#45 Fri (8/5/22) - [OW] The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol

"La palabra habría sido en el principio un símbolo mágico, que la usura del tiempo desgastaría. La misión del poeta sería restituir a la palabra, siquiera de un modo parcial, su primitiva y ahora oculta virtud. Dos deberes tendría todo verso: comunicar un hecho preciso y tocarnos físicamente, como la cercanía del mar"

J.L.Borges en Prólogo a "La Rosa Profunda" (1975)

 

“The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force. All verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presence of the sea does."

J.L. Borges in Prologue to "La rosa profunda" (1975) (SP, 343-345, A.R.)

 

The passage continues in the next line; I have here an example from Virgil:

 

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt

 

After providing two more examples, he concludes, "Such verses move along their shifting path in the memory."

 

The passage quoted is from The Aeneid by Virgil, Book I, line 462.

It is described in some detail here, providing context and a translation:

 

According to one translator it is rendered as:

the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.

 

Denis Diderot, the Enlightment philosophe and author of the Encyclopédie discussed the passage as well:

 

One of the most beautiful verses of Virgil, and one of the most beautiful principles of imitative art, is the following:

sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.

 

One ought to write it above the entrance to the painter’s studio: ‘Here the unfortunate ones will find eyes that shed tears for them.’ (my translation, O.B.) 

The Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC, tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. Virgil fashioned the Aeneid into a compelling founding myth or national epic that tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic Wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues, and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes, and gods of Rome and Troy.

 

Borges in his San Martin Copybook (1929) includes a poem entitled "The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires."  Borges was also concerned with crafting a literary and cultural national identity for Argentina.

This poem includes the following phrase:

 

It was really a city block in my district - Palermo.

A whole square block, but set down in open country,

attended by dawns and rains and hard southeasters,

identical to that block which still stands in my neighborhood:

Guatemala - Serrano - Paraguay - Gurruchaga.

 

In so doing, he sets the foundation site of Buenos Aires in a specific city block in his home district, a district today in which a segment of Calle Serrano has been renamed Calle Jorge Luis Borges. (Google Maps indicates that this is a fairly unremarkable block in the city's fabric.)

{Here is the point at which chance intersects and creates a whole new trajectory, opening a new adjacent space simply because the wikipedia entry on The Aeneid also includes a section on Allegory and discusses something that, heretofore had not been apparent or integral. Borges was discussing the purpose or obligation of verse and the effect that Virgil's verse had, citing only one line, speaking to memory and mortality. We now launch into a new path in a parallel universe of dream and allegory.  Borges reappears again at the end of this path discussing Virgil in the context of dream and nightmare.}

 

Virgil's poem contains several allegories, one being the exit from the underworld:

    There are two gates of Sleep, one said to be of horn, whereby the true shades pass with ease, the other all white ivory agleam without a flaw, and yet false dreams are sent through this one by the ghost to the upper world. Anchises now, his last instructions given, took son and Sibyl and let them go by the Ivory Gate.
    — Book VI, lines 1211–1218, Fitzgerald trans. (emphasis added)

(Wiki) Aeneas' leaving the underworld through the gate of false dreams has been variously interpreted: one suggestion is that the passage simply refers to the time of day at which Aeneas returned to the world of the living; another is that it implies that all of Aeneas' actions in the remainder of the poem are somehow "false". In an extension of the latter interpretation, it has been suggested that Virgil is conveying that the history of the world since the foundation of Rome is but a lie. 

(Wiki) Dryden's translation gives us:

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;

Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn:

True visions thro' transparent horn arise;

Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies.

Of various things discoursing as he pass'd,

Anchises hither bends his steps at last.

Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd

His valiant offspring and divining guest.^[9]

Why Virgil has Aeneas return through the ivory gate (whence pass deluding lies) and not through that of horn is uncertain. Jorge Luis Borges accepted the view that, for Virgil, what we call reality is not in fact such; that Virgil may have considered the Platonic world of the archetypes to be the real world.  

Borges made this remark in a lecture that he gave in Buenos Aires in the mid-1970s on the subject of nightmares. The transcription of the lecture is included in English translation in Seven Nights (see pp. 30-31) and in Everything and Nothing (see p. 83).

Another explanation is that Virgil is thus indicating that what he has recounted is not to be taken as literal fact, not history but myth. Virgil is pictured between the Muse of History (Clio) and the Muse of Tragedy (Melpomene).  History, mother of truth...