Borges and Lugones

Jorge Luis Borges attributes the inclination to parody or caricature in Lugones' poetry to an overloading process. In commenting on Los crepüsculos del jardín he states:

Cada adjetivo y cada verbo tiene que ser inesperado. Esto lo lleva a set barroco, y es bien sabido que lo barroco engendra su propia parodia.^[17]

(Each adjective and each verb must be unexpected. This leads him to be baroque, and it is well known that the baroque creates its own parody.)

In an earlier article, the criticism is more explicit. Lugones' verse is a "sistema premeditado de epítetos balbucientes y adjetivos tahures"^[18] (a "premeditated system of babbling epithets and gambling adjectives"). Borges' statement from "Pala-

brería para versos," although not in reference to Lugones' work, describes the future of the poetic practice of the Lunario sentimental: "El mundo aparencial es un tropel de percepciones barajadas. . . . Le lengua es edificadora de realidades"^[19] ("The apparent world is a jumble of shuffled perceptions. . . . Language is the builder of realities"). The aim of the ultraístas was to shock the reader out of accustomed sets of perception by joining two distant categories, leaving the gap to be closed by the reader. This reconciliation was to be followed by a reordering of other categories, thus creating new ways of viewing the world. The Lunario 's element of surprise, its devaluation and reevalution of previous poetic hierarchies, constituted its appeal for the new group of poets. What they refused in the Lunario, however, was its insistence on rhyme, an element they found unnecessary, just as they saw the definition of poetry as music as unnecessary. Poetry did not have to fit into any formal patterns. It was to be an end in itself.

After Lunario sentimental Lugones will cling to rhyme as the last remnant of an earlier order and will turn his back on the territories into which he has ventured. These new territories—a mocking eroticism, vignettes of urban life, casual juxtaposition of unrelated categories—will be left to begin again the "titánica epopeya" (the "epic of titanic proportions"). This time its path will be more closely circumscribed, and the glories of a more parochial world will be extolled. As Lugones draws back again to achieve panoramic balance, the colloquial phrases and prosaic moments will be integrated into an encompassing view of the "patria" or "homeland." Leaving the urban scene and its open door to cosmopolitan adventure, Lugones will insist on the unification of perspectives within this local scene. He will draw together disparate elements under the composition of a grand portrait. The harmonies will be justified by their approximation to song, this time of a more local cadence.

Once an iconoclastic innovator, Lugones will become a rhymer, His poetic journey, at once the most rapid and widely ranging of any modernista poet, will end back at the doorstep, praising the "latinidad" (the "Latinity") of a cultural order now undergoing radical upheaval. Avid experimentation becomes dogmatic adherence to rigid aesthetic principles in his later

works, a tendency hinted at in his early prose. Lugones' new paths met more success in prose than in poetry. His poetic work now begins to be received as a rigid form, serving only as an opposing force rather than as an inspiration. Despite his rejection by younger poets, however, he is nonetheless seen as the master craftsman, the perfect stylist. Some of the comments recorded in a survey by the magazine Nosotros in 1923 illustrate his position as an influence, even a negative one.^[20] In this survey young poets were asked to discuss their literary ideals and formative influences. Time and again Lugones is mentioned as an important influence, but is also constantly disparaged as a failed talent: "Lugones es un lamentable ejemplo de claudicación y malabarismo" ("Lugones is a lamentable example of a juggler who bungles his act"). Others speak of his "dudoso gusto" ("questionable taste") and mention that, "Lugones, como poeta, no tiene personalidad, a pesar de su gran talento" ("Lugones, as a poet, lacks personality, in spite of his great talent"). Julio Noé, in his review of El payador, says of Lugones, "parece un eximio 'dilettante' cuya fuerza intelectual no salva los errores de sus asombrosas improvisaciones"^[21] ("he resembles a distinguished 'dilettante' whose intellectual strength cannot overcome the errors of his astonishing improvisations"). Lugones, in an effort to make his poetry resistant to a cursory reading, falls prey to a selfgenerating parody. In faithful adherence to his models, he overloads his productions, always walking a tightrope between the truly striking and the jangling contortions of sound and imagery systems.

