As the years go on, the book becomes scarcer and more expensive. (Amazon has one copy only, and that costs $699.99.) Soon the book – it is called ‘Borges’ by Bioy Casares – will be available only in some libraries. It is unlikely to be reprinted. As yet, there is no English-language edition, even though a translation from the Spanish in a shorter edition is promised.  

The book is 1,663 printed pages plus a 129-page index that is online.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is the subject of the book which is the diary his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) kept of their meetings in Buenos Aires between 1947 and Borges’s death. Both Borges and Bioy loved strange literary texts and elaborate ruses. Thus, they might be pleased, amused, perhaps even relieved, at how elusive this book – published in 2006 – has become, and how much the index looks like a vast hoax.

It is clear from the book that the two had well-stocked minds, high-toned prejudices, well-developed wit and plenty of time to spare.  

Jorge Luis Borges was brought up in Buenos Aires at a time when Argentina was one of the richest places in the world and the most self-consciously European of the South American countries. For him and his associates, the real world was elsewhere; they spoke and read French and English, and in their imagination they belonged to Europe. But when they lifted their heads from books, or came back from abroad, they were in, what they believed, was a half-finished place, and they had no intention of becoming chroniclers of their half-formed time or their badly-formed country.

They wanted to make their own time and their own country. They believed that you cannot write social realism, whatever that is, in an underdeveloped country. But they also believed that you cannot write social realism, whatever that is, at all.

Borges' best work, written in the 1940s, has not dated. He is, in certain ways, close to the Jonathan Swift of ‘Gulliver's Travels.’ He lived far from the centre of things, and in his work he mocked common ideas of time or truth. He mimicked the language of reportage, using a tone which was po-faced, dry and factual to describe invented worlds and systems. He was also a poet, and sometimes in his best stories he found exquisite images which soared above the jokes or games (or often whimsy) with which he began.

His stories are short, and short on characters or plots. He preferred stories within stories than actual stories. His Irish-themed story ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ tells of how a leader like Parnell is found to be a traitor and his punishment is to have a staged assassination, and the planning of this is based on moments in ‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Macbeth.’

In Borges’s story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’ Pierre Menard writes ‘Don Quixote’ using exactly the same words as Cervantes, but, of course, as the story points out, these are entirely different books, since Menard's was written three hundred years after Cervantes'.

Borges’s prose style is precise and measured, but often he throws in a word or a phrase or a whole passage which is startling and unsettling. He is, like Nabokov, capable of inventing an archly superior and rather pompous comic voice. He is also capable of writing deliberately as though his sentences were translations. And all of this has proved a nightmare for his translators: how to balance the Latinate precision, the sense of mystery and magic and the playful awkwardness?

‘The Circular Ruins’ is perhaps Borges' most perfect story; it is an account of a man dreaming another man into existence. It is told in detail, and even in translation it takes you over. Borges wants you to relish the mystery and the strangeness of this, but also to half-believe it. Thus, the story moves between moments of pure metaphysics but also solid physical descriptions of a man coming into being.

Our hero begins to dream a heart. Borges' Spanish reads: "Lo soñó activo, caluroso, secreto, del grandor de un puño cerrado, color granate en la penumbra de un cuerpo humano aún sin cara ní sexo." This reads in Anthony Kerrigan's translation: ‘He dreamt it active, warm, secret, the size of a closed fist, garnet-coloured in the half-light of a human body that boasted as yet no sex or face.’ According to James E. Irby's translation, it reads: ‘He dreamt it as active, warm, secret, the size of a closed fist, of garnet colour in the penumbra of the human body as yet without face or sex.’ In the translation by Andrew Hurley, it reads: ‘He dreamt the heart warm, active, secret - about the size of a closed fist, a garnet-coloured thing inside the dimness of a human body that was still faceless and sexless.’

The ‘half-light’, the ‘penumbra’, the ‘dimness’, who can decide?

It is a dream-heart, but maybe it has elements of a real-heart coming into being.

*

A quarter of a century ago, you could find old copies of the literary magazine Sur in the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires on a Sunday morning. Sur, appearing between 1931 and 1992, was funded and edited, for most of its life, by Bioy Casares’s sister-in-law Victoria Ocampo. It is where some of the short fiction written by Borges and Bioy Casares was first published.

One day in Buenos Aires in the spring of 1998 a friend invited me to lunch with Bioy Casares, who was in his early eighties. Soon, I discovered why the great old writer had agreed to this. He was a man of the old school – old money and old literary values. He was, he explained when he sat at the table in a restaurant near La Rocoleta cemetery, considering changing his English bookseller from Hatchards to Blackwell’s or vice versa.

Every few months, it seemed, for many years, he got a package of the best new books chosen by a bookseller in England. They were carefully selected for a man of high and exquisite taste, with a dislike of the banal.

