with Borges at the Arcade...

     One Jonathan Mayhew offers some brief remarks on Jorge Luis Borges. The old man was given to certain quasi-platonic notions, and Mayhew alights on one in particular: Borges came to more and more relativize the given words of a poem as though they were shadows, if you will, of their archetype. As Mayhew notes, Borges came to think that Quevedo never found his archetype, and so his poetry became mere verbal virtuosity.
     I have many times written in ER of how a poet's job is to find out 'what the poem wants to be'. In formal terms, this simply means that you cannot force a ballade to be a sonnet to be a run of rhyming couplets. In short, a well-made poem will have an inevitability about it - try to imagine Paradise Lost in rhyme royale stanzas, for instance, or Shakespeare's sonnet 119 as a rondel. At a more minute level, this implies that the order of the words themselves within any given line, and the syntactical structures cutting across lines, will have a similar inevitability to them. To my mind, this is because the poet found the form and the music and all the other attendant details that allowed the made thing, the poem, to become what it was meant to be. It's like sculptor finding the form in a block of marble. I do much wonder, however, if this bears any resemblance to Borges's notion.
     Mayhew aptly says that certain lines have a 'chiseled quality'. Rather than being the slippery, provisional arrangement of sounds to approximate an archetype, such lines, indeed such poems, are themselves the archetypes for all the many and various translators that must move 'em from one language to another. For Borges, all poems, even the 'originals', become translations of a sort; for Mayhew, and for me, this just doesn't make sense. And yet, and yet, I must wonder again at the origin of that sense of rightness, that sense of a poem being chiseled into form.
     We're treading here into territory marked by Plato's epoch-making anguish over the thrice removed images of mimetic art and even the rhythm of song, and their ability to catalyze passions destructive and benevolent and all perhaps untrue. It was anguish, certainly - he returned to it again and again, using all the genius and mastery of his art to attack it first from one direction then another. I have no definitive answer to his question, and thus lack a cure for the anguish. It's an anguish I share, as a maker of poems [surely a grand tautology that]. What I will say for now, is that there is in the greatest of poets nothing like 'mere' verbal virtuosity, though we might value that more highly than we do at this benighted juncture of space-time.
     This all bears more thought. For my part, at the very least I'm glad to have stumbled upon The Arcade. Benjamin is in good hands.