Favourite Essays

In Arabic, the Thousand and One Nights is called the Quitab alif laila ua laila (in that deliciously arabesque mode of musical repetition), which led Burton to translate the title as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. So I suppose this title would work out to mean something in binary, the decimal 3 being 11 in base 2 (and 10 being called two). This brings me naturally, albeit tangentially, to the subject of my favourite essays, via 'The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights' by Borges, quite blatantly my favourite writer.

The most illuminating (and fun) essays I've read have had a few common qualities, apart from quality of language and style. The most important, in my opinion, is the author's knowledge of purpose, of his need to write and the necessity of the reader's reading the essay. My personal introduction to forceful, lucid, and above all, clear writing was a collection of essays by Orwell. 'Politics and the English Language' remains relevant in its call to "send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting-pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin where it belongs."

Another of Orwell's essays, 'Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool', criticises an obscure pamphlet by Tolstoy wherein the famous Russian attacked Shakespeare, singling out King Lear for his most scathing remarks. Orwell defends Shakespeare's legacy, and at the same time criticises certain aspects of Tolstoy's thinking and behavior. It was while reading this essay that I felt the strongest urge to read both Shakespeare and Tolstoy, urges that quickly dissipated when I actually encountered them, hence illustrating another quality of essays that I like: advertising other good reads. In this regard one might draw parallels to evangelical writing. Of course the master of (secular) writing scattered with references and recondite erudition is necessarily Borges. His non-fiction writing is a much larger body of work than his more famous ficciones. The same pet topics crop up in both, though: labyrinths, dreams, Gnosticism, the Kaballah, Argentinia... aside from the last these are topics which evidence a man whose life was led in books and for books. I cannot choose a favourite essay (perhaps becuase I still want to read more), but a good one to read is 'The Homeric Versions', where he discusses various translations of Homer into English. The topic of translation stayed with Borges his whole life, and he still talks about it in his Norton lectures at Harvard, recently published as This Craft of Verse. His (reassuring) opinion is consistent throughout all those decades of writing about translation and translators, that a translation should not be considered as being better or worse than another, nor should one designate any particular version as the definitive translation; they are all works in their own right, and should be considered as complementing the original version. For the translation of his own poems (my favourite being Conjectural Poem) into English in collaboration with di Giovanni, he even encouraged the poet-translators into coming up with translations that surpassed his originals.

In 'Forms of a Legend' Borges describes the many forms that the story of Buddha has taken over the years, admitting at the end of the essay that "the chronology of India is unreliable, my erudition even more so; ... it would not surprise me if my history of the legend was itself legendary, formed of substantial truth and accidental errors." (Even the master can make mistakes: cf. the notes to This Craft of Verse but they are remarkably few given his blindness and how he often quoted from memory. In his understanding of the Oriental, he also relied, by necessity, on the Orientalist canon which Said has already criticised.) This theme of multiple versions also runs through Borges's stories and poems. It is an understandable topic for a bibliophile and one-time National Librarian of Argentina: reprints, reissues, and multiple versions of the same work are a cataloger's headache, in part remedied by the concept of uniform titles and the advent of computerised catalogues.

Moving away from the purely literary (Borges perhaps, but less so Orwell) and into the political and local, my two favourite (and in this many will concur) essayists on Singaporean issues are Cherian George and Kishore Mahbubani. The former writes with the concise engagement of a journalist, while the latter is somewhat more liberal with his application of the academic apparatus (extensive quotations, diversions, references). The Mahbubani essay that I liked most was 'The Rest of the West?', not so much for its content -- five years later many of the things he speaks of are self-evident -- but for its straightforward style and his use of the dialectic analysis (hence betraying his academic background as a philosophy graduate) which is particularly suited for the issue at hand:

My thesis will be that even today, the world continues to be dominated by the West. My anti-thesis will be about the forces bringing about the end of Western domination and my synthesis will be about the Rest of the West.

That is from a perspective of power and political influence. East-West relations of course also include cultural interactions, and in this post-colonial part of the world, cultural affiliations are fraught with political subtext, blunty put in the title of his essay 'Where East Meets West, and West Beats East.' George is reassuringly blunt with the truth: "culture is of course never static and never 'pure', except in the fevered imaginations of the world's ethnic nationalists." Journalists aren't wiff-waffling pansies. Speaking on issues closer to the heart of Singaporeans (by this I mean more pressing on our psyche), his opinions are easy to relate to and quickly generate either assent or dissent. He handles a sensitive subject with forthrightness, leading to a punchy ending:

Meanwhile, newsreaders on national radio and television regard it as a mark of sophistication that they can say French names properly, but show no similar care over the pronunciation of Asian names. But since they mispronounce them the way an American would mispronounce them -- the correct mispronunciation, so to speak -- their bosses do not seem to mind.

It's a pity the collection stops short at 2000 when it was published. Since the pivotal events of Sept 11, 2001, the political landscape here has changed drastically, with security concerns being touted as a necessary impediment to our 'politics of comfort and control.' I would much like to see the publication of a next collection from George.

That said, perhaps I'll end off by suggesting a sequential paired reading of a Borges story and a Mahbubani essay, as a sort of comment on our changing ethics in general and American ethics in particular (because American ethics are famously the ethics which most affect our world's state of affairs: the Benthamites would have been alarmed): 'The Bribe' from Borges's Book of Sand is, as he describes it, "an attempt to portray... the American's obsession with ethics." Whether this is necessarily a good thing, in terms of the utilitarian principle (to cause the least suffering), is explored in Mahbubani's 'Pol Pot: the Paradox of Moral Correctness.' The 'calculus of felicity' is more complex than it seems.