Goodbye to Borges

John Sturrock

• Atlas by Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with Maria Kodama, translated by Anthony Kerrigan
  Viking, 95 pp, £12.95, March 1986, ISBN 0 670 81029 0
• Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Eliot Weinberger
  Faber, 121 pp, £3.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 571 13737 7

Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices which we were given to read at the time. There was much Englishness about him, starting with his mother’s family, which was English, but obvious also in the plain way that he wrote, and in the humour with which he used to deprecate his own high literary standing. Anglo-Saxon was the strange hobby of his old age, because it was northern and pleasantly formal, and in his earlier days, before his eyesight got too weak, he had read more in English literature than in any other. Critics might say, because there were labyrinths and what seemed like anxiety in his stories, that he followed on from Kafka: Borges himself said, rather, from Kipling. But none of this saved him when he died from being a foreigner, and a writer, hardly worth the column-inches of our barbarically parochial papers.