sought what is essential
to all poetry and especially to Japanese poetry. Japanese poetry tries to
carve into a few precious lines of seventeen syllables the meeting of time
and space in a single point. The maker, even as God Himself tries to
abolish succession in space.
In his own way Borges has tried to express the same wish in the foreword to his Historia de Ia Eternidad (1936):
/I

Oriental Influences in Borges' Poetry: The Nature

of the Haiku and Western Literature

In the foreword to his Collected Writings (1969), and in other works,

Borges has expressed many judgments on poetry and style which indicate the way he gradually assumed the essential poetic forms of the Japanese tanka and haiku. He attempted those two forms for the first time in
El Oro de los Tigres (1972) and in La Cifra (1981). Borges began his prologue to the Collected Writings by claiming: "I have not rewritten the
book. I have toned down its Baroque excesses, I have trimmed rough
edges, I have blotted out sentimental verses and vagueness and, in the
course of this labor sometimes pleasing and sometimes annoying, I have
felt that the young man who in 1923 wrote those pages was essentiallywhat does essentially mean?-the elderly gentleman who now resigns
himself to what he penned or emends it. We are both the same; we both
disbelieve in success and in failure, in literary schools and in their dogmas; we both are true to Schopenhauer, to Stevenson and to Whitman.
In my opinion, Fervor de Buenos Aires foreshadows all that came afterwards." He ends by saying: "In those days, I sought sunsets, outlying
slums and unhappiness; now, mornings, downtown, and serenity."
These words express not only the writer's feelings on his work, and
on himself, but reflect also an essential search, foreshadowed as he tells
us, from the beginning. This search, or attempt, is the oldest in the
world. It began with Homer, and will continue as long as men write. Its
aim is to discover with the utmost formal rigor the center, eternity. This

I don't know how on earth I compared to 'stiff museum pieces' the archetypes
of Plato and how I failed to understand, reading Schopenhauer and Scotus
Erigena, that they are living, powerful and organic. Movement, the occupation of
different places in different moments is inconceivable without time; so is immobility, the occupation of the same place in different points of time. How could I
not perceive that eternity, sought and beloved by so many poets, is a splendid
artifice, that sets us free, though for a moment, of the unbearable burden of successive things.

In The Aleph (1949) he also says:

The Aleph's diameter must have been two or three inches, but Cosmic Space
was therein, without diminution of size. Each object (the mirror's glass, for instance) was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all points in the universe ...
I saw the Aleph from all points; I saw the earth in the Aleph . . . I saw my face
and entrails . . . and felt dizziness and wept because my eyes had seen that conjectural and secret object whose name men take in vain but which no man has

172 I Borges the Poet

looked on: the inconceivable universe. I felt infinite veneration, infinite pity ...
For the Kaballah, this letter the En-Sof, the limitless and pure God Head . . .

These ideological elements form converging aspects sympathetic to

the intent of Japanese poetry, which must be examined in some detail in
order to understand both its poetic patterns and their purpose.
As in the case of Western literature, Japanese literature begins by
groping its way. The task of finding a precise date for the birth of regular
forms in prose and verse is not an easy one. The earliest example is the
Kojiki, a record of ancient matters, compiled circa A. D. 712. Afterwards
came the Nihon Shoki, a chronicle of Japan, A.D. 720. In the year A.D. 751
there appeared a compilation of Chinese verses written in Japan, the KaifUso: Fond Recollection of Poetry. Therein are found texts dating from the
last part of the seventh century. The Nara Period offers the first great anthology of poetry, the Manyoshti Collection of A Myriad Leaves. This
compilation was undertaken towards the end of the eighth century. In
the Kojiki and in the Nihon Shoki the length of the lines in the poems and
in the songs varies from three to nine syllables though even in this early
period we find the habit of repeating five and seven syllables. In the
Manyoshii the poems have already a fixed number of lines and the forms
are regular. The lines are invariably compounded of five and seven syllables passing from one to the other. An example is the poem in which
Prince Arima is getting ready for a journey:
Iwashiro no
Hamamatsu ga e wo
Hikimusubi
Masakiku araba
Mata kaerimimu.

