This Craft of Verse

Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967–1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own “poetic creed,” Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the twentieth century will be long remembered.

Jorge Luis Borges is inarguably the most influential Latin-American essayist and short-story writer of our time. To spend a few hours in [his] company, even on the page, is a civilized entertainment not to be missed… [Borges] emphasizes the power of poetry to work its magic… I would have given a lot to have been at Harvard in the audience when this courtly man of letters looked ‘upward with gentle and shy expression on his face, seeming to materially touch the world of the texts’ and spoke about the poems and books he loved most., Anything written by Borges glows…with an unearthly light that transforms the world into a plushly furnished drawing room crammed with knicknacks and dusty, leather-bound volumes of arcana… Almost every casual aside from Borges suggests a book of its own; this one is a wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading., If few writers in history have been as prodigiously learned as Borges, certainly none wore their learning so lightly or humbly… [The lectures] display the eloquence and erudite, offhand wit familiar from his writings as well as a charming, plainspoken modesty., What’s most astonishing about these previously uncollected essays…is that for all their complexity and elusiveness they are oral performances. While Borges’s blindness is a major figure in his writing, the breadth and density of his rhetorical web obscures the fact that he has no notes to read, that he is calling these texts up from the inexhaustible abyss of his memory… In his decomposition of genres and styles, Borges provokes language to express this immanent word-magic, knitting his own pronouncements together with the primordial force of oral composition. Borges speaks on metaphor, bringing the tangled, sensuous allegories of San Juan de la Cruz into contact and concert with the cold, salty kennings of the Norse Eddas. He discusses translation with freshness and an uncanny sensitivity to the ligatures among the languages; he considers the narrative arc and the transformation of thought into poetry… As editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu puts it in his graceful afterword to this volume, ‘Literature,’ for Borges, ‘was a mode of experience.’, What if one of the giants of twentieth century literature rose from the dead and told you how he read and thought about poetry? The closest you may come to such a living-room epiphany is This Craft of Verse…a set of allocutions that, as one can hear on these four discs, delighted as much as dazzled their audience… Like reading his work, listening to Borges offers the opportunity to think, muse, and marvel… The chance to be in the auditorium while the nearly blind librarian of Babel speaks from his heart is a technological wonder that should not be missed.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was the author of Labyrinths and Ficciones, among other books. Calin-Andrei Mihailesu is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Western Ontario.