News and Notes

Remembering Borges on the fortieth anniversary of his death • Alberto Manguel writes: Francis Bacon’s dictum ‘Truth is the daughter of Time, not of Authority’ can be read in at least two ways. The common reading is that, given enough time, truth will out. The other, less conventional, is that in time, every generation of readers finds new ways of recognizing or discarding, interpreting or distorting the facts, so that what was true for our elders who survived the Second World War, for example, seems no longer to be true in our long-nosed twenty-first century.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, a number of Italian journalists and politicians began a campaign to rehabilitate Benito Mussolini. Picking up the boastful self-
description of France’s right wing as ‘la droite decomplexée’, these revisionist historians turned the until then covert expressions of admiration for Il Duce into proof of courageous thinking. ‘Mussolini never killed anybody’, said Silvio Berlusconi after he became prime minister for the first time. In this vein, Berlusconi and his cronies played down the anti-fascist celebrations in Italy on 25 April, much the same as the Portuguese far-right party led by Andrés Ventura would do two decades later, on that very same date. The day on which Italy celebrates its liberation from fascism happens to be the same on which Portugal celebrates the peaceful carnation revolution that marked the end of Salazar’s dictatorship. Clio, the muse of History, has a twisted sense of humour.

In 1946, in the midst of Juan Domingo Perón’s populist government in Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges took advantage of a dinner given in his honour, to denounce all forms of tyranny. ‘Dictatorships foster cruelty’, Borges declared. ‘Even more abhorrent is the fact that they foster stupidity. Pins stammering out commands, effigies of bullies, pre-established cheers and boos, walls adorned with obligatory names, unanimous ceremonies, mere discipline usurping the place of lucidity’, Borges argued, were tokens of such stupidity. ‘Fighting these sad monotonies,’ he concluded, ‘is one of the writer’s many duties.’

Borges died on 14 June 1986 in Geneva, the city he had loved so much in his distant adolescence. A month before his death, he spoke on the phone with his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares, and his final words were: ‘I’ll never come back’. In his diary, Bioy notes that Borges, who as a young man had written ‘I’ve always been (and will always be) in Buenos Aires’, was weeping.

Throughout his work, Borges maintained that our stories – both our individual ones and those that our society concocts, made up of fragments of fabricated memories and selective oblivion – can never be fully known. ‘What will die with me when I die?’ he asked on his sixtieth birthday. ‘What pathetic or despicable form will the world lose?’ Certainly not the discovery of our power as readers to breathe new life into any text. Borges rescued that essential role for us, and this miracle, though distorted and abused, is today part of the literary act. ‘A writer writes what he can; a reader reads what he wants’, he once asserted in defence of our generous responsibility in the act of reading.

Today, Borges would have recognised the irony of discovering such generosity (first suggested with a touch of sarcasm in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote’) in the proliferation of fake news; his ideal of a world without governments (suggested by the neutral Switzerland of his adolescence), in the return to populist fascism; his vision of the Universal Library of Babel crammed with indecipherable pages, in the futile universality of electronic texts and AI imitations of literature. Above all, he would have seen confirmation of his argument that ‘dictatorships foster stupidity’ in the attitude of most electorates in our suicidal times.

Eleven years before his death, Borges published a story, ‘Utopia of a Man Who Is Tired’, in which he recounts a dreamlike visit to the future and discovers, among other things, that every person is now a Christ or an Archimedes, and that politicians are forced to seek honest occupations. Also, that Truth is the daughter of Time in the sense that History (as we had read in ‘Pierre Menard’) is whatever we say is History. A guide, showing Borges the future utopian world, stops before a tower and explains that this is the crematorium. ‘They say it was invented by a philanthropist whose name, I believe, was Adolf Hitler.’ Borges, in his weariness, sensed that the infamous figures of history (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin or the nineteenth-century Argentinian tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas, for example) would be redeemed in the memory of the future. He died without knowing he was right. A few decades after Borges’s death, during the celebrations marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany, Josef Stalin was declared a ‘Great Patriot’ by Vladimir Putin, and in July 2013, the Buenos Aires City Council opened a new underground station named after General Juan Manuel de Rosas.


