ALH Online Review, Series VIII 1
Emron Esplin, Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish
America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 256 pp.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Lawrence, Rutgers University
For a US-based reader, browsing the “North American” section of a bookstore in
Buenos Aires or Mexico City is always an exercise in comparative literature. One must
assimilate not only the encounter with familiar works in translation, but also the
familiarity with which certain US authors are treated at the expense of others. Why, for
instance, are Paul Auster, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Bukowski, and Chester Himes a
fixture of these bookshelves and not John Updike, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow?
We still lack a systematic study of the reception of US literature in Spanish America at
the level of Irene Rostagno’s Searching for Recognition: The Promotion of Latin American
Literature in the United States (1997). But studies of single US authors in Spanish
America have been instrumental to the development of hemispheric or inter-American
literary studies since before the field was recognized as such. Two Spanish-language
works on Walt Whitman and William Faulkner respectively, Fernando Alegría’s Walt
Whitman en Hispanoamérica (1955) and James Irby’s La influencia de Faulkner en cuatro
narradores hispanoamericanos (1956), helped to establish formal criteria for analyzing the
reception of major US writers in Latin American letters. More recently, critics such as
Sylvia Molloy, Enrico Mario Santí, Doris Sommer, George Handley, Deborah Cohn, and
Emilio Sauri have returned to the Latin American reception of Whitman and Faulkner,
incorporating the stylistic concerns of the earlier influence studies into a more
encompassing cultural-historical approach. At the same time, scholarship by Richard
Jackson, Arnold Rampersad, Vera Kutzinski, and others has used a similar approach to
locate the Spanish-language reception of Langston Hughes’s poetry within global
diasporic networks. This second wave of reception scholarship has allowed us to better
comprehend the order of things on those bookshelves, that is, why particular US
authors assumed canonical status in various parts of Latin America when they did.
Emron Esplin’s Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish
America, inscribes itself within this tradition of hemispheric reception studies. Opening
with the assertion that “No other U.S. writer has enjoyed the same level of influence on
and affinity with Spanish American letters for such a lengthy time period as Edgar
Allan Poe” (1), Esplin revisits Poe’s legacy in Latin America by expanding on a line of
inquiry that includes John Englekirk’s Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (1934) and
John Irwin’s The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (1994).
The aim of Borges’s Poe is twofold. First, Esplin seeks to demonstrate that Jorge Luis
Borges’s readings, translations and rewritings of Poe’s works initiated a shift in Poe’s
image in Spanish America: Borges’s conception of Poe as a philosophical short story
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ALH Online Review, Series VIII 2
writer and critic displaced the early twentieth-century modernista paradigm of Poe as a
poet prophet. Contrary to much of the existing scholarship on Borges and Poe, Esplin
argues that this transformation occurred as much through Borges’s dialogue with Poe’s
horror stories, revenge tales, and theoretical essays as through his oft-discussed
reformulations of Poe’s detective fiction. Second, in the vein of the recent hemispheric
scholarship mentioned above, Esplin wishes to restore historical specificity to Borges’s
North by South reading, highlighting the “national, regional and hemispheric contexts”
within which the Argentine writer “reshaped” Poe’s image. Reading Poe from Spanish
America, Esplin argues, is not only to confront the works of a nineteenth-century US
author but also, and more fundamentally, the interpretive framework that Borges
erected around Poe’s texts over a 50-year literary career. Esplin wants us to appreciate
the depth of Borges’s achievement in reimagining Poe for the Spanish-speaking world,
and he also wants us to acknowledge that our own view of Poe changes once we see
him through a Borgesian—and by extension, Spanish American—lens.
