Borges on Martín Fierro

Borges on Martín Fierro concerns Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges's comments on José Hernández's nineteenth century poem Martín Fierro. Like most of his compatriots, Borges was a great admirer of this work, which he often characterized as the one clearly great work in Argentine literature. Because Martín Fierro has been widely considered (beginning with Leopoldo Lugones's El Payador, 1916) the fountainhead or pinnacle of Argentine literature, Argentina's Don Quixote or Divine Comedy, and because Borges was certainly Argentina's greatest twentieth-century writer, Borges's 1953 book of essays about the poem and its critical and popular reception - El "Martín Fierro" (written with Margarita Guerrero) - gives insight into Borges's identity as an Argentine.

The poem's central character, Martín Fierro, is a gaucho, a free, poor, pampas-dweller, who is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort defending against Indian attacks. He eventually deserts, and becomes a gaucho matrero, basically the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw.

In his book of essays, Borges displays his typical concision, evenhandedness, and love of paradox, but he also places himself in the spectrum of views of Martín Fierro and, thus, effectively, gives a clue as to his (Borges's) relation to nationalist myth. Borges has nothing but praise for the aesthetic merit of Martín Fierro, but refuses to project that as indicating moral merit for its protagonist. In particular, he describes it as sad that his countrymen read "with indulgence or admiration", rather than horror, the famous episode in which Fierro provokes a duel of honor with a black gaucho and then kills him in the ensuing knife fight.

Borges emphasizes that "gauchesque" poetry was not poetry written by gauchos, but generally by educated urban writers who adopted the eight-syllable line of the rural payadas (ballads), but often filled them with folksy expressions and with accounts of daily life that had no place in the "serious and even solemn" payadas. He views these works as a successful impersonation, facilitated by the interpenetration of rural and urban cultures, especially in the Argentine military. The author of Martín Fierro was one of the few gauchesque poets who ever actually lived as a gaucho.

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