J.H. Prynne • Jeremy Noel-Tod remembers: J.H. Prynne, who died on 22 April at the age of eighty-nine, was a poet and teacher who excluded the author’s personality as a relevant consideration in the reading of literature and simultaneously became one of the most talked-about people in modern British poetry.

No doubt it was partly his personal elusiveness in the verse published under his name that heightened interest in traveller’s tales about his character, which became entirely believable to anyone who ever met this inimitably sharp, energetic and high-spirited man.

It was said he had been in a Polish tank regiment for National Service and could pass in Eastern Europe for a German communist; that he could be a maddening companion on country walks, lingering with a magnifying glass over a blade of grass; that he always wore the same outfit of a white shirt, black jacket and orange tie, with the concession of a short-sleeved shirt in summer; that he was both a good cook and mechanic; that he worked through the night in his rooms at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and could often be found at parties, holding forth and ‘blowing your mind’; that he had an aversion to being photographed and kept his office phone in a drawer; that he was famous in China.

My own story illustrates what one of his poems calls ‘a pure joy at a feeble joke’, although it was not really so feeble. I was newly arrived in Cambridge to begin a PhD, and he kindly invited me to afternoon tea. We got on to the subject of the University Library, and he recalled hearing about a volume of Heidegger that had been thrown from a high window onto the roof below. It was an apt fate, he felt, for a philosopher who had coined a term for the conditions of existence over which an individual life has no choice: ‘Geworfenheit’, or ‘thrownness’. Remembering this now not only makes me think how his poetry was fascinated by the material conditions of our lives – his first book, never reprinted, was called Force of Circumstance (1962); his next, Kitchen Poems (1968) – but also how his power to pursue a single-minded course, in life and verse, seemed to throw off the limits of thrownness. A long-time friend once remarked that Prynne’s polymathic intellect meant he might equally have been a linguist or a scientist. But he set himself to be a poet and pursued that contrary path as a way of expressing his belief in the dialectical nature of truth. As he wrote in 2010:

To be in and across all things a poet, in daily involvement with the dialectic of imagination and real things, has been a task giving the profoundest joy and fulfilment. The task in this work has been to maintain the fundamental argument of contradiction, even while opening one’s powers of feeling and knowledge to the largest extent, so that language occupies the entire space of the poet’s self-being and then overflows it.

Contrarily enough, having avoided autobiography for so many years, in 2016 he gave a long interview to the Paris Review, of which the full (unpublished) transcript comprises 152,000 words, or 495 printed pages. The published version provides ample evidence of his ability to speak extempore in eloquently complex sentences. The same year, the flow of poetry suddenly became a flood. The third edition of his Poems covered the period 1968–2014 in almost 700 pages; it was supplemented by a volume of even greater length, Poems 2016– 2024. After that, he published Front Obsidian Cobalt (2024), Doric Plumage (2025), Which Scarf Match and Single Tangle Mine (both 2026). His work appeared almost entirely through small presses, making individual collections now hard to find, or afford, but there have been two new paperback editions of earlier books: The White Stones (1969) and The Oval Window (1983). A collection of his critical prose in two volumes, long wished for by readers, is forthcoming. As well as his essays and commentaries on poetry, it is hoped that it will include ‘Mr Prynne’s Notes and Materials for English Students’, a legendary collection of reading lists, lecture notes and generous wisdom (‘tips’) accumulated over more than forty years of teaching Cambridge undergraduates.