Borges’s Poe is at its best when it focuses on reception history, patiently working through
Borges’s various interpretations and appropriations of Poe’s texts. In the first part,
Esplin shows that Borges engineered a critical reorientation toward Poe in Spanish
America that shifted the region’s attention from the writer’s poetry to his fiction and
essays. The third part, on Borges’s fictional uses of Poe, contains the strongest chapter in
the book, “Supernatural Revenge,” which opens with a wide-ranging discussion of
theories of fantastic fiction in relation to Poe and Borges, and culminates in an engaging
reading of the revenge theme in Borges’s “The Aleph.” There are also several archival
discoveries that will interest hemispheric scholars and Borges specialists alike. I was
particularly surprised to learn of several failed efforts to publish English-language
translations of Borges’s short stories in the late 1940s and 1950s, long before New
Directions published the now-legendary Labyrinths collection in 1962. As Esplin shows,
these initiatives were nixed because Knopf editor Herbert Weinstock felt that the
Argentine’s works were “commercially untranslatable” (54), a euphemism that
encapsulates the long history of unequal circulation across the hemispheric literary
divide.
Borges’s Poe greatest limitation, on the other hand, is that it never fully makes good on
its promise to situate Borges’s “reinvention” of Poe historically. Although the
introduction insists that we approach Borges’s work through the specific contexts of
“Argentina, the Río de la Plata region, and Spanish America,” the book mostly confines
its discussion of geographical particularity to details of textual and publication history.
Aside from a few comments about Borges’s qualified rejection of modernismo and the
Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones, there is scant attention paid to Borges’s vexed place
within the Argentine (or Spanish American) literary tradition. And there is almost no
ALH Online Review, Series VIII 3
discussion of how Borges’s cultural politics (his early criollismo, his lifelong interest in
gauschesca poetry, his predilection for twentieth-century British rather than US detective
fiction, etc.) shaped his readings and rewritings of Poe. Even more surprisingly, the
book neglects the political turn in Borges scholarship over the past 30 years in both
Argentina and the US—a line that includes major critical works by Beatriz Sarlo,
Graciela Montaldo, Daniel Balderston, and José Eduardo González. What one misses
here is less the presence of these scholars’ names than a sense of the consequences of
their work: not only that Borges himself was far more sensitive to political and cultural
movements than we previously thought, but that Borges’s legacy itself (like Poe’s) is
subject to continual critical reformulation. The debate about the intersection between
Borges’s aesthetics and his cultural politics is among the liveliest—and most urgent—in
contemporary Latin American literary studies. Esplin’s decision to bracket it in favor of
criticism that directly treats Borges’s readings of Poe leads to somewhat narrower
conclusions than one might expect from an analysis of two such central figures in the
hemispheric corpus.
Ultimately, I’m convinced by Esplin’s claim that Borges’s texts fundamentally changed
how Spanish American writers read Poe. But the question remains: which Borges and
which Poe? In his introduction, Esplin draws on Borges’s essay “Kafka and His
Precursors” to theorize the Borges-Poe relationship as one of “mutual influence:”
Borges’s reinvention of Poe influences subsequent readings of the US author as much as
Poe himself influenced Borges. Esplin later invokes this concept in asserting that “The
Poe of today’s Spanish-speaking world is Borges’s Poe” (45), a statement he bolsters
with a reference to the 2008 rerelease of Julio Cortázar’s translations of Poe’s tales,
introduced by Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. These Boom authors, primarily
known for their works from the mid-to-late twentieth century, are odd choices as
representatives of the Spanish American reception of Poe today. The legacy of the
Borges-Poe pair in contemporary Spanish America extends far beyond this trio (or even
Jorge Volpi and Fernando Iwasaki, briefly mentioned in the conclusion), from Ricardo
Piglia, Juan José Saer and César Aira in Argentina to Cristina Rivera Garza and Juan
Villoro in Mexico, from the detective genre, fantastic fiction, and revenge narrative that
Esplin analyzes to the philosophical short story and the political thriller. I’m not sure
that Borges would entirely recognize the Poes in these various writers—frankly, I doubt
he would accept their Borgeses. Yet this seems to be how influence works, at least in
the strong Borgesian sense of the term that Esplin appears to endorse. If we really want
to rethink the literary relationships of the past in light of the present, we should recall
that neither of the two terms stay put. Borges’s Poe goes a long way toward explaining
Borges’s twentieth-century reinvention of Poe. But we need further inquiry into how
contemporary Latin American and US writers have remade—and will continue to
remake—Poe, Borges and Borges’s Poe.