Andrew Neilson – Inferno, I, 32 by Jorge Luis Borges

Inferno, I, 32 is not a poem but today it might be seen as one. A prose poem of sorts. It is one of a series of micro-fictions collected in The Maker, first published in 1960. They are all brief meditations, often on passages from classic Western literature, and they represent Borges at his most beautifully gnomic.

Inferno, I, 32 is not a poem but its title refers to a very famous poem – the first part of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The tercet in question, in the translation by Robert Pinsky, reads as follows:

And suddenly – a leopard in that place The way grew steep; lithe, spotted, quick of foot. Blocking my path, she stayed before my face.

The rest one can glean from the piece itself. When I first read it, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I thought it was the most perfect single page to be found in literature. Years of reading since hasn’t disabused me of the notion. It speaks wonderfully to the complicated order of Dante’s original poem and his medieval theology, but also to the complicated order – different from Dante’s – that Borges himself seeks to discern in life, in the universe. Within this order, however it is precisely conceived, all things are intimately connected – no matter how big, or how small. This is writing that always makes me want to cry.

Inferno, I, 32 is not a poem but I did once discuss it with the poet Michael Donaghy. This was in the early days of our friendship and being young and impressionable (I was 22 or 23 at the time), I was amazed that he shared my estimation of this particular entry within the Borges canon. Yet anyone who knows Michael’s work will see the influence of Borges, and the quest for order that both Borges and Dante pursue is also a quest that Michael devoted a fair part of his writing life toward. Like Borges, and unlike Dante, however, Michael’s epics were written in miniature.

Inferno, I, 32 is not a poem but it seems a fitting meditation to accompany memories of Michael, twenty years after his passing. Who knows what the Borgesian God might have said to him in a dream. I am glad, however, that Michael shared some recognition with the great Argentinian: both won awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation in their lifetimes. Beyond that? Well, the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

Inferno, I, 32 by Jorge Luise Borges

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leopard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot pleasure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something inside it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and God spoke to it in a dream: You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowledge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, God illuminated the animal’s rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savage beast. 

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, God told him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

(Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions, 323)