At his own pace • Jaime Siles, the poet from Valencia, Spain, has received the Queen Sofía Award for Ibero-American poetry. The newspaper El Pais described Siles as a philologist, teacher, literary critic and poet who received the award, the judges affirmed, due to his ability to ‘bring the abstract and the sensual together in a language close to scientific discourse’. The seventy-five-year-old poet said, ‘this is the most significant recognition I have ever received’. Recipients of the honour, a spokesperson for the judges declared, constitute ‘almost a history of poetry on both sides of the Atlantic’. It was first presented in 1992 to the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas. Later recipients have included Mario Benedetti, Pere Gimferrer, Nicabor Parra, Francisco Brines, Ernesto Cardenal, Ida Vitale and Raúl Zurita. Unapologetically, Siles declares himself ‘an intellectual poet’ who goes at his own pace in an age of hurry. He recalls a phrase that Jorge Guillén used about Proust: ‘In a precipitate age he went slow’. Following Horace’s advice, he lets his books mature before he publishes them; the next one to appear has been aging for four or five years and is almost ready. A precocious poet, his first collection (Génesis de la luz) appeared when he was only eighteen years old.


Uncollected Lorca • Federico García Lorca is back in the news. A poem (not a particularly distinguished one) has been added to his oeuvre ninety-three years after it was composed. It is eight lines long and was discovered on the reverse side of the manuscript of ‘Gacela de la raíz amarga’. He probably wrote it in 1933 when he was working on Diván del Tamarit, a tribute to the Arab poets who thrived in his natal city of Granada. Three years later the poet was killed.

As the centenary of his execution approaches, publishing activity has accelerated. Last year a facsimile of his anguished, posthumously issued Sonnets of Dark Love was issued after much hesitation by the Estate. The ‘new’ poem will feature in a volume of previously uncollected work due out soon.

Also soon to appear are Lorca’s prose poems composed in adolescence, which marked his turn away from a musical to a poetic vocation. In 1917, after his nineteenth birthday, he wrote in ‘Mística en que se trata de Dios’: ‘Night of 15 October, 1917. Federico. The year since I came out for the good of literature’, which places the precise date on 15 October 1916, the day of St Teresa of Ávila, when he was on a student trip to Ávila. ‘Ávila is the most Castilian and dignified city of its area. Its silent Streets, its imposing walls and its ancient churches seem to preserve a truly ancient spirit.’ On the anniversary of St Teresa’s death, Lorca the musician was also laid to rest and Lorca the writer recognised himself. At the age of eighteen plus a few months his father paid for the printing of his first collection which went almost entirely unnoticed. It is unlikely that the Complete Literary Prose of Lorca, to be published by Galaxia Gutenberg, will be greeted by comparable neglect. Here readers will find his ‘Místicas’, his ‘Estados sentimentales’, ‘Baladas’ and much else. Revelatory texts include ‘My First Love’ in which he recounts his passionate childhood infatuation – obsession – with the portrait of skinny, blonde girl, a friend of his grandmother’s who died young, and talks about the poetry of Góngora and Cernuda, on painting and music and drama.


Cultural vandalism • We are hearing criticism of those virtuous well-established authors who three years ago mounted the boycott of book festivals supported by Baillie Gifford on the grounds that this beneficent trust fund had minor holdings in companies in the fossil fuels area of the economy. Fossil Free Books was the name of the group that drove off the most generous single sponsor of book festivals in the UK and made other possible patrons reluctant to expose themselves lest they transgress the red lines that zigzag the areas of cultural propriety which soon came to include companies with interests in Israel. Authors who had led the protests should ‘hang their heads in shame’ said outgoing director Alistair Moffat, who founded the Borders Book Festival: it was an ‘idiot’ group that organised the boycott of festivals sponsored by Baillie Gifford. They had done ‘terrible damage’ to the sector. The group has now, he added, ‘disappeared, and nobody hears from them’. He singled out some of the members, naming Robert Macfarlane, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith. ‘The whole thing was so stupid and ill thought through. Baillie Gifford had been exemplary sponsors. They are terrific, and we miss them very much. […] I thought [what happened] was cultural vandalism.’ There were dozens of authors associated with the campaign, including George Monbiot, Katherine Rundell, Labour MP Dawn Butler, comedian Nish Kumar and the singer Charlotte Church who pulled out of appearances at the 2024 Hay Festival. Hay was first to reject Baillie Gifford’s help. Others followed, including the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Borders Book Festival. Baillie Gifford was on a hiding to nothing and in the end withdrew financial support from seven other organisations including Cheltenham.