On the beach of Iwashiro. I put the knot together. The branches of the pine. If my
fate turns out well, I shall return to see them again. This particular form of
thirty-one syllable poems in five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 each is the most
frequent and the most lasting of the three forms evolved in the Manyoshii Period. In Japanese poetry it is called tanka or waka. The other two
are the sedoka and the choka. The choka is a long poem with no limit to the
number of lines. The longest of these poems attains one hundred and
fifty lines. It passes, like the tanka, from 5 to 7 syllables ending in a line
of 7 syllables. It could also be completed by one or two or more hankas or
envoys written after the manner of tanka and summing up the subject of

Maria Kodama I 173

the whole poem. However, of all stanzas to be found in Japanese poetry,
the most congenial to the Japanese mind seems to be the tanka, since it
still survives, along with the haiku that is engendered by an evolution of
the tanka towards a greater brevity and a greater conclusion.
During the Manyii Period, poetry tended toward a private lyricism.
The tanka, however, underwent a considerable evolution, which ended
in a new form, the haiku. A crucial point was the transition of the caesura
or pause in the syntax. In the Manyu Period most tankas had their caesura after the second or the fourth line. The poem is thus divided into
three units of 5, 7 (12) and 5, 7 (12) and 7 syllables. This pattern hinders
the attempt to pass from a short line to a long one and is weakened by
the last short unit.
A verse from Hitomaro Kashii provides an example:
Hayabitono
Na ni ou yogoe
Ichishiroku
Waga na wa noritsu
Tsuma to tanomase.

Clear and loud as the night call of a man of Haya, I told my name. Trust me as
your wife. [The Haya, a southern Kyiishii tribe, famous for the clarity of
their voices, were employed at the Imperial Palace as watchmen. A
woman tells her name to signify her assent to a proposal of marriage.]
Towards the end of the Heian Period (794-1185) and in the Kamakura
Period (1185-1603), the caesura comes after the first and the third line.
The poem is thus divided into three longer units of 5, 12 and 14 syllables.
As an example the poem of Narihira is given, from the novel Ise Monogatari:
Tsuki ya aranu//
Haru ya mukashi no
Haru naranu//
Waga mi hitotsu wa
Moto no mi nishite.

Can it be the moon has changed, can it be that the spring is not the spring of old
times? Is it my body alone that is just the same? This division gave the poet a
greater freedom. It favoured the evolution of the imayo style, where the
12-syllable line had a caesura after the seventh. Far more important is
the fact that the second caesura is stronger than the first.

Marla Kodama I 175

174 I Borges the Poet

This latter style of tankn was divided into the two principal parts, the
first three lines and the last two lines (17 syllables and 14 syllables). From
this division came the form of linked verse, the renga, whose initial
stanza comprises three lines, the second two lines, the third three lines,
and so on. In due time, the initial stanza of the renga became independent and took the name of haiku. The curious fact that the season of the
year was always recorded or hinted at in those first three verses may have
favored the process. A mild surprise clung to it, a sudden enlightenment
akin to the satori of Zen Buddhism. This is the origin of haiku, which was
essentially in its beginning the old linked poem of the fourteenth century, ruled by the ideas and conventions peculiar to the tanka.
Basho (1644-1694) fixed forever the road of the haiku. Basho stated
that the haiku should use the common speech of men avoiding, let it be
understood, vulgarity. He abounded in images and words forbidden to
the tankn. Sparrows instead of nightingales; snails instead of flowers.
The poet should be "one with the crowd but his mind should always be
pure." He should use "common language and somehow make it into a
thing of beauty." He should feel pity for the frailness of all things created
and feel keenly Sabi, a word that stands for solitude, for lonely sadness,
and for the melancholy of nature. Above all, he should so express the
nature of the particular as to define, through it, the essence of all creation. His seventeen syllables should capture a vision of the nature of the
world.
The best example of this teaching is his famous haiku:
Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizuno oto.

An old pond. A frog jumps in, sound of water. First, we have something
changeless, the pond, then something quick and moving, the frog, and
lastly the splashing water, which is the point where both meet.
In an examination of Borges' poem "Un Patio" from Fervor de Buenos
Aires (1923), we find many elements in common, metrics apart.
With evening
the two or three colors of the patio grew weary.
The huge candor of the full moon
no longer enchants its usual fmnament.
Patio: heaven's watercourse.

The patio is the slope

down which the sky flows into the house.
Serenely
eternity waits at the crossway of the stars.
It is lovely to live in the dark friendliness
of covered entrance way, arbor, and wellhead.
[trans. Robert Fitzgerald]

Unknowingly, this poem follows the indications of Bash6.

