![BORGES, Jorge Luis (1899-1986). Autograph working manuscript draft for 'Historia del Tango', [probably before 1953], 10 numbered pages, 4to, on graph paper (removed from spiral-bound notebook).](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2007/CKS/2007_CKS_07411_0015_000(022244).jpg?w=1)
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BORGES, Jorge Luis (1899-1986). Autograph working manuscript draft for 'Historia del Tango', [probably before 1953], 10 numbered pages, 4to, on graph paper (removed from spiral-bound notebook).
COMPLETE DRAFT OF BORGES' ESSAY prior to its publication in the 1955 edition of Evaristo Carriego, WITH UNPUBLISHED PARTS AND KEY VARIATIONS FROM THE PRINTED VERSION. While meticulously neat, it represents the essay in an advanced but still evolving state. The five sections are in a different order to those in the published version. Some of the marginalia record the literary sources for his reflections, forming unpublished footnotes. The margins are also filled with alternative words or phrases to those in the main text. While these tend to be adopted in the published essay, it is rare for any part of the main text to be crossed out, and two versions of a passage may even co-exist together. The opening part, evoking Martín Fierro, the epic Argentine poem by José Hernández, the pampas and the gaucho, is unpublished. In it, Borges laments that Argentina's known history is solely one of wars, and that only two words in its language -- 'pampas' and 'gaucho' -- are international. Even the gaucho has been North Americanised into a cowboy, Walt Whitman calling the gaucho 'the incomparable rider of horses ... over the pampas'. A third word is tango: 'Otra es Tango.' Borges gives the unsatisfactory dictionary definition, 'Baile de sociedad importado de America en los primeros años de este siglo,' before beginning the 'Historia del Tango' itself.
In the published essay, 'El culto del coraje' ('The cult of courage') is renamed 'El desafío' ('The challenge') and forms the last section. But here the illustrative story of the legendary knife fight between Wenceslao Suárez and his unknown challenger is attached to the opening paragraphs of the 'Historia del Tango'. Borges finds it a common feature of such stories that 'the challenger comes upon his ruin.' They show that men of the poorest lives had a religion with its mythology and its martyrs, 'the hard and blind religion of courage.' Their music consisted of the estilos, the milongas, the first tangos.
The 'History' continues to give way to other sections. An unpublished paragraph precedes 'El Tango pendenciero' ('The fighting tango', p. 4) which explores the explicit relationship between the tango and violence. The tango and milongas directly express a conviction which many poets have sought to convey: 'la convición de que pelear puede ser una felicidad, la emoción del combate como una fiesta.' Borges entertains the idea of replacing 'convicción' by 'emoción' but crosses the latter through. He also proffers 'fiesta' as an alternative to 'felicidad'. The printed essay adopts the former word and drops the second part of his sentence entirely (though it is not crossed through in the manuscript). Joy in battle is a theme in the Iliad and Beowulf and no less in Quevedo or Victor Hugo. However, 'La música es la voluntad, la pasión' ('music is the will, the passion'). Two parallel versions of the manuscript, one with amendments which were eventually published, explain the superior ability of 'the old tango' to transmit 'like music, that warlike happiness which ancient Greek and German poets tried to express verbally.' One of Oscar Wilde's dialogues shows that music can create a sense of a personal past which may never have existed. It may be the mission of the tango to give Argentines the sense of having once been brave and valorous.
'Un misterio parcial' ('A partial mystery', p. 5) emphasises that the patriotic Argentine does not identify with great leaders in his country's history but the generic figures of the gaucho and compadre. This is because the state is 'una inconcebible abstracción' ('an inconceivable abstraction'); any idea that it has moral authority is a sinister joke. After some unpublished reflections on the diffusion of the tango in London about 1910, Borges finally returns to the 'Historia del Tango' which he started on page 1. Having repudiated the myth, popularised by cinema, that the tango had its birthplace in the poor riverbank tenements of Buenos Aires, he announces that his sources are in unanimous agreement about one basic fact: 'el origen del Tango en los lupanares', the origin of the tango in brothels, not much before 1880 or after 1890. Even the rudimentary instrumentation of the first tango orchestras -- piano, flute, violin and later the concertina -- differs from the guitar of the riverside. Other indications of its origin are the sensuality of the movements, the innuendo of certain titles, and the popularity of the dance with pairs of men, decent women refusing to participate, a feature which he observed as a boy in Palermo and which Carriego's verses record.
The manuscript ends with a long section on 'Las letras' ('The lyrics', pp. 7-10). After half a century, the lyrics constitute an enormous body of literature, when in the beginning the tango had no lyrics, save the obscene or haphazard. Bad life in the slums was not poetic material. The milonga, a related dance, was a joyful showy boast. Later on, the genre retold stories from low life in the same vein as French naturalistic novels or Hogarth's Harlot's Progress. In the end, city life in general was integrated into the tango, the lyrics forming a vast Comédie humaine of life in Buenos Aires. His conclusion to 'lyrics' and to the whole essay as here structured exists in two, if not three, forms, the shorter unpublished version reading: 'Diriase que sin atardeceres y noches de Buenos Aires no puede hacerse un tango y que en el cielo hay un arquetipo del tango (como lo hay de las mesa y del lecho[)] ...'
The 1930 first edition of Borges' biography of Evaristo Carriego, the Argentine poet he had known in childhood, was a modest work of seven chapters bound in pink wrappers. The new edition of 1955 was filled out with half-a-dozen pieces of which the 'History of the Tango' is by far the most significant. 'El desafío' had appeared in La Nación, 28 December 1952: the change of title from 'El culto del coraje' helps establish the date of this manuscript as prior to 1953. Norman di Giovanni points out that the essay as a whole formed 'A complete rewriting of a piece published early in 1927 and later collected in El idioma de los Argentinos, its viewpoint and its conclusions are an about-face. The first essay is nationalistic to the point of xenophobia, while the later work is not only universal but also berates much of the narrowness of the earlier judgements' (The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work, New York, 2003, p. 102).
