Article by Ernesto Negri*, published in Página 12

From Sarmiento to Lugones, from Payró to Arlt, from Martínez Estrada to Walsh and Castillo, chess has permeated all literary genres, leaving traces of its social and cultural relevance. In this article, Negri examines the relationship of the author of Fervor de Buenos Aires with the world of chess.

The relationship between chess and literature runs deep in universal experience. In Argentina, Sarmiento, writing in a trans-Andean newspaper, published letters from women who mentioned chess, and, describing the siege of Montevideo, asserted that one side had the other in check. In poetry and short stories, Lugones; in theater, Payró; in novels, Arlt; these are the writers who brought chess into their respective literary genres, as clear proof of its social and cultural relevance. Following in their footsteps, numerous writers would come.

In a necessarily short list, Martínez Estrada must be mentioned first. He captured the local chess atmosphere during the 1939 Tournament of Nations like no other and posthumously bequeathed the fruits of his research in the Philosophy of Chess. Abelardo Castillo incorporated him into one of his works, "The Question of the Queen in the Max Lange," and explored the various hypotheses about its origin in another. Walsh was a skilled chess player, but he abandoned the game, opting for activism when he was able to look up from the board to learn, successively, of an uprising against one of the many illegitimate governments the country had in the 20th century and of the execution of Valle, his mentor. However, he would return to chess in his later written work.

So many thinkers have spoken of chess… Mitre and Alberdi, in the early days of the fledgling nation; Juana Gorriti in that same 19th century (being the first woman to do so); Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, Marechal, González Tuñón, Sabato, Mujica Lainez, Bioy Casares, Cortázar, Orozco, Gelman, Pizarnik, Soriano. And another name: that of the greatest exponent of Argentine literature, Borges, who knew how to construct a universe with chess; who knew how to see a universe in chess; who lavished the most beautiful verses dedicated to the ancient game, those sonnets that bear the name, precisely, Chess. Borges came to it through his father (his grandfather Francisco already played it). Using a chessboard, his father explained to him the paradoxes of Zeno's inaction (those of Achilles and the tortoise and of the arrow that never reaches its target). There is another influence: his father was a translator of the Rubaiyat of Khayyam (FitzGerald's version), to which Borges Jr. will allude in the verse "the sentence is from Omar", included in those sonnets in which it is evident that "the player is a prisoner... of another board/ of black nights and white days", just as the Persian anticipated.

Estela Canto asserts that Jorge Luis Borges, when it comes to seduction and speaking in perfect English, describes her by saying: “She smiles like the Mona Lisa and moves like a chess knight.” He dedicates a poem to the writer Alicia Jurado in which he says: “Time plays chess without pieces/ in the courtyard. The crackle of a branch/ tears through the night. Outside, the plain/ scatters leagues of dust and dreams./ We are both shadows, copying what other shadows dictate:/ Heraclitus and Gautama.” In *The Secret Miracle*, the protagonist dreams of a game played throughout time by two illustrious families. In Guayaquil, he recounts a Welsh legend in which “two kings play chess atop a hill, while their warriors battle below. One of the kings wins the game; a rider arrives with news that the other's army has triumphed. The battle of men was a reflection of the battle on the chessboard.” He presents the mythical meeting of the Liberators in chess terms, stating: “Some conjecture that San Martín fell into a trap” (set by Bolívar). In Utopia of a Man Who Is Tired, he asserts that “Having reached one hundred years of age, the individual can do without love and friendship. Illness and involuntary death do not threaten him. He practices one of the arts, philosophy, mathematics, or plays a solitary game of chess.” In The Garden of Forking Paths, he poses a riddle: “In a riddle whose theme is chess, what is the only forbidden word?” The answer is conclusive: “chess” (the riddle is a parable of a concept that also could not be said: “time”; the powerful force of the unnamed).