How could a South American poet, aft~r so many centuries, attain
the very essence of the haiku? A possible explanation may be found in the
fact that the essence of poetry is timeless and universal and when a
writer attains it, as in the case of the Greek tragic poets, the achievement
has no ending. An altogether different clue may be given us by Borges'
childhood. His paternal grandmother was English, knew her Bible by
heart and was continually quoting from it. I have been told that she
could recite chapter and verse for any sentence in the Holy Writ. After
Grimm, Borges read and reread the Arabian Nights in an English version
and then went on to a now forgotten book, Fairy Tales from Old Japan by
Mitford, an American scholar. During the first World War, the works of
Schopenhauer sent him to the study of Buddhism. Borges explored with
eagerness the books of Hermann Oldenberg on the Buddha and his
teaching. These many interests gave him an open mind, a hospitable
mind, sensitive to the most different cultures. Thus unaware of his path,
he followed the century-old road of Japanese poetry towards the discovery of the haiku. Things done unconsciously are done well, and writers
should not watch too closely what they are writing. If they do, the dream
betrays them.
In the early 1970s, Borges deliberately undertook the composition of
tankns and crowned that attempt in the 198os with the composition of
haikus. The stanza has seventeen syllables; Borges wrote seventeen
haikus. Some may be chosen and examined more closely. The form will
not be taken into account, since seventeen Spanish or English syllables
may not be heard as seventeen syllables by an Oriental ear and vice
versa. Japanese verse is meant not only to be heard but to be seen; the
kanjis make a pattern that should be pleasant and moving to the eye. This
kind of picture is unfortunately lost in a Western translation.
The haiku may be defined as an ascetic art. The ascesis is by far the
most important element and the most difficult to attain. Therein we find

176 I Borges the Poet

a fundamental difference between East and West. Ascesis, in the West, is

a mean towards an end. We instinctively think of passing from pleasure
to suffering; from happiness to sanctity. In the East, ascesis is an end in
itself and therefore stands in no need of explanation or justification.
Strangely enough, the rigor of ascesis is linked in the East to art. In the
West, art passes from life to artifice, from the simple to the complex. The
haiku is as near to life and nature as it can be and as far as it can be from
literature and a high flown style. This ascesis is the reverse of vulgarity.
The chief contribution of Japan to world literature is a pure poetry of
sensations, found only partially in Western letters. The great difference
between the haiku and western poetry is this material, physical, immediate character. It is an exaltation of the flesh, not of the sexual. In the haiku
we find blended in equal proportions, poetry and physical sensation,
matter and mind, the creator and creation. The choice of subjects is significant; war, sex, poisonous plants, wild animals, sickness, earthquakes, that is to say all things dangerous or threatening to life, are left
out. Man should forget those evils if he aspires to live a life of mental
health. The art of haiku rejects ugliness, hatred, lying, sentimentality
and vulgarity. Zen, on the other hand, accepts those evils, since they are
part of the universe. The heat of a summer day, the smoothness of a
stone, the whiteness of a crane are beyond all thought, emotion or
beauty which the haiku tries to capture. Japanese literature, with particular regard to the haiku, is not a mystic one. The haiku is, of all artistic
forms, perhaps the most ambitious. In seventeen syllables it grasps, or
tries to grasp, reality. Intellectual and moral elements are ruled out.
The haiku has nothing in common with Good, Evil or Beauty. It is a
kind of thinking through our senses; the haiku is not a symbol. It is not a
picture with a meaning pinned on its back. When Basho says that we
should look for the pine in the pine and for the bamboo in the bamboo,
he means that we should transcend ourselves and learn. To learn is to
sink into the object until its inner nature is revealed to us and awakens
our poetic impulse. Thus a falling leaf is not a token or symbol of autumn, or a part of autumn; it is autumn itself.
Here is a haiku by Borges and another by Kito, Buson's disciple:
Hoy no me alegran
los almendros del huerto.
Son tu recuerdo.

Maria Kodama I 177

The almond blossoms hold no cheer for me today; they are but your memory. Kito
wrote:
Yii-gasumi
Omoeba hedatsu
Mukashi kana.

The mists of evening when I think of them, far off are days of long ago. In the
last poem the mist of evening reminds him of days past. The dim twilight
is akin to the dim past. For Borges the almond blossoms bring back a
happy, and perhaps recent past. The starting point of both pieces is
nature. In another haiku Borges says:
Desde aquel dia
no he movido las piezas
en el tablero.

Since that day I've not moved the pieces on the chessboard. And Shiki's haiku
expressed a similar thought:
Kimi matsu ya
Mata kogarashi no
Arne ni naru.

Are you still waiting? Once more penetrating blasts turn into cold rain. Shiki
looks back on a woman who may still be expecting him. Her (or his)
loneliness may be hinted at by the penetrating blasts of wind and rain.
Solitude is also the theme of the Borges haiku. The lonely chessboard
stands for the lonely man. In this haiku, solitude is the solitude of the
poet; in Shiki's haiku solitude is the solitude of the other.
In another haiku, Borges suggests:
Algo me han dicho
la tarde y Ia montana.
Ya lo he perdido.

The evening and the mountain have told me something; I have already lost it.
Teishitsu (1610-1673) also composed a similar idea:
Kore wa kore wa
To bakari, hana no
Yoshino-yama.

My, oh my! No more could I say; viewing flowers on Mount Yoshino. Teishitsu
is overwhelmed by a powerful beauty that he cannot describe; in Borges'

Maria Kodama I 179

178 I Borges the Poet

case a revelation has been given him by a fleeting moment, a revelation

that he is unable to express.
Further, Borges writes:
El hombre ha muerto.
La barba no lo sabe.
Crecen las unas.

