Borges' Library

notes on the perfect library

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.” 
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

 

The Abbey Library at St Gall

Sissinghurst Library

Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna

Rotating Sutra Library at Hasedera

Oriental Library in Tokyo (for its Silk Road archives)

Hapsburg Libraries at el Escorial and the Vienna State Library

Monastery Libraries at Admont and Melk

Coimbra

Royal Library of Turin

(Why have I never seen in French libraries? And to see the library at Salamanca is a top priority!)

 

1) The Abbey Library at St Gall

Many years ago, I worked on a translation of a Japanese documentary on the subject of the Abbey Library of St. Gall, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Everything I read about the library entranced me. And I finally got to visit this beautiful jewel a few years ago when I traveled to see it in St Gallen, Switzerland. Nothing could have prepared me for the perfect Baroque period jewel that is the library. I think it is the most beautiful library in the world. The library itself dates far back in history, having started out as an early medieval scriptorium. Some of the books in the collection are national treasures. With its carved bookcases and painted ceilings, it's like a baroque dream come true. There is even a huge painted 16th century globe of the world. 

Probably what struck me most of all about the place (and this is perhaps true of many pilgrims visiting the famed library) was the plaque that was affixed above the rococo doors leading into the room, which reads in Greek: Psyches iatreion, which can be translated as "pharmacy of the soul" --though when we were there, I think the guidebook said "medicine of the soul." This claim that books are medicine for the soul (or libraries are hospices for the sick) is, in fact, the world's oldest library motto, dating all the way back to Pharaoh Ramses II, whose ancient library also had a "plaque" above the door designating the pharaoh's library to be a "house of healing for the soul."

Here is an article:  Download Library motto. 

 

2) Sissinghurst

Like a lot of people, I have long imagined paradise as a beautiful garden.

And of all the gardens in the world, there is one in particular that perfectly embodies the heavenly for me. My obsession with Sissinghurst goes way back. The garden had "caught instantly in my heart and imagination" when I was around 13. A garden of my dreams, it is also a real life place. A place in England, in fact. And, if the idea of the "Kentish Weald" is not romantic enough for you, how about a garden created in the ruins of an early Tudor period castle? 

At 13, I was greatly enamored by its creator Vita Sackville-West-- and thought she was like Karen Blixen in Out Of Africa. Independent, fearless and talented. 

Or like Virginia Woolf, with whom she had had a legendary love affair, Vita was for me the ultimate heroine. Denied an inheritance because she was female, she stood up and took brilliant charge of her life in a way that continues to dazzle me. She would have her fun, her friends and lovers; her books and art--not to mention her stunning career--and simply never look back. Of course, Vita was born into great privilege, and yet there was still something triumphant about her way of living her life. Looking back at my own life, I don't think I have achieved anything close to her stunning independence. Not all that long ago, a friend of these pages remarked that despite considering herself to be an independent person, she had actually never lived on her own. Her words struck me. Of course, I have lived independently both in Japan and America for some lengths of time--and yet with the birth of my son especially, I feel I have lived in a very dependent way. And given my youthful admiration with Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, it is surprising that I never became more resistant to living on someone's else's terms.

 

3 Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna

The most history-fragrant library I have ever been in... from the arcades covered in paintings of the coats of arms of students who had studied here in the middle ages to the old anatomy theater--two great marble staircases sweep students up to the Stabat Mater Lecture Hall and the old library.  

Upper loggia of painted memories

Famous Alumni of the Europe's oldest university

History from official website:

The Archiginnasio palace was constructed between 1562 and 1563 as desired by the Papal Legate of Bologna, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo and Vice-legate Pier Donato Cesi, by the project of Bologna's architect Antonio Morandi called Terribilia. The purpose of the operation, during the cultural climate of the Council of Trent, was that to give a unit seat to the university teaching until then dispersed in various seats.
The external portion of the palace is presented by a long portico of 30 arches and is pronounced in two internal floors around a central courtyard with a double order of loggias. Two grand staircases lead to the floor above that presents 10 scholastic lecture halls (today they are not able to been visited, as they hold the principle books deposits of the library) and two home lecture halls located at the two ends of the building, one for the Artists (today Reading Hall of the Library) and one for the Legisti (Ancient Law students) (Sala dello Stabat Mater).
The sides of the rooms, the vaults of the grand staircases, and of the open galleries are decorated with inscriptions and monuments commemorating the masters of the ancient university and thousands coats of arms and students names.
The building's university function ceased in 1803; from 1838, after being for a few years a primary school, is the seat of the Library. At the ground level some of the antique lecture rooms are occupied by the Società Medica Chirurgica and by the Accademia di Agricoltura.

