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There were other large contradictions in his life. For complex political as well as intellectual reasons, Borges was not a practicing Catholic in one of La tin America's most Catholic countries. For most of his life, he could not even decide whether he was a Christian. In stead, Gnostic images and ideas dominated his thought and art. The classical Christian Trinity appeared to him a nightmare of self-mirroring reason rather than the mutual indwelling Love of orthodox theologies. The night before he died, however, he asked a Catholic priest for last rites. Though he loved Argentina, he had chosen to go to die in Geneva ("One of my homelands"), where he had studied at the College Calvin as a boy. On his gravestone are verses in Old Norse from The Saga of the Volsungs and in Anglo-Saxon from The Battle of Maldon. At some primordial level, Borges's imagination was stirred by everything that was seemingly most distant from the immediate physical world in which he peacefully resided for so many years. Fittingly, then, it was only after World War II, when Borges was translated into French, that his reputation started to grow.
Three volumes of new English translations of Borges have recently appeared in tribute to the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1899: one each of fictions, nonfictions, and selected poems. Though bulky and, at the same time, still not as comprehensive a set of texts as might be desired (e.g., Borges wrote 1500 nonfiction pieces from which 161 are selected here), they present a solid introduction to the full range of his out put together with good notes and references, and should forever put to rest the idea that he was solely the author of fictions. The translations are uniformly smooth, perhaps too uniform and too smooth for a writer whose work reads with a certain angularity in the original. But Borges's genius is clearly perceptible here all the same. He was insightful about himself when he once remarked: "First and foremost, I think of myself as a reader, then as a poet, then as a prose writer."
These three volumes illustrate much of what he meant. Reading itself be comes for Borges a kind of substitute for the exploits of his martial forebears. His range as reader and commentator is astonishing—and telling. Besides his favorite English works, he wrote on Heraclitus the Obscure, Basilides the Gnostic, the authors of the Kabbala, Norse Sagas, and the various translators of the exotic 1001 Nights. Buenos Aires itself took on a mythical quality for him. As he beautifully portrays it in "Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires," which may be his most famous poem:
And was it along this torpid muddy river
that the prows came to found my native city?
The little painted boats must have suffered the steep surf
among the root-clumps of the horse-brown current.
Pondering well, let us suppose that the river
was blue then like an extension of the sky,
with a small red star insert to mark the spot
where Juan Diaz fasted and the Indians dined.
But for sure a thousand men and other thousands
arrived across a sea that was five moons wide,
still infested with mermaids and sea serpents
and magnetic boulders that sent the compass wild . …
… Hard to believe Buenos Aires had any beginning
I feel it to be as eternal as air and water.
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