Javier Aranda Luna: Borges and Today's Conspirators

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In 1985 Jorge Luis Borges traveled to Madrid and Barcelona to present The Conspirators , a collection of poems that would become his final book. He also visited Argentina to attend the trials of military personnel during his country's dictatorship: "Failing to prosecute and condemn crimes would encourage impunity."

He was already tired, “I often feel like I am earth, tired earth.” Yet he kept writing. “What other fate is left for me, what other beautiful fate is left for me?” Until he returned to Geneva, his “other homeland,” where he died on June 14, 1986.

It's been 40 years since the first edition of what became his final book. It brings together 39 poems, which for me are 41, as I include his "Inscription," which is an astonishing ars poetica ("to write a poem is to rehearse a minor magic") and, at the same time, one of the most beautiful love letters ever written, addressed to María Kodama ("We can only give what we have already given. We can only give what already belongs to the other"). I also consider the Prologue among the poems, which abound in signs and dreams, gifts of the night and the dawn.

The Conspirators is a book full of symbols: the Christ on the cross who died in vain and left us “splendid metaphors”, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Beppo , his white cat whose name recalls Byron’s, the last wolf of England “furtive and grey”, his blindness, which for him was proof of the magnificent irony of God who gave him at the same time: “the books and the night” and the women who left us, who are now ours without subjecting us “to the alarms and horrors of hope”.

This final book includes two milongas. “Milonga del infiel” and “Milonga del muerto.” Milongas are popular River Plate verses sung with a guitar. He had already written others, such as in Seis cuerdas , that short collection of poems published in 1966. Borges recalled that “some of the best tangos and milongas were composed by people who couldn’t write them down or read them. But they certainly had the music in their souls… I remember meeting one of those men: Ernesto Ponzio. He composed Don Juan , one of the best tangos ever written… before the Italians… ruined the tangos. He once told me: ‘I’ve been in jail many times, Mr. Borges, but always for murder!’ What he meant to say is that he wasn’t a thief or a pimp.”

It's no sin to assume that The Conspirators is a magnificent sampler of all Borges. There's cyclical time, mirrors, metaphysics to make us travel through parallel worlds, labyrinths, philosophy, Kabbalah without pedantry, alternating paths, the universal and the grain of sand, the minute and the millennium, the short story, the forcefulness of facts rather than characters, the fantastic, and the intertextuality that drew from Old English and German, with which he enriched our language.

Several poems have continually surprised me for their verbal architecture, for the sonority that sustains them. But also because they are written for today's reader. "A Wolf," the last wolf in England, is, in addition to being a great poem, a critique of the idea of ​​progress at the expense of nature. And what about "Elegy of a Park," which laments the loss of its labyrinth of eucalyptus trees, its woven honeysuckle, its gazebo, its trill, its gazebo, and the leisure of the fountain?

Even in these days of the Palestinian Holocaust, we can see the absurdity of war in the verses of "Juan López and John Ward," a poem that tells of two ordinary men who kill each other without knowing each other, due to the narratives imposed by those in power.

“They would have been friends, but they only saw each other face to face once… They were buried together. The snow and the corruption know them. The event I'm referring to happened in a time we can't understand.”

Every poem in Borges is a minor magic that helps us look at the world with a slight increase in light.