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Following Hapsburg Libraries I think of as a set:

4 Abby Library at Melk

5) Abby Library at Admont

6) Library at El Escorial

 

 

HasederaKyōzō (Sutra Archive)

 

Royal Library of Turin

Coimbra

Oriental Library

 

Admont

https://io9.gizmodo.com/lose-yourself-in-these-photos-of-europes-most-magnifice-1679182958

In some ways libraries do stand as types of memory palaces mirroring who we are and where we came from. Libraries are often associated with nation-state or kingdom building. And thinking of the above image of a civilization in ruins trying to rebuild with what books they had left is a topic taken up by Roy Scranton in his incredibly compelling book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. I've written about this book before in these pages. And I highly recommend this book to you. Ostensibly about climate change, the short book is really a brilliant meditation on death. Convinced there is no rolling back the damage, Scranton examines ways of facing the end of civilization. And he thinks we should learn from Rome. We don't want to have to rebuild like those shipwreck survivors of the early middle ages trying to frantically recreate all the knowledge that was lost. And so much has already been lost. We must, therefore, make a concerted effort, he says, to conserve our ecological and our civilizational heritage. In libraries.

Manguel, while playing with the idea that his library will stand as a kind of legacy of his life, long after the body of the man has turned to dust; wonderfully tells the reader that he also “likes to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.” It's true that libraries have also been mausoleums. Think of Ramses II or Alexander the Great's places of final rest. Or el Escorial in Spain. Manguel, though,  seems to reject the legacy of memory aspect to his library. 

So, then, what does it all mean? Well, like so many others who came before him, Manguel wonders if perhaps more than anything, a library is a consolation.

Consolation, perhaps. Perhaps consolation.

As balm for the fractured soul~ this is how he ends his book. 

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Do you have a favorite library?

Many years ago, I worked on a translation of a Japanese documentary on the subject of the Abbey Library of St. Gall, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Everything I read in the translation about the library entranced me. And I finally got to visit this beautiful jewel a few years ago when I traveled to see it in St Gallen, in Switzerland. Nothing could have prepared me for the perfect Baroque period jewel that is the library. I think it is the most beautiful library in the world. The library itself dates way back in history, having started out as an early medieval scriptorium. Some of the books in the collection are national treasures. With its carved bookcases and painted ceilings, it's like a baroque dream come true. There is even a huge painted 16th century globe of the world. 

Probably what struck me most of all about the place (and this is perhaps true of many pilgrims visiting the famed library) was the plaque that was affixed above the rococo doors leading into the room, which reads in Greek: Psyches iatreion, which can be translated as "pharmacy of the soul" --though when we were there, I think the guidebook said "medicine of the soul." This claim that books are medicine for the soul (or libraries are hospices for the sick) is, in fact, the world's oldest library motto, dating all the way back to Pharaoh Ramses II, whose ancient library also had a "plaque" above the door designating the pharaoh's library to be a "house of healing for the soul."

Isn't that wonderful? 

This very ancient library motto became known to Europeans in the Renaissance when it was translated into Latin by Poggio and then adopted by the Swedish Royal Library for its official bookplate; finally, being carved into the eye-catching plaque above the library at St. Gall in 1760.

 

 **

-- For Abbas and Margit, who are also organizing their library

See my posts on the book burning scene in Don Quixote: Don Quixote: When Professor Wey-Gómez Ate Mochi and The Inquiry of the Library 

Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

 

Library of Exile --Venice

Venice is so full of surprises. We were there during the Biennale, but had no plans to visit any of the exhibitions. We were there for Titian, after all. So, I had no idea that Edmund de Waal had been invited. We stumbled on his exhibit, sharing campo space with the La Fenice. I am a huge fan--I have longed to see his pottery in person. And there it was, just through that door. 

Words by de Waal.

I have made a library. During the Biennale it will be housed in the Ateneo, the beautiful 16th-century building near the Fenice opera house which has acted as a meeting place for two centuries. I’m taking over the Aula Magna room on the ground floor. Working here in Venice I realised that this whole project was a reflection on the power of translation. That the ghetto was a place of voices, of language in flux and that this was, in itself, a manifestation of Venice as the powerhouse of printing in Renaissance Europe. This was the city where Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer from Antwerp, created the great edition of the Bablyonian Talmud in 1520-23. He worked with Jewish scholars and copyists to make books that hold the Hebrew text, an Aramaic translation and commentary within a single page. These beautiful books were ordered by distant Jewish communities from Aleppo to Frankfurt.

 

So this is a new library of exile, a place that contains 2,000 books written by those who have been forced to leave their own country, or exiled within it. This is a history from Ovid and Tacitus, through Dante to Voltaire and Victor Hugo. It is the history of the 20th century, the century of Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth, of Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. It is dissidents. It is poets and novelists forced from their homes, Ai Qing in China and Czeslaw Milosz in Poland, Ismael Kadare in Albania. I think of the recent decades of extraordinary writers from Lebanon and Syria, the literature of exile of Iran, Palestine, Tunisia and Turkey.

 

The external wall of the library is covered in porcelain, painted in liquid form over sheets of gold on which I have written a new text, a listing of the lost and erased libraries of the world, from Nineveh and Alexandria to the recent destruction of Timbuktu, Aleppo and Mosul. Inside this library is a quartet of new vitrines whose structure echoes Bomberg’s great Talmudic page.

This new library will be open for all readers from early May. There are books in 32 languages. There will be readings and conversations about literature, about history and translation, a new dance work, storytelling for children, and music. It will celebrate the idea that all languages are diasporic, that we need other people’s words, self-definitions and re-definitions in translation.