When I explained how books could now be found on the internet, Bioy waved his hand in disapproval. No, he wanted a bookseller. He had one in Spain, in France, in Germany and in Italy. He read all those languages as well as English. His parents had also collected books in many languages. He was an only child and had inherited their collection.

When I asked him if he ever had trouble finding a book in his collection, he sighed. It was as though the great weight of the world had descended on him.

‘Yes, it is hard,’ he said in a low melancholy tone. ‘Some people say that I have the largest personal library in South America.’

For a second, I imagined the Argentine pampa stretching vastly towards the Andes, nine feet of top soil, the most fertile land in the world. Bioy’s family had owned vast tracts of this. I imagined the borderlands between Paraguay and Brazil, between Brazil and Bolivia. I let my mind range into Chile towards the Atacama Desert and then up into Peru and Ecuador towards the Amazon basin. As I dreamed, I saw no bookcases and no bookshops, no books coming in the post, no old gentleman sitting by lamplight reading a poem, no young woman with the latest novel.

I imagined then, in an apartment near where we had lunch, what the largest personal library in South America might look like, its scattered vastness, its sheer untidiness and then rooms of neatly stacked bookcases, with some space left for the future.

I told Bioy Caseres that I had been buying copies of Sur, with the aim of having as complete a set as I could. Bioy replied that I might be alone in this; no one, especially in Argentina, had ever wanted the magazine and Victoria Ocampo had ruined herself paying for it.

His tone grew stern as he spoke. In fact, he said, the only time when any of the literary magazines sold in Argentina was a small magazine, brought out by Bioy himself and Borges. They sold it, he remembered, outside a polo ground on a wet day, and all the Argentines bought it because they needed something dry to put on their seats to protect their nice clothes from the rain.

‘We sold many, many copies that day,’ he said ruefully.

Even then, in his earlier eighties, Bioy was remarkably handsome – tall, with clear blue eyes. Unlike his friend Borges, he never had trouble finding love. In 1940, Bioy married the writer Silvina Ocampo, twelve years his senior, who was a close friend of his mother’s. Borges, after much rejection and disappointment, finally found happiness with Maria Kodama whom he met in the 1970s.

*

In June 1982 when Borges and Kodama came to Dublin at the invitation of the Irish government to be in the city at the time of the Joyce centenary, they stayed at the Shelbourne Hotel.

Upstairs in his large bedroom overlooking Stephen’s Green, Borges spoke with relish and enthusiasm about Robert Louis Stevenson and quoted his poem about the sailor being home from the sea. He marvelled at the idea that Shakespeare wrote: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ rather than ‘made of.’

Then, as though out of the blue, someone fresh from the real world came into the room and announced that the Malvinas War had ended – it was now 15 June 1982 – and I left Borges to be interviewed by serious journalists.

In the lounge of the hotel downstairs Maria Kodama was having tea with Anthony Cronin. In the course of the conversation, very gently and tactfully, Cronin asked Kodama if Borges had ever seen her.

‘No,’ she said sadly, ‘he was already blind when we met. He has never seen me.’

*

Both Borges and Bioy had housekeepers who wrote books about them. Bioy’s housekeeper Jovina Iglesias, it must be said, was a better writer than Borges’s housekeeper, Epifanía Uveda de Robledo, also known as Fanny.

Silvina Ocampo, according to Jovina, believed that her maid had magical powers, and every time she sent one of her manuscripts or a manuscript by Bioy to the publishers she would make Jovina touch the pages to give them luck.

The Bioys’ apartment had twenty-two rooms.

‘Los Bioy’, the book by Jovina, awaits its English translation.

Bioy played tennis in the mornings, according to Jovina, conducted his love affairs in the afternoon and then settled down to literary matters in the evening, usually having supper with his wife and Borges. When, after supper, he and Borges collaborated on their books, Jovina noticed that they roared with laughter.

‘Borges’, then, this big book by Bioy, is partly an account of what they were laughing at.

The diary entries often begin with a simple sentence that lets us know that Borges came to supper. And then the talk begins. On Tuesday 3 November 1959, for example, Borges reports on a meeting with a German diplomat who insisted that Bach’s ‘St Matthew’s Passion’ was the greatest German work, greater than Goethe’s ‘Faust’. Borges quoted Chesterton to him – Borges and Bioy never tired of talking about G.K. Chesterton – to say that Grimm’s Fairy Tales are better than ‘Faust.’ Bioy then interrupts: ‘The Faust myth is idiotic.’

And they discuss this for a while before moving on to the matter of India, quoting Goethe on India, and thinking about Indians who loved England, and then moving on to consider the pressures on the Argentine writer.

Two days later all Bioy says is that Borges came for supper. 