Poetry slop • After the controversy surrounding the award to allegedly AI generated ‘sublime’ fiction by the Commonwealth Short Story Prize judges, those familiar with the artistic efforts of AI were not surprised to hear evidence of possible AI creativity from a prominent Russian source. The well-attended St Petersburg International Book Festival, once attended by European authors and occasional British royals, it is now a place for promoting the Russian cause against Ukraine. The three-day event in May foregrounded pro-war writers, correspondents and foreign commentators championing the Kremlin’s agenda. ‘Z-poetry’, a genre of wartime poetry that has emerged since 2022, was performed on the main stage. The AI generated poem, no doubt translated by AI as well, was delivered by a veteran pseudo-named Valentin Yukhta. It concerned a war he may have experienced in in central Africa: ‘The storm split the sky like an axe in flight, / Thunder struck like a gong, calling battle to rise. / All burned in the rain, in the screams of the night. / Corpses below and jets in the skies.’ It doesn’t get much better than that. While the Commonwealth Foundation declared that its competition judging processes were ‘robust’, what mattered at this year’s St Petersburg Book Festival was political propriety, and computers are sometimes even more biddable than flesh-and-blood authors. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has said she uses AI for research and drafting. It is likely that she is not alone. The Times reported, ‘Neil Clarke, publisher and editor-in-chief of monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, cut off submissions after noticing a spike in AI-generated writing way back in 2023. Clarke says he and his team now take a ‘hardline’ approach to AI-generated writing. ‘AI, for all its time-saving, has increased my workload by at least twenty-five percent’, said Clarke, who has a background in technology and computer science, as a large chunk of his time is spent sorting through ‘slop’ submissions. His specific insights were telling. ‘From what I’ve seen, there are certain stylistic choices that AI seems to choose out of what it reads. The more you see these, the more you recognise that it’s off.’ All the same, as Clarke says (as many lecturers would say), ‘when you see so many stories coming that are generated artificially, it damages the way you look at things. If I read ten AI stories in a row, I just feel disgusted by people – who does this? And then you approach a new writer with the same doubt and scepticism, and it’s not fair on them.’


The 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize • In June, Kevin Young was awarded the 2026 Griffin Poetry Prize – in cash terms one of the most valuable for a single title. His book is Night Watch and the judges were Andrea Cote, Luke Hathaway and Major Jackson. They selected Night Watch from 461 books of poetry from forty-two countries. Young has been poetry editor of the New Yorker for the last nine years.


Carol Rumens • The Guardian ran a celebration of their poetry columnist Carol Rumens, ‘whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly twenty years and was beloved among its loyal readership’. She died on 25 April at the age of eighty-two. She published more than a dozen books of poems, translated, and wrote drama, fiction and criticism. The Guardian said, ‘Rumens published several collections in the 1980s, including Star Whisper and The Greening of the Snow Beach, as well as her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on several translated volumes by Russian poets, including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. She taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor. […] In October 2007, she began writing the Guardian poem of the week column, choosing “Far Rockaway” by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. She would ultimately write nearly 1,000 columns, with the final one appearing in February and featuring two poems by Matthew Rice.’ The Guardian noted that in 2019, a collection of fifty-two poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices by Carcanet.

Writing about the columns on the Carcanet blog in 2019, Rumens observed: ‘I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them. That’s the selfish, self-loving bit.’ She writes:

The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems. I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, anyway, as best I can.