 

It honours the words of André Aciman, himself an exile from Alexandria, that he understands himself “not as a person from a place, but as a person from a place across from that place. You are – and always are – from somewhere else.”

 

Everything is plural here, one history reaching out to another, a palimpsest of voices. And this is where this project finds its core. I thought of how the psalms work as songs of exile from the city, the ever-present absence of Jerusalem. Of how much the psalms work as songs that move between the singular and the plural, the solitary voice and the tribal, anger and despair, lament and joy. And how the psalms are cornerstones of all three Abrahamic traditions.

This place is embedded in metaphor. It is on the edge of the world, it is a place of concentration, a place of powerlessness.

There is another history, other metaphors. Sitting here I think of the great sweep of languages of this place, the mingling of high and low argot and slang, of the dialects and cultures of the German, Flemish, Persian, Ottoman, Spanish and Portuguese Jews alongside Italians, an almost unimaginable array of clothing, food and music. It was a place of constant translation, a testing ground for comprehension and nuance. It was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music, liturgy and exegesis, with Hebrew as the only common denominator. I think of the great 17th-century Rabbi Leon da Modena, who wrote in his autobiography that he had practised 26 professions in his life, from teacher to cantor to judge, to composing poetry for gravestones, translating, printing and arranging marriages.

The place was noisy with learning, education, debate, poetry and music … Hebrew the only common denominator

 

 

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Inquiry of the Library Part 2

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

Remember the days when invited into someone's home, you sometimes had a chance to poke around their bookcases? I used to love seeing the books people owned; loved how books were part of most people's lives and how these books illuminated the people who owned them; who loved them; who cared for them.

I am reading a delightful book by British historian Valerie Flint about the books that Columbus owned and loved. It is a fascinating project to try and illuminate the man by the books he managed to collect and lug around with him on board ship. 

Titled The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, in a nutshell it is an exploration of the explorer's inner landscapes--of the myths and notions that informed his project. 

In thinking about:

Mexican writer and translator Ilan Stavans' book, Imagining Columbus, recounts some of the wildly changing incarnations the explorer has occupied in our collective imaginations over the past five hundred years. Stavans contends--and I agree-- that only Jesus Christ has been interpreted in so many different ways. In my lifetime, for example, Columbus has gone from "rational man of commerce and science" to the representation of all the evils of imperialism and religious fanaticism. Reading Stavans book, I was surprised by just how many great writers have engaged with Columbus in literary terms-- from Nietzsche, Whitman, Umberto Eco and James Fenimore Cooper to Borges, Salman Rushdie, and Kazantzakis.

Stavans himself has been fascinated by the explorer since childhood and helpfully narrows down the multitude of literary tropes into three main types: that of messiah; that of ambitious gold seeker; and that of a conventional, rather unremarkable man.

A bumbler, some said.

Looking at the books that Columbus owned and heavily annotated we can say that he certainly knew--like most people at the time-- the earth was round and more, he was very concerned with the riches of the east. He made careful notes of resources to be found in India, China, Japan--specifically of gold, silver and pearls, spices and silks... he alsoi made careful notes about the people he might find --being worried about cannibals and the  best way to govern (in a future colony presumably). 

Five books survive from his library.

Pierre d"Ailly's Imago Mundi 

Pope Pius II's Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum

A version of Marco Polo's Travels

Plutarch's Lives

Piny's Natural History

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I wanted to ask Brooks about Durer's library. I came across a wonderful essay by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt in a book of essays about Las Meninas. As Laura Cumming described so painfully in her book Vanishing Velazquez, there is very little information to go on about Velazquez's personality (or his inner life). One crucial piece of evidence came to light in 1925 when scholars were able to make an inventory of his library. This was a turning point in Velazquez studies. And in knowing what books he owned, we can surmise that the painter was no intellectual slouch. For informing Las Meninas are sophisticated books on mathematics, architecture and geometry. He also had two editions of Pliny. Velazquez owned 154 volumes--which was substantial for a painter at that time. 

In Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night (a book that has become my Bible), the author describes a visit to the fateful home that Cervantes lived in in Valladolid from 1602-1605. Fateful because it was where he wrote his last work, Exemplary Novels (our hotel in Valladolid is named after one of the novellas in this work)-and where Cervantes got caught up in a murder investigation and was --yet again-- hauled off to jail. The house is a museum now and as Manguel wanders amongst what is left of Cervantes belongs, he thinks about the famous Inquiry of the Library chapter in part one of el Quixote. Deciding to try and help the mad Quixote, the barber and the priest decide to purge Don Quixote's library of any items which could have contributed to his madness. Manguel takes note of the housekeeper who insists the room itself must be purified, "for there might be here one of those many wizards who inhabit these books, and he might cast a spell on us, to punish us for wanting to expel them from the world."

Maguel notes that like many people who do not read (He doesn't say who cannot read but who do not read), the housekeeper fears the power of the books that she refuses to open.He goes on to suggest that the same superstition holds true for most readers as well; for the books we keep closest to hand are possessed by magic.