Quote of the Day: Jorge Luis Borges on poetry [and IMHO story]

Perfect things in poetry do not seem strange. They seem inevitable.

- Borges, The Craft of Verse, lecture 1, "The riddle of poetry"

Comments

[Southpaw]

Thanks for that.

I immediately thought "Imperfect things in poetry also do not seem strange, and are inevitable" because my brain does that to me without permission.

But I also recognized that I am not a poet, much less a writer, and that there was likely much more to this that isn't revealed in that original quote. So I found the lecture and searched that out, and now it seems likely that I have some reading to do, though I'm sure my understanding of it will come as slowly as Ulysses did the first time I read it.

I did find this sparkling gem that Borges made reference to, which I had never read before and will also discover more of, later.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
~ John Keats

[Mitch H]

The imperfection of 'On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer' is, obviously, that Keats was completely unread in actual history, and conflated Cortez with wosshisname, Balboa. And I rather think that this is the standard, rather than the exception. Poets' perogative is the right to be astonishingly inaccurate, even erroneous. The poet is the claimant to 'the lawful lie', the utter falsehood, the total and complete bollocksing bullshit faradiddle.

Been fighting with 'The Waste Land' tonight, which is a tissue of lies, plagaristic thievery, and complete and total bollocks.

[Mitch H]

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it's only because they, like congressmen and MPs, hide under the umbrella of the laws of libel, slander, and consequence for utter falsehoods spoken as a matter of course.

[Bad Horse]

5748086 Well, at least they're not philosophers.

Keats is often guilty of sloppy thinking. He's called a Romantic poet, but his content, what his poems are about, is always neo-classical, which I'll unfairly summarize as "yearning uncritically for antiquity as seen through rose-colored glasses". I feel like the neo-classicists didn't really understand the tragic aspect of the Greek tragedy they admired so much, as I think is demonstrated by their determination to find structural rules in it that weren't really there.

But I can't tell whether you mean your current anger at poets to apply to Borges and his quote about perfect things. I've probably complained more about the concept of "perfection" more than anyone who's ever lived, but I cut Borges some slack here, partly because I think "perfect" here is just sloppy shorthand for "really really good", and partly because poetry, like songs, is so condensed that now and then we find a song or poem that seems impossible to improve.

[Mitch H]

5748088

I'm pretty sure Borges used 'perfection' as a shorthand for platonic ideals, since he's the guy who went on about the Library and suchlike. He was a creature of abstraction and wild dreamlike phantasms of the greater-than-we. As such, I'm fairly sure he was of the camp of 'not good-enough, not wow-this-is-pretty-keen, but rather Reely, Reely Important, Kay?'

Also, that despite Keats' classical cosplay, he shouldn't have been characterized as a proper neo-classical. Especially given his political aspirations and identities. but perhaps I've misunderstood his ideologies, and he was a proper republican back-gazing wishful sort. I live more in the era of Fitzgerald and Swinburne, than Keats and Byron, myself. It causes some ideological distortions.

[Bad Horse]

5748085

Poets' perogative is the right to be astonishingly inaccurate, even erroneous.

Re. that, authors of fiction are also guilty, as are painters, and at times even architects.

I want to write a long essay someday on the responsibility of authors to get things right. Writers put too much emphasis on writing beautiful, moving, well-structured, technically excellent fiction, and no emphasis at all on understanding the things they're writing about. A lot of novels construct Utopias or dystopias that make falsifiable claims about economics, business, logistics, resource management, human psychology, karma, metaphysics, the patterns of history, etc.; and getting all this stuff right matters. If your craft is marvellous but your understanding is weak, you're going to write something proposing simple and stupid solutions to hard problems, and a lot of people will believe you because watching the movie based on your novel is more fun than reading the DSM-5 or running a business. Like, we call Dostoyevsky a great writer, but his Russian Orthodoxy tainted some of his work so much that it does more harm than good. Especially Notes from Underground. I'm picking on Dostoyevsky bcoz he's dead & he can take it, but there are many others.

[Mitch H]

But again, tonight, I've been fighting with The Waste Land. And that mess's tangle with the Victorians and Eliot's own self-negation. The Romantics seem, in retrospect, to be a quaint tumble-down cottage of irrelevant ruins, as relevant to modern discussions of foundations and bombed-out blocks as the excavations of Troy.

[Mitch H]

5748090
It depends heavily, on how realistic the things they write about are, doesn't it? Notes on the Underground was so much more tangible than, say, The Brothers Karamazov, that the two are completely divergent. I haven't read the former, so I can't say too much about it.

