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Borges and tango: imagining Argentina.

Article Excerpt
To a blind man, all places are, visually speaking, imaginary. However vivid his memories of a city, a street, a house, or a room, what he actually visualizes is no more and no less real than his own imagination. Jorge Luis Borges, who went blind in mid-life, is famous for his fantastic gardens of forking paths and men on pink corners, his fictional funhouse of mirrors and labyrinths and Chinese boxes. What is less well known is the role tango and its forebear the milonga played in his imaginary landscape. Borges glorified the milonga and the classic creole tango, but scorned the later lango-cancion. To understand why is to understand the competing visions of the past that have vied for space in the Argentine imagination.

Like jazz, tango is a musical genre that grew, divided, and produced internationally adopted offspring. And just as there are varieties of jazz, so too there are varieties of tango--the Old Guard (creole tango), the New Guard (including tango-milonga and tango-cancion), and the New Tango (avant-garde tango a la Piazzolla).

What these tangos have in common is the evocation of an imaginary time and place. Like much South American music, tangos are perhaps more than anything an expression of saudade, dreams of days long past or better days to come, a life, a love imagined. Even Astor Piazzolla, who brilliantly refashioned the tango in the last half of the twentieth century, became famous for nostalgic pieces like "Adios Nonino."

The tango defies attempts to pin down just what it is and where it came from. Its roots become lost in a tangled heritage of gaucho country rhythms, African-Argentine dance, habaneras, and underworld urban culture in Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century. It is to Buenos Aires what jazz is to New Orleans, a fundamental part of its mythic heritage, as Borges indicates in his poem "Fundacion mitica de Buenos Aires":

A piano sent forth classic tangos. ... The day was drowned in yesterdays, and men shared pipe dreams of the past. (1)

The places envisioned in those pipe dreams changed with the years. The early milongas were sung by tough mate-drinking gauchos sporting daggers lodged in silver-coin-studded belts. These strong and independent Creoles were most at home perched on a horse, strumming a milonga on the guitar, and drinking mate from a gourd handed up by an adoring girlfriend. The setting was...

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