Three of Borges's Miltons

Abstract

“John Milton, Englishman” figures regularly in the works of Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, from his early newspaper writings to his late poems, through direct quotation and indirect reference.1 Borges’s translator, friend, and aficionado Willis Barnstone received no demurral from the septuagenarian Borges when he remarked that, “In various conversations and so frequently in your writing you mention Milton. You mention him far more than you do Dante.” Milton’s prominence for Borges is clear from his ready response to Barnstone’s follow-up question, “When did you read Milton’s Paradise Lost?”:2 “My parents went to Europe in the year 1914. . . . I got a copy of Milton’s works in the Everyman’s Library edition, and instead of seeing Paris — I must have been fifteen at the time — I stayed in the hotel and read Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the sonnets,” to which he immediately added, “And I don’t regret it.”3 We glean from this characteristically pithy and playful response that Borges’s first exposure to Milton’s works was influential both because it came early in his life, during particularly impressionable years, and because his own bookish Parisian experience resembled Milton’s. Milton likely would have found some satisfaction in Borges’s first reading of his works. Most generally, that reading was