But, on the other hand, I get the impression that few listened to or read either, especially among those who burned the world to the ground in response to Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev.

[Bad Horse]

5748089

Especially given his political aspirations and identities. but perhaps I've misunderstood his ideologies, and he was a proper republican back-gazing wishful sort.

No; I defer to you on that point. I don't know anything about his politics.

5748091

The Romantics seem, in retrospect, to be a quaint tumble-down cottage of irrelevant ruins, as relevant to modern discussions of foundations and bombed-out blocks as the excavations of Troy.

I think we can't understand why 20th century philosophy was so stupid without studying the stupid 19th-century philosophy that it developed from.

[Mitch H]

The hilarious thing about "Chapman" is that it's a reaction to a translation. The educated individual in the Regency era was supposed to be able to read Homer in the original Greek. Keats was showing his rather Cit alignments by being enthusiastic about a translation, I think? And in the process, demonstrating his rather shaky grasp of semi-modern historical detail. In a way, it was one of the most modern things the man wrote.

That being said, it was a solid bit of poetry.

[Bad Horse]

5748094

especially among those who burned the world to the ground in response to Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev.

I haven't read Turgenev or Gorky, and I don't see the connection between Tolstoy and communism (which I assume is what you mean). I know Tolstoy was a religious fanatic who had a cult-like following in the last years of his life, but I don't know what that cult believed. His short stories were orthodox, if anything. What's the relationship between those 3 authors and the revolution?

5748089

I'm pretty sure Borges used 'perfection' as a shorthand for platonic ideals, since he's the guy who went on about the Library and suchlike.

I see Borges as being ambivalent about, or deconstructing, perfection: The Library contains perfect books, but we humans have no way of discerning them from the false. Funes the Memorious has a perfect memory, and this makes him completely dysfunctional. The Aleph seems to be the one perfect and true perspective on all of reality; but in a postcript, Borges wrote that he believed it was a false Aleph.

But in truth I don't know, and don't really care, what he meant, as much as that I can use it. Even if we take it as Platonic perfection, it does no harm in that quote; its claim is that appearing inevitable is key to making a poem [or a story] great. The takeaway would be the same if we used the word "great" instead of "perfect".

That said, it's odd that Borges would say such a thing. Some of his stories converge on a "conditional inevitability" in the end, like Death and the Compass, God's Script, and especially The South, in all of which the ending is inevitable given a decision or mistake made by the main character. Some seem to dispel or question the efficacy of the causality or order necessary for anything to be inevitable (eg The Library, the Aleph, the Garden of Forking Paths), or have ambiguous endings which can't be read as inevitable (Borges and I).

[Mitch H]

5748208

I haven't read Turgenev or Gorky, and I don't see the connection between Tolstoy and communism (which I assume is what you mean). I know Tolstoy was a religious fanatic who had a cult-like following in the last years of his life, but I don't know what that cult believed. His short stories were orthodox, if anything. What's the relationship between those 3 authors and the revolution?

There wasn't a hard and fast boundary between the general run of progressive intellegencia and the bolsheviks. The overwhelming majority of the intellegencia were just generally opposed to the established order, and were inclined to find no enemies to the left, as they say. As it was, the Communists were a fraction, and the Bolsheviks a fraction of a fraction. Tolstoy and Turgenev, and to a greater extent Gorky, were the pillars of the people who opened up the road to the Bolshevik coup. Not Communists themselves, but those who prepared the ground so that there were highways to the Bolshevik conclusion, and not barriers.

(Lenin famously called Tolstoy 'the mirror of the revolution', and wrote extensively about him, in a rather complex fashion, but then Lenin was struggling with the fact that he had an ideology which emphasized the importance of a proletariat in a country without a significant proletariat, and what little Russia had, was at the time of revolution, shrinking along with the Russian economy. Lenin saw latter-stage Tolstoy as an ideological key to the problem of the village-bound peasantry.)

Gorky himself, of course, saw the revolution. And became something of a pillar of it, if a complicated and uncomfortable support at times. Indeed, in a much more honest and less weaselly fashion than Brecht was for post-war affairs. Although one always has to give Brecht credit for "Die Lösung", if nothing else.

[Bad Horse]

5748217
Heh, I went online to buy an audiobook of Turgenev, and found that not only did I read one of his novels, I posted a review of it on fimfiction: Review: Ivan Turgenev's Rudin (1856, Russian)

[Mitch H]

You have a comment on that review mentioning 'Derpy Nickerlaiovitch Mishkin'.

Have you heard of The Little Humpbacked Horse? The Soviet-era animation makes her look and sound exactly like Derpy.