COMPLETE DRAFT OF BORGES' ESSAY prior to its publication in the 1955 edition of Evaristo Carriego, WITH UNPUBLISHED PARTS AND KEY VARIATIONS FROM THE PRINTED VERSION. While meticulously neat, it represents the essay in an advanced but still evolving state. The five sections are in a different order to those in the published version. Some of the marginalia record the literary sources for his reflections, forming unpublished footnotes. The margins are also filled with alternative words or phrases to those in the main text. While these tend to be adopted in the published essay, it is rare for any part of the main text to be crossed out, and two versions of a passage may even co-exist together. The opening part, evoking Martín Fierro, the epic Argentine poem by José Hernández, the pampas and the gaucho, is unpublished. In it, Borges laments that Argentina's known history is solely one of wars, and that only two words in its language -- 'pampas' and 'gaucho' -- are international. Even the gaucho has been North Americanised into a cowboy, Walt Whitman calling the gaucho 'the incomparable rider of horses ... over the pampas'. A third word is tango: 'Otra es Tango.' Borges gives the unsatisfactory dictionary definition, 'Baile de sociedad importado de America en los primeros años de este siglo,' before beginning the 'Historia del Tango' itself.
In the published essay, 'El culto del coraje' ('The cult of courage') is renamed 'El desafío' ('The challenge') and forms the last section. But here the illustrative story of the legendary knife fight between Wenceslao Suárez and his unknown challenger is attached to the opening paragraphs of the 'Historia del Tango'. Borges finds it a common feature of such stories that 'the challenger comes upon his ruin.' They show that men of the poorest lives had a religion with its mythology and its martyrs, 'the hard and blind religion of courage.' Their music consisted of the estilos, the milongas, the first tangos.
The 'History' continues to give way to other sections. An unpublished paragraph precedes 'El Tango pendenciero' ('The fighting tango', p. 4) which explores the explicit relationship between the tango and violence. The tango and milongas directly express a conviction which many poets have sought to convey: 'la convición de que pelear puede ser una felicidad, la emoción del combate como una fiesta.' Borges entertains the idea of replacing 'convicción' by 'emoción' but crosses the latter through. He also proffers 'fiesta' as an alternative to 'felicidad'. The printed essay adopts the former word and drops the second part of his sentence entirely (though it is not crossed through in the manuscript). Joy in battle is a theme in the Iliad and Beowulf and no less in Quevedo or Victor Hugo. However, 'La música es la voluntad, la pasión' ('music is the will, the passion'). Two parallel versions of the manuscript, one with amendments which were eventually published, explain the superior ability of 'the old tango' to transmit 'like music, that warlike happiness which ancient Greek and German poets tried to express verbally.' One of Oscar Wilde's dialogues shows that music can create a sense of a personal past which may never have existed. It may be the mission of the tango to give Argentines the sense of having once been brave and valorous.
'Un misterio parcial' ('A partial mystery', p. 5) emphasises that the patriotic Argentine does not identify with great leaders in his country's history but the generic figures of the gaucho and compadre. This is because the state is 'una inconcebible abstracción' ('an inconceivable abstraction'); any idea that it has moral authority is a sinister joke. After some unpublished reflections on the diffusion of the tango in London about 1910, Borges finally returns to the 'Historia del Tango' which he started on page 1. Having repudiated the myth, popularised by cinema, that the tango had its birthplace in the poor riverbank tenements of Buenos Aires, he announces that his sources are in unanimous agreement about one basic fact: 'el origen del Tango en los lupanares', the origin of the tango in brothels, not much before 1880 or after 1890. Even the rudimentary instrumentation of the first tango orchestras -- piano, flute, violin and later the concertina -- differs from the guitar of the riverside. Other indications of its origin are the sensuality of the movements, the innuendo of certain titles, and the popularity of the dance with pairs of men, decent women refusing to participate, a feature which he observed as a boy in Palermo and which Carriego's verses record.
The manuscript ends with a long section on 'Las letras' ('The lyrics', pp. 7-10). After half a century, the lyrics constitute an enormous body of literature, when in the beginning the tango had no lyrics, save the obscene or haphazard. Bad life in the slums was not poetic material. The milonga, a related dance, was a joyful showy boast. Later on, the genre retold stories from low life in the same vein as French naturalistic novels or Hogarth's Harlot's Progress. In the end, city life in general was integrated into the tango, the lyrics forming a vast Comédie humaine of life in Buenos Aires. His conclusion to 'lyrics' and to the whole essay as here structured exists in two, if not three, forms, the shorter unpublished version reading: 'Diriase que sin atardeceres y noches de Buenos Aires no puede hacerse un tango y que en el cielo hay un arquetipo del tango (como lo hay de las mesa y del lecho[)] ...'
The 1930 first edition of Borges' biography of Evaristo Carriego, the Argentine poet he had known in childhood, was a modest work of seven chapters bound in pink wrappers. The new edition of 1955 was filled out with half-a-dozen pieces of which the 'History of the Tango' is by far the most significant. 'El desafío' had appeared in La Nación, 28 December 1952: the change of title from 'El culto del coraje' helps establish the date of this manuscript as prior to 1953. Norman di Giovanni points out that the essay as a whole formed 'A complete rewriting of a piece published early in 1927 and later collected in El idioma de los Argentinos, its viewpoint and its conclusions are an about-face. The first essay is nationalistic to the point of xenophobia, while the later work is not only universal but also berates much of the narrowness of the earlier judgements' (The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and his Work, New York, 2003, p. 102).
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