Borges considered chess one of his favorite objects, almost on par with his mirrors and labyrinths. Is it possible that in all three cases a singular individual (and perhaps humanity as a whole) can become lost? He kept this in mind in his classic enumerations of precious situations and things. In Another Poem of Gifts, alongside “Labyrinth of effects and causes; the diversity of creatures; love, which lets us see others/ As divinity sees them, and sleep and death/ Those two hidden treasures,” there is no shortage of “geometric and bizarre chess.” When selecting those who make up the list of The Just (“Those people, who are unaware of each other, are saving the world”), he includes, in addition to, for example, “He who prefers that others be right,” “Two employees playing a silent game of chess in a café in the South.”

In conceiving Tlön, a world created according to human criteria, Borges emphasizes that “humanity forgets and forgets again that it is a rigor of chess players, not of angels.” For Borges, chess is essential in detective stories, as María Kodama affirms: every crime can be solved with the analytical capacity used to discover the best move. Poe, the creator of the genre, was not a great admirer of a game he labeled “exquisite frivolity.” Borges, who admired the American writer, disagrees on this point: “Chess is one of the means we have to save culture, like Latin, the study of the humanities, reading the classics, the laws of versification, ethics,” adding immediately, with his usual sharp gaze: “Chess is today replaced by football, boxing, or tennis, which are games for fools, not intellectuals.”

In The Book of Books, Borges characterizes Alice Through the Looking-Glass as “Lewis Carroll’s dreamlike chess game”; in that work, the Englishman, in a clear role reversal so beloved by the Argentine, had suggested that the girl could have dreamed a game or been dreamed by one of the pieces. The greatest writer the Spanish language has ever produced, alongside Cervantes, alluded in his Metaphor of the Arabian Nights to the Eastern masterpiece, and to chess, when he describes “The ape who reveals he is a man,/ Playing chess,” a clear reference to the thirteenth of the nights narrated by Scheherazade (who that night entertained her master by telling him about a prince who, through an enchantment, had been transformed into a monkey).

Borges, providentially, rescued from oblivion the best pages Martínez Estrada had written on chess, which were contained in a manuscript their author had intended to burn. Arrabal was intrigued by a piece written by Menard, who, in one of Borges's stories, appears as the author of "A Technical Article on the Possibility of Enriching Chess by Eliminating One of the Rook Pawns," to such an extent that the Spanish-French writer analyzed its actual feasibility. In Borges, above all else, there was always a metaphysical quest. His final question posed in "Chess," that of "What God behind God begins the plot / of dust and time and dream and agony?" is as suggestive as it is moving. In those lines lies the ultimate mystery, perhaps the only one: whether there is a Creator who directs the strings of the game, just as chess players move the pieces on the board. Not content with that premise, Borges explores the hypothesis of an endless chain of deities, a continuum in which we will inevitably lose ourselves. Like in one of his labyrinths; like in one of his mirrors; like in his chess game. Mysterious chess that is an inevitable mirror of life. Chess that was present in Borges's life since his father taught it to him. Chess that captivated him in its social practice or in his reflections on its scope (or on that of its esoteric relative, the pan-chess created by his friend Xul Solar). Chess that was an important part of his literary work. Chess that is essential even in the novel that was inexplicably attributed to him. Chess that he will be enjoying today, a faithful companion to his favorite poetry, in that other plane he inhabits, in the realm of immortality, about which he wrote so much and which at some point he so greatly feared.

If this were so—and we prefer to think it is—chess and poetry have converged in a Borges inhabiting a definitive realm. The master himself foresaw this when, in "The Other Himself," he wrote: "Poetry is a mysterious chess game, whose board and pieces change as in a dream, and over which I will lean after I have died." We seem to hear him reciting these verses right now, and those of his immortal "Chess." We seem to hear him, right now, with his clear, though tremulous, voice.

* FIDE Master and chess researcher. Co-author of the collection History of Argentine Olympic Chess and author of Chess in Argentine literature (coming soon).