On 14 June 1986 – just over a quarter of a century ago – the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges died in Geneva. He is a figure who has haunted PN Review since it took its first steps as Poetry Nation I. He remains with us, his poems and fictions reviving their more than enigmatic ironies.

A sonnet from 1964 entitled ‘Un Poeta del Siglo XIII’ (‘A Poet of the Thirteenth Century’) sees the poet looking through the crumpled drafts of his poem. It is about to become the very first, as yet unrecognised, sonnet. In his drafts Borges’ poet has mixed quatrains and tercets, not yet quite regular. He labours on a further draft, then hesitates:

           ‘Acaso le ha llegado
del porvenir y de su horror sagrado
un rumor de remotos ruiseñores.’

Perhaps he has sensed, says the poem, radiating from the future, ‘a rumour of far-off nightingales’. Of things to come, a suggestion of a new form and maybe (a step beyond it) of impending clichés. The modern poet asks, in the sonnet’s sestet:

¿Habrá sentido que no estaba solo
y que el arcáno, el increible Apolo
le habia revelado un arquetipo,

un ávido cristal que apresaría
cuanto la noche cierra y abre el dia:
dédalo, laberinto, enigma, Edipo?

(‘Had he detected he was not alone, / that the cryptic, the unimaginable Apollo / had disclosed to him an archetypal pattern, // a greedy crystal that would capture, / the way night closes day opens it: / Dedalus, labyrinth, the riddle, Laius son.’)

In Borges’s poem the future weighs on the present, just as the past can do: in looking back, we see a past aware of our gaze, returning it. Inherencies, less a promise than an earnest. Once that first sonnet is recognised by its poet, not as a discovery but as a thing given by ‘the unimaginable Apollo’, once it is in language and the form defined, a course is set. This sonnet, we understand from Apollo and from the last line, works with anciencies. Classical myth, legend, literature – common memories – provide the content. The thirteenth-century poet, suspended between a pre-classical then and a post-modern now, mediates. Each later sonnet in whatever language participates in his work, and he in its.

A poet who develops received forms is always in collaboration with the poems that came before and those that will come after. A sonnet never belongs exclusively to its author. Or even to its language.


In the 1960s Borges started collecting the ‘milongas’ he had been composing, including several in 1965 in Para las Seis Cuerdas (For the Six Strings) – a reference to the six strings of the guitarrón argentino. In his preface he asks the reader to imagine, in the absence of music, a strumming singer in a shadowy passage or a shop. His hand lingers on the strings, words count for less than imagined harmonies. This is a new kind of poem, though familiar as song; it really ought to date from the 1890s, when the form was popular, ingenious and spirited. Borges’s modern versions are, he says, elegies, aftermaths of a form and a once vital popular culture. Though the poems are formally original, they are not his. In a recorded comment he declares, ‘The milongas I shall recite wrote themselves, almost against my will. Better said, they were composed by the dead creoles who wander through my blood. The names, the stories that these milongas tell are true.’

What is true is that the milonga never belongs definitively to its author, even if he was the first to make of it a literary form. In composing his milongas, Borges collaborates with a musical form and a narrative, ballad-like tradition, although more urban in cast. This erudite poet-librarian, who was put in charge of Argentina’s national library in the year in which he went blind, steps away from his usual concerns into the streets of his city, the musically tuned heart of a tradition. A self-effacing, enchanting collaboration ensues.

At the birth of the sonnet, a net is woven. It is a net that can be used to snare all sorts of quarries. In the thirteenth and the twenty-first century the sonnet remains serviceable. And the milonga remains serviceable too, though it belongs specifically to Spanish, and to Argentinean Spanish.


When David Jones, quoting Nennius, makes a heap of all he can find in the Anathemata; or Eliot makes a heap of broken images, quoting Ecclesiastes, in ‘The Waste Land’, with material drawn from many sources, both enter into complex collaborations. For Eliot these collaborations intersect with his real-time collaboration with Pound and Vivienne. The original works, fragments of which are given new context in Eliot’s poem, have as much a claim on his poem as his does on theirs. It is a matter of participation rather than appropriation. It would take a reader with a most fastidious sense of copyright to resist the incorporation of earlier material in a poem. Does anyone object to George Herbert using a line of Sir Philip Sidney’s: ‘Let me not love thee if I love thee not’? Or the collaboration of Doctor Johnson in Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’, namely the closing lines?

Gertrude Stein was a new kind of collaborator. Her forty-page meditation on Henry James, for example, entitled ‘Henry James’ and composed towards the start of the 1930s, is first about Shakespeare, then about her own practice in the poem ‘Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded’, and only then, and obliquely, about Henry James at all. She begins with a question: ‘What is the difference between Shakespeare’s plays and Shakespeare’s sonnets.’ (This keeps us conveniently in the zone of the sonnet.) Immediately she moves on to distinguish between accident, which her discovery was, and coincidence, which it also was. ‘An accident is when a thing happens. A coincidence is when a thing is going to happen and it does.’ Having set these contrasts in motion, she composes what she subtitles a ‘Duet’. This is how ‘Duet’ begins:

And so it is not an accident but a coincidence that there is a difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and Shakespeare’s plays. The coincidence is with Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded.
     Who knew that the answer was going to be like that. Had I told that the answer was going to be like that?
     The answer is not like that. The answer is that.
     I am I not any longer when I see.
     This sentence is at the bottom of all creative activity. It is just the opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me.

She has seen something about her poem ‘Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded’ that takes it away from her composing ‘I’ and puts it in the company of other work that has shed the composing ‘I’. What strikes her about her poem and Shakespeare’s Sonnets is this: ‘Shakespeare’s plays were written as they were written. Shakespeare’s sonnets were written as they were going to be written.’ The earnest that was there in Borges’s first sonneteer’s first sonnet is fulfilled, for the n-th time, in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

It is like chasing a butterfly with a net – not a sonnet – to read Stein’s seeming-babble for sense. The key distinction she makes between writers is this: ‘They either write as they write or they write as they are going to write and they may not choose to do what they are going to do.’ And what does Stein understand when she says ‘see’ – I am I not any longer when I see? She is not talking about a thing seen, the image as writers construe it nowadays, reportage, out there in the world, which must be got precise and right in words. Her see sees not a thing but, when there has been a specific occasion – a tree, say, or a beautiful face, or a lovers’ argument, or a painting – sees it and not its occasion. Her see sees, despite external point of view and occasion. The seen is no longer ‘hers’, it is itself, made, and in its own time, the time Borges imagines with such plasticity... I am put in mind of a familiar formulation, ‘it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.’ The activity is not secondary, memory; it is primary. The reader’s activity, too, is primary: ‘if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous’. The poem’s action is not just historical, a moment, the record of something: it adds to available reality.