From archive (archive)
Subject: SEVEN NIGHTS by Jorge Luis Borges
From: ecl@cbnewsj.ATT.COM (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Date: 1 Aug 89 16:56:37 GMT




		      SEVEN NIGHTS by Jorge Luis Borges
	       New Directions, 1984, ISBN 0-8112-0905-9, $6.95.
		      A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
		       Copyright 1989 Evelyn C. Leeper

     Anyone who knows me knows I'm not going to *not* recommend a Borges book,
and there are no surprises from me here.  Yes, I heartily recommend this
collection of seven lectures given by Borges in the summer of 1977 in Buenos
Aires.  The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from the literary (THE
DIVINE COMEDY and THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS) to the religious (Buddhism
and the Kabbalah) to nightmares, poetry, and blindness.

     THE DIVINE COMEDY is another favorite of mine, and so it is perhaps
natural than I would enjoy Borges's comments and get some new insights into
Dante.  (I recently found the cosmology of Dante--or of the Middle Ages in
general--reflected in a New Zealand fantasy film, THE NAVIGATOR, reinforcing
the idea of synchronicity if nothing else.)  On the other hand, I have never
really read any of THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS, yet I found his lecture
entertaining, enlightening, and intriguing enough to make me want to read
it.  I was particularly taken by a phrase of Juvenal's he quotes:  "ultra
Auroram et Gangem" ("beyond the dawn and the Ganges").  This phrase, for
Borges (and for me as well), somehow encapsulates the mysterious enchantment
that the Eastern world has for many of us raised in the Western world.

     Borges gives as good a *brief* summary of Buddhism as I have seen.
Certainly other works are better explanations, but they take considerably
more than Borges's eighteen pages.  (For example, Joseph Campbell discusses
Buddhism at length in his latest and last book, MYTHS TO LIVE BY.)
Similarly, Borges has studied the Kabbalah and manages to give a basic idea
of the philosophy and mysticism behind that work, and that perspective,
without taking volumes.

     Much of the poetry lecture refers to poems in Spanish, and this may be
a problem for readers who don't read Spanish.  There is often a translation
provided and many of the ideas that Borges discusses are independent of the
words, but depend more upon the images that the words draw.  Still, poetry
is a tricky form to transfer between languages and this may be the least
accessible of the lectures.

     Borges's blindness came on him gradually, and there is irony to the
fact that just about the time he was appointed the head of the Argentine
National Library he became too blind to read (could this have been a partial
inspiration for Rod Serling's "All the Time in the World"?).  But he talks
less about this irony than about the doors that his blindness opened for
him--the new languages he learned and the "role models" he followed.  He
doesn't call Milton and Homer role models, of course, but in his words one
senses a feeling of the student following the masters.

     This is, in short, a marvelous, poetic book.  Read it.

Evelyn C. Leeper   |   +1 201-957-2070   |   att!mtgzy!ecl or ecl@mtgzy.att.com