The man is dead. The beard is unaware of it. His nails keep growing. Which is
similar to the composition by Bash6 (1644-1649), who wrote:
Ie wa mina
Tsue ni shiraga no
Haka mairi.

All the family equipped with staves and greyhaired, visiting the graves. Death,
in Borges' haiku, is not represented as pathetic or memorable, sorrowful
or fatal, but rather as disgusting and strange, as a curious physical happening. In this particular haiku Borges fulfills a requisite we have already
noted; that the stanza is a meeting point of something everlasting, death,
and something going on for a while, such as the grim circumstance of
the growing beard and nails. Death in Basho's haiku is presented in a casually indirect way: the poet sees the family visiting graves and feels that
those old men and women will soon be dead. The theme of death was
forbidden to the writers of haiku; Basho, a follower of Zen Buddhism,
dared to use it.
The moon presents another image to Borges:
Bajo el alero
el espejo no copia
mas que Ia luna.

Under the eaves the mirror holds a single image. The moon.
This is complemented by an earlier haiku by Kikaku (1661-1707) who
composed:
Meigetsu ya!
Tatami no ue ni
Matsu no kage.

A brilliant full moon! On the matting of my floor shadows of pines fall. Kikaku
sets a picture before us. The shadows of the pines can be seen because

the moon is in the sky. In both poems solitude is signified by the full
moon, absence is the real subject of both, and a fleeting point of time is
held by the words. An image of eternity in the Japanese poem is in the
full moon; eternity in Borges' haiku is reflected in a quiet mirror.
The sense of loneliness may also be found in two other haikus by
Borges:
Bajo Ia luna
Ia sombra que se alarga
es una sola.

Under the moon the growing shadow is but a single one.

La luna nueva.
Ella tambien Ia mira
desde otra puerta.

The new moon. She too is gazing on her from another door.
Let us now compare a Western haiku and an Oriental one. First here
is one by Borges:
lEs un imperio
esa luz que se apaga
o una luciemaga?

This dying flash is it an empire or a firefly? Compare it to a haiku by Bash6:

Natsu-kusa ya!
Tsuwamono-domo ga
Yume no ato.

You summer grasses! Glorious dreams of great warriors now only ruins. The
subject of both poems is commonplace: the mortality of all things. We
should recall, by the way, Seneca's memorable sentence: Una nox fuit inter
urbem maximam et nullam, in which the last word speaks of the destruction of the entire city. The two haikus quoted express the futility of all
human endeavours.
Next we might look at this haiku by Borges:
La vieja mano
sigue trazando versos
para el olvido.

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I Borges the Poet

This old hand goes on writing verses for oblivion. A haiku by }oso is complementary:
Nomoyamamo
Yuki ni torarete
Nani mo nashi.

Both plains and mountains have been captured by the snow. There is nothing
left. Joso (1662-1704) was one of the ten special disciples of Basho and a
follower of Zen Buddhism. He tells us that nothing lasts. Even the mountains and their strength are blotted out by the most immaterial things
such as snow. In Borges' haiku, the haiku itself is written for final and
relentless oblivion.
Two other haikus are presented for comparison. Borges writes:
La vasta noche

no es ahora otra cosa

que una fragancia.

The endless night is now but a fragrance. And the poet Mokudo (1665-1723)
wrote:
Haru-kaze ya!
Mugi no naka yuku
Mizuno oto.
A gentle spring breeze! Through green barley plants rushes the sound of water.
Perhaps this last haiku by Borges is one of his best. The poem refers to a
single instant where the unseen night reveals herself to the poet. The last
line of Mokudo's haiku had been used already by his teacher Basho in his
most famous poem. Nobody thought of repetition as plagiarism; nobody thought in terms of personal vanity. The haiku is a splendid habit of
a whole country, not of an individual. It is considered that poetry in
Japan is a living thing, and every person from a laborer to the Emperor is
a poet.
In examining these poems it is necessary to ask if there is a certain
virtue common to all poetry in all ages and lands. The answer may be
sought in Borges' foreword to El Oro de los Tigres, that: "to a true poet
every single moment of his life, every deed or dream should be felt by
him as poetic, since essentially it is poetic" ... "Beauty is common in

Maria Kodama I

181

this world." In the foreword to El Otro, El Mismo Borges tells us that "the
fate of a writer is very strange. At the beginning he is Baroque, insolently
Baroque; aftger long years he may attain, if the stars are auspicious, not
simplicity, which is meaningless, but a shy and secret complexity." This
is the way of the haiku. The brief haiku is the apex of a vast pyramid.

BORGES the Poet

Edited

by Carlos Cortfnez

The University of Arkansas Press

Fayetteville 1986