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Selected Non-Fictions
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
The first comprehensive selection in any language of the non-fiction--much of it appearing here in English for the first time--of “one of literature’s most fertile and original minds” (San Francisco Chronicle)
A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper
It will come as a surprise to many readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges’s extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.
Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost superhumanly erudite reader of the world’s literatures, from Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here, too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against fascism, antisemitism, and the Perón dictatorship; Borges the movie critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers.
Like the Aleph in his famous story—the magical point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges’s non-fictions are a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen, Shakespeare and the Kabbalah, the history of angels and the history of tango, the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.
Selected Non-Fictions presents more than 160 of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. This unique selection presents Borges as at once a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is an indispensable guide to Borges.
The first comprehensive selection in any language of the non-fiction--much of it appearing here in English for the first time--of “one of literature’s most fertile and original minds” (San Francisco Chronicle)
A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper
It will come as a surprise to many readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges’s extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.
Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost superhumanly erudite reader of the world’s literatures, from Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here, too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against fascism, antisemitism, and the Perón dictatorship; Borges the movie critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of modern writers.
Like the Aleph in his famous story—the magical point in a basement in Buenos Aires from which one can view everything in the world—Borges’s non-fictions are a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen, Shakespeare and the Kabbalah, the history of angels and the history of tango, the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.
Selected Non-Fictions presents more than 160 of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. This unique selection presents Borges as at once a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a universe that is an indispensable guide to Borges.
560 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Jorge Luis Borges
1,589 books14.3k followersJorge 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."
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."
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September 1, 2024
Jorge Luis Borges envisioned heaven as a library, not an infinite library (that would be Hell), but one sufficiently vast that you could spend all eternity revisiting the classics while keeping the possibility open for a few surprises to pop up now and then. I like that idea, though I would also like there to be real gardens and fields and forests and lakes and rivers and oceans dotted with islands with all manner of vegetation on them and sunshine and white sandy beaches and the occasional storm and starry nights and swamps and mountains and grasslands and deserts and jungles and pyramids and cities and multiple seasons and a diversity of creatures and coffee and beer and more coffee and more beer and pizza and people who like reading good books and my favourite people not too far off and a rustic cottage surrounded by wooly sheep on some desolate moor where I could get my most important reading done alone with the wind and without Catherine or Heathcliff. And of course I would always have a volume of Borges on me in my peregrinations across eternity to help me dream about books and about life. Now that would be heaven.
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December 9, 2024This book is an example of those inexhaustible treasures I can start reading again immediately after finishing the last page. In fact, i’ve done just that when i was writing this review and i’ve discovered a myriad of new things. Borges’s curiosity, encyclopaedic knowledge and the ability to connect all of this into an elegant coherent argument would never stop to amaze me. This of course even more impressive as he didn’t have any AI assistant or even a search engine. But maybe that is actually the reason why it worked. Public intellectuals is a disappearing specie or maybe already totally instinct in the era of often clueless podcasts’s hosts and low attention spans.
I’ve read many of those essays before. But this time i wanted to read this book spanning practically his whole life in a chronological order. Of course, it brings up the whole another dimension: how his mind and probably his personality not necessary matures, but changes with age. It has allowed me to see how he approached the same themes, authors, ideas again and again but always found some different angle. Also his concerns metamorphosed while essentially staying the same: the youthful and optimistic concept of “eternity” changed into “a refutation of time” to be later transformed into “immortality” in his mature age.
He is an original thinker, an attentive and passionate reader, contagious to the others. At one of the essays, he quotes Valery saying:
It is a fascinating idea. Other things equal, I prefer to go into a work without knowing anything about its author or her intentions. I like to experience the text on its own. Also recently i find more and more stimulating to figure out the personality of the author and infer her life experience solely based upon the text. The opposite way, reading about the author or searching her interviews for the contemporary ones, might be more beneficial if someone is interested in history or politics pertinent to the context of the work rather than its intrinsic art. There is no right or wrong way. In any case, if Valery’s approach would be the rule, Borges would often breach it. He is fascinated by the writers as people at least to the same extent as he is interested in their ideas. The book contains the whole section of “capsule biographies” - condensed short fragments about authors ranging from Isaac Babel to Virginia Woolf. In other essays, reviews, prologues the authors prominently feature as well.
Borges is a writer who manages to take someone else ideas or even the words, spend time playing with them, add his own invention into the mix and consequently render this mix in a totally new light. He is a dreamer who is able to create a thought experiment out of a handful of symbols and present it as if it is a concise literary fragment blending fiction and fact. This in turn sparkles imagination of his readers, at least in my case. Some of his mental experiments are like flowers, irregularly shaped, multidimensional and fresh that can be contemplated for a long time or simply enjoyed.
An example of this is his seminal essay “A new refutation of time” (1944-47). He treats time within the framework of a broader idealistic tradition quoting Berkley and Hume, Spencer and Schopenhauer but trying to go even further than those philosophers. I’ve read this essay at least three times within a few days: once for sheer flow of his prose; once to understand his idea; and the third time just to enjoy certain paragraphs, especially more personal ones.
He believes there is no such thing as time if by “time” we mean an irreversible linear sequence of events directed one way. He assumes each moment is autonomous and there is an infinite but countable amount of those moments, sort of hanging out there (please do not ask me where). But if this is the case then it is sufficient to postulate the possibility of two identical moments happening in a mind of an individual or two separate people “to disrupt and confound the series in time!” In other words - to break any perceived sequence.