Jorge Luis Borges, once one of Lugones' sternest critics and more recently one of his defenders, never fails even in his most favorable statements to point out obliquely Lugones' failings. Borges has explained his debts to Lugones, his admiration for him, and even his dislike for him in diverse writings. What seems to interest Borges most about Lugones is his personality and its reflection, or suppression, in his writings, as in the statement: "El defecto de Lugones es la falta de intimidad, por eso Lugones es inferior a Darío"^[22] ("The problem with Lugones is his lack of intimacy; that is why he is inferior to Darío"). Like Martínez Estrada he also comments on Lugones' use of successive styles and its distancing effect:

Lugones está, por decirlo así, un poco lejos de su obra; ésta no es casi nunca la inmediata voz de su intimidad sino un objecto elaborado pot él. En lugar de la inocente expresión tenemos un sistema de habilidades, un juego de destrezas retóricas. Raras veces un sentimiento fue el punto de partida de su labor; tenía la costumbre de imponerse temas ocasionales y resolverios mediante recursos técnicos.^[23]

(Lugones, one could say, is somewhat distanced from his work; this is rarely the immediate voice of intimacy but an object elaborated by him. Instead of innocent expression we find a system of clever resources, a game of rhetorical skill. Rarely has a feeling been the point of departure for his work; he had the habit of imposing upon himself incidental themes and working them out through technical means.)

Having followed a path similar to Lugones' up to a certain point—working within highly acclaimed distant models and theorizing about literature as a world of its own which provides directing force for other systems—Borges also exaggerated his own mannered style until it could no longer be controlled without a willed acceptance of its limitations. Recognizing, unlike Lugones, that any literary system is but a manipulation of a certain set of devices, he concentrates on available energies and thus is able to move into new territories. An ironic stance allows Borges to begin again when the recognition comes that no more originality is to be found in the same source. When Lugones reaches this point, at the time of Lunario sentimental, the ironic self-knowledge of the poet as trickster and manipulator stops the process of renewals. He turns back to accustomed territory and familiar ground, clinging to rhyme and to elaborately worked metaphors. Rather than leaving the earlier frameworks in shambles and going on to work through ambiguity about the poet's function, Lugones returns to recognizable, comfortable harmonies.

In the collection of Borges' statements about Lugones, what begins to emerge is an ironic self-portrait of Borges himself. Borges comments on Lugones' successive use of masks along with his alienation. For Borges, the fact that these poses or styles were sequential and not simultaneous points out Lugones'

denial of himself as a creator. Lugones' attempts to aestheticize and, at the same time, to caricature his own experience, avoid the demand for moral sincerity. Borges also repeatedly stresses Lugones' insistence on the use of language as a logical instrument (in the same manner he stresses the use of logic in his essay "Quevedo" from Otras inquisiciones ). In his statements on Lugones, Borges makes analogies between Lugones and himself as well as with his entire generation. It is as if Borges presented Lugones as a prefiguration of himself, for both undergo a continual extinction and invention of new personalities in their roles as writers. For example, he states, "Lugones fue más que un espejo de los libros que iba leyendo"^[24] ("Lugones was more than a mirror of the books he reads"). Lugones, like Borges, was concerned with his standing as a poet in the eyes of future generations, and even the choice of prose or poetry for the two was not always clear.

Borges has accorded to Lugones a rather dubious distinction in the light of the century's teevaluations of poetry. In 1941, with a softened and ironic posture toward Lugones, he diminishes the work of other poets of his ultraísta phase. After Almafuerte:

Lo sigue el múltiple Lugones, cuya obra prefigura casi todo el proceso ulterior, desde las inconexas metáforas del ultraísmo (que durante quince años se consagró a reconstruir los borradores del Lunario sentimental ) hasta las límpidas y complejas estrofas de nuestro mejor poeta contemporáneo, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. No es imposible que los críticos de un porvenir remoto juzguen que todos los poetas actuales son facetas o hipóstasis de Lugones.^[25]

(Then comes the multiple Lugones, whose work prefigures almost all the subsequent process, from the disjointed metaphors of Ultraism [which for fifteen years was dedicated to reconstructing the drafts of Lunario sentimental ] to the limpid and complex strophes of our best contemporary poet, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. It may not be impossible to think that critics of some remote future may judge today's poets as facets or hypostases of Lugones.)

Such a stance is in striking contrast to his earlier vehement criticism of Lugones, as in his introductory comments to an anthology of 1929, where he proclaims the end of "rubenismo."

Announcing early on, "se gastó rubenismo ¡al fin, gracias a Dios!" ("Thank God that Rubendarismo is finally over!") Borges continues from what is as much a sociological as a poetic perspective:

 . . . el rubenismo fue nuestra añoranza de Europa. Fue un suelto lazo de nostalgia tirado hacia las torres, fue un largo adiós y regó el aire del Atlántico, fue un sentirnos extraños, y descontentizados y finos.^[26]

( . . . Rubendarismo was our homesickness for Europe. It was a loose ribbon of nostalgia, thrown to the towers; it was a long goodbye, and it watered the Atlantic winds; it was a way for us to feel foreign, unhappy, and refined).