Borges In Ireland, Where I Met Borges

At the age of nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish for a Buenos Aires newspaper. By the time he was 47 he was an ‘inspector of poultry and rabbits in the public markets’. When he was 71 Borges divorced his wife Elsa, and went home to live with his mother.

It’s known that Borges visited Ireland at least three times - in 1920, 1963 and 1971. There are two further visits posited by Michael Deerman in his study (Borges & The Romantic Present, OUP, 1992), said to have occurred in the years 1916 and 1979. Evidence for the second of these is scarce, and relies almost entirely on an account by the Irish poet Bryan Hardiman (who stayed with Samuel Beckett for most of the second half of the year), who claims that a blind Borges turned up (alone, apparently) at Beckett’s Paris apartment in early September, and after spending a couple of days talking, the two men undertook a journey by train and ferry to the port of Rosslare and the south east of Ireland. Anthony Cronin has remarked that he tended to believe the story as “people would go anywhere to get away from Hardiman - even to Rosslare”. But the account is broadly unconvincing. There are some good reasons however to believe that a seventeen year old Borges was indeed in Dublin during the Easter Rising. For a detailed assessment of the evidence on both sides, see Rafael Viola, A Path Through Borges, NIN, 1998.

It was, famously, the visit in 1920 which had such a profound effect on a twenty one year old Borges. He lived in a small shack outside the town of Kilrush, Co. Clare for three months in the middle of the year. It was here that he was witness to the killing of Charles Mitchel and Maurice O’Doherty, shot as informers, and to the actions of the Black ‘n’ Tans. He also spent time in Mayo and Roscommon (where he met Herbert Quain, whom he was later to write about in The Garden Of Forking Paths) and in Monaghan, where conversations with Martin Healy (continued by letter after Borges’ return to Argentina) find eventual expression in both Theme Of The Traitor And Hero and Three Versions Of Judas.

Borges wrote often about Ireland. Or, rather, he often employed Ireland as a platform upon which he was comfortable building certain structures, often concerning violence and betrayal and confusion. His most popular “Irish” story (at least in Argentina, where it is published, even now, with remarkable regularity), is The Mirror And The Mask in The Book Of Sand. It tells of the poet and the king after the Battle Of Clontarf, and of how each somehow reduces the other over the course of three years, through language and gift, culminating in the king's presentation of a mobile phone, and the poet’s composition of a one line text which he whispers to the king and refuses to repeat. The story ends :

Of the poet, we know that he killed himself when he left the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar who wanders the roads of Ireland, which once was his kingdom, and that he has never spoken the poem again.

When my father met Borges in 1963, Borges told him that there was nothing in the world that was not in Ireland. My father told him that was not true and that Borges was confusing his own head for the world. Borges liked that.

In 1971 he came to our house and shook my hand. He told me, very solemnly, that I (a five year old who had not thought of being anything other than an astronaut) should not try to be a writer. “It will only drive you away from your home” he said. “And your home is in Ireland.” I found him very scary. I could see up his nose.

A street was named for Borges in Kilrush in 1999, and
since then an apartment development near the town’s
new marina has been named “The Garden Of Fecking Paths”. Borges features prominently on the school curriculum, and his work is widely read and much cherished by Irish people. Ask any Irish woman or man to tell you what they know of Borges and they are most likely to immediately recite, in full, Anthony Kerrigan's translation of The End, which all Irish children learn in National School. Ficciones is the best selling book by a foreign author in Irish history having outsold even The DaVinci Code by some considerable amount. In 2011, the new International Prestige Gold U2 Tower Of Gold in Dublin is due to open, with its entire 113th floor given over to a labyrinth/restaurant to be called “The Library Of Bono”.

Dublin’s School For The Blind opened a Borges Wing in 2006. The opening was attended by both the Argentinean Ambassador and my father, who makes an excellent living all over Ireland these days as a Borges look-a-like.