Ficcionario: Una antología de sus textos

by Jorge Luis Borges

Compilar una antología es construir un libro, es proponer al lector una lectura unitaria de textos dispersos. En el caso de una antología de textos de Jorge Luis Borges, construir un libro plantea, por añadidura, una dificultad accesoria: pocas obras son tan íntimamente una como la de este escritor. Y aunque cada texto suyo es a la vez, como Borges mismo propone, todos sus textos, preferir algunos para construir un volumen entraña destruir una totalidad que es superior a la suma de sus partes.
Consciente de ello, o más aún, tomándolo como punto de partida, Emir Rodríguez Monegal ha construido una antología que no pretende ser ni una lectura del Borges más representativo ni esa otra, tan frecuente, organizada según las arbitrariedades del antólogo.
"He intentado compilar una antología -señala Rodríguez Monegal- que cubre prácticamente toda la producción de Borges y que no sólo selecciona sus textos famosos (suficientemente antologados ya, incluso por él en dos antologías personales) sino también algunos perdidos y soslayados hasta por los eruditos más tenaces. El aficionado notará por eso -continúa- algunas omisiones flagrantes y se preguntará el porqué de algunas resurrecciones. En cuanto a las primeras, precisamente porque son flagrantes pueden ser restauradas en la antología por la memoria del lector. En cuanto a las segundas, muy deliberadamente han sido escogidas para mostrar aspectos de la escritura borgeana (temas, manías, humores) que los antólogos anteriores habían descuidado."
Muchos de los textos aquí incluidos han sido tomados de publicaciones periódicas, a veces inaccesibles, y no habían sido recogidos en ningún libro de Borges.

483 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."