Then, three days later, a further supper. And Borges says that he has to give a talk on Schiller. ‘I am really curious to know what I will say,’ he says. ‘Nothing occurs to me.’

There are certain writers – Conrad, Stevenson, Henry James, Wilkie Collins – they come back to over and over in their conversations. And of course Shakespeare and Cervantes and Coleridge and Calderón.

One of my friends in Buenos Aires was the novelist and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky, who died earlier this year. I find him in this book, aged twenty-three, having supper with Borges and Bioy and reading some poems by Emily Dickinson. Borges admits to hardly knowing her work.

Borges has dreams: ‘I dreamt that I was in a lift and I couldn’t find the button to press for my floor. And then I thought: since I am in my bed, dreaming, why does it matter that I can’t find the button. And then I went on sleeping.’

By 1970, Bioy notices Borges ageing: Borges doesn’t hear what is not said to him directly. He delays getting involved in the conversation. Three years later – Borges is now seventy-four – Borges has a dream in which he begins a sentence that he can’t finish. When he wakes, he still can’t finish the sentence. 

In 1974, Borges remembered that his father used to say that one single word in the Gospels that was favourable to animals would have saved them thousands of years of ill-treatment, but it is useless to search for it, he added, it isn’t there.

Borges and Bioy were much preoccupied by Joyce, Borges wondering if anyone could ever say ‘the wine-dark sea’ again with any degree of seriousness or if it had been, in fact, destroyed by Joyce’s ‘the snot-green sea’. In March 1965, Borges expressed the view that ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ would never have been noticed if Joyce had not subsequently written ‘Ulysses’, and that it showed Joyce’s inability to write a novel, to imagine characters and invent a plot. Of ‘Finnegans Wake’, Borges said: ‘It is a book that many people will have purchased but probably no one will have read beyond the first few pages. It looks like you have to read the entire book simultaneously, all at the same time. How to do that one does not know. Maybe God might be able to do it.’ 

Borges was never fully convinced by ‘Ulysses’. ‘A work of art has to be selective; I don’t think accumulation is the best method. Except that his memories of Dublin must have amused him, they would be like our memories of Buenos Aires. He amused himself putting it all in a book.’

Borges was fascinated at the idea that W.B. Yeats was tone deaf. And he is a bit surprised at how Yeats ignored the carnage in the First World War but got so upset over the execution ‘of four or five Irishmen’ after the Rising. Borges was under the impression that the British shot Roger Casement. (In fact, as we know, they hanged him.)

Borges is uneasy about the stories of Henry James, wondering if they are not too schematic. He prefers the stories of Kipling and Conrad that seem to have three dimensions, rather than James’s two dimensions. He wonders what books James might have read, wondering if he read ‘very bad English novels.’

They then go on to discuss Kafka.

James, Borges and Bioy agree, knew more about his characters and their milieu than he put into the story, but Kafka was different, they say, Kafka thought in parables. He did not know anything more than what he put in the text. ‘His theme was man’s relationship to God and to an incomprehensible cosmos.’ Borges’s father, he told Bioy, said that there were people, such as the Argentine gauchos, that were only able to think in images, and the famous parables in the New Testament prove that Christ was also one of those people.’

Literary Buenos Aires was a small, unmannerly place. Most of the time Borges and Bioy rose above it. But they had their enemies, and when these writers were mentioned, their vitriol knew no bounds. This is Bioy in 1956 on the subject of Ernesto Sabato (1911-2011) whose most famous novel is ‘The Tunnel’: ‘Sabato…will disappear, leaving no trace, after his death. The case of Sabato is curious: he has written little but the little is so vulgar that it overwhelms us as if it were a copious body of work.’

Sometimes there is a startling sentence. On Sunday 10 January 1971, Bioy begins as usual: Borges comes to supper. And then, he writes: ‘We translate Macbeth’ followed by (in the original Spanish) ‘cabeceando entre endecasílabo y endecasílabo’ which could be translated as ‘veering’ (or maybe ‘nodding’ or maybe there is a better translation) between ‘hendecasyllable and hendecasyllable’ - a hendecasyllabic line in poetry having eleven syllables.

So, this is how they lived then, these two literary men. The last page of ‘Borges’ is dated 1989, three years after Borges’s death. As often happens in these pages, it is hard to know how seriously to take Bioy. He was, at times, ironic and ready to amuse himself. 

He says that Borges died saying the ‘Our Father’ ‘first in Anglo-Saxon, then in Old English, in English, in French and in Spanish.’

It’s such a lovely image that it hardly matters whether it is true or not.

And the house in Geneva where Borges died, Bioy adds, does not have a number, the street itself does not have a name, ‘but it has a key, which is also the key to the house.’

Thus, he comes to the end of his long journey with his old friend.

 Colm Tóibín (August 2024)