This idea that the identical moments can happen to different people entails very interesting implication: “Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare are literally Shakespeare in that moment.”. It means when i read this line I am Borges at this particular moment. And when you would read this sequence of two preceding sentences, for a very short time you would become Borges and me in a quick succession:-)
But this theory also implies that “tumultuous and universal catastrophes - fires, wars, epidemics - are but a single sorrow multiplied in many illusory mirrors”.
So all we are is an infinite set of fragile mirrors reflecting an infinite set of moments from out there, presumably occasionally reflecting each other as well; that is unless these mirrors are identical and defined only for a moment by the moment.
I am not sure this idea of totally identical events is supported by probability theory or modern physics with its entropy for that matter. But it is certainly an elegant image, profound in its symbolism and literary beauty.
In one of those almost uncanny reading coincidences, I’ve come across the following in a story by Woolf:
This essay is in its most powerful when it blends philosophy with Borges’s personal recollections. It does it with sheer poetry. One thing is to postulate a theory and totally other is to relive, to feel the truth of your idea. There was a moment in Borges’s life when it seemed to have happen to him. In 1928, he has written a note “Feeling of death”. It was so important to him that he inserted the note in full into not one, but several of his essays. One of them is this one, and another - the earlier one “A history of Eternity”. With this short note, Borges has created his very own situation Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. `the note reads quite differently in the context of the two different essays. The effect is amplified by the fact that it is included into this book in two different English translations. i am not sure whether i did become Borges while reading it, but the image he has created has certainly brought me closer to what he felt. Here is just one line:
And it is just one essay. Elsewhere in this book he deals with philosophical questions such as time, space, mind and self; he deals with politics, especially the roots of nazism (he is puzzled by the fact how such a high culture as the German one could produce such an abhorrent mass movement) and the politics of his native Argentina; he is fascinated by the differences in cultural traditions and religions of so called East and West though he sees a lot of archetypical similarities and constant interactions between the two. The interactions are of course facilitated by the people.
The one of the longest but also very entertaining pieces in the book is devoted to the translators of “Thousand and One night” (1933). He picks up three translators of the text and shows how differently they approach it based upon their personalities and potential nature of their readership. To start with, the 18th century translator someone Mssr. Galland has included a half-dozen tales that were not in the original due to the knowledge of his local helper. Many of these tales are still the most popular ones such as Aladdin and The Forty Thieves. Borges ironically comments: “The mere mention of these names amply demonstrates that Galland established the canon, incorporating stories that time would render indispensable and that the translators to come - his enemies would not dare to omit.” The translator into English was Richard Burton, famous adventurer and traveller of the 19h century. “Richard Burton was solving the problem how to entertain 19th century gentlemen with the pulp fiction of the thirteenth century.” He seemed to do it through using a linguistic exuberance and underscore the perceived barbarism of certain tales. In contrast, the French translator, Dr Mudras aspired to be the most literary but ended up adding a lot of details and images and writing the most “readable” translation. He “translated not the words but its scenes” according to Borges but it was hardly a translation anymore. Enno Littmann, the German “could not tell a lie”. However, he seemed to tight himself into a very strict knot. And the result, according to Borges was “so very little”. Borges wished these tales to be “rethought” in German considering German literary tradition of dealing with the fantastic and the uncanny. I wonder how this situation has changed in hundred years since the essay has been written.
The love of books, the desire to reveal their place in what we call our reality is of course the main preoccupation of his work and his life as a whole, in fact. So it is hardly surprising that many great essays, lectures and reviews focus on different aspects of this phenomena.
In “On the Cult of Books.”(1949) he quotes “The Odyssey”’s “gods weave misfortune so the future generations will have something to sing about;” followed by Mallarme’s “The world exists to end up in a book”. However, the easiest way to summarise this essay is to say that according to Borges: The world IS a book. In Coleridge Flower (1945) he brings up Valery’s thought I’ve mentioned earlier to trace "the history of the evolution of an idea” between the work of three authors. He looks how they depict a situation when an imaginary cause having a real physical effect, an elusiveness of the border between the imaginary and real.
In “The Wall of the books.” (1950), he tells the story: “The man in China who ordered the building of almost infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all the books that has been written before his time.” Borges explains this by the Emperor desire to cancel space and time in such a way to stop death. I’ve had less existential but more uneasy association with our time with the newly re-elected ‘the leader of free nations” who wanted to build another wall and whose views on banning some books might be rapidly emerging. Another anecdote that made me thinking about the present was a phrase by Clement of Alexandria who was afraid of the power of a book as opposed to oral tradition: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.”. I thought of a parallel with our modern information technology such as social networks, AI etc. A written book was perceived as a risky business in the 5th century but it worked out somehow for the humanity. Is it different this time?
Many essays I loved were devoted to a particular work of literature. I cannot leave without mentioning Nine Dantesque Essays (1945-1951). I’ve read them a few years ago while reading The Divine Comedy i’ve written a review then. But this time they were as fresh and original as ever. The most memorable, elegant essay in this category was about the book i have not yet read, “Defence of Bouvard and Pecuchet” (1955). Borges has got a few essays in the book devoted toGustave Flaubert and his work. But this one was particularly stimulating in terms of the idea of a relationship between an author and his/her characters:
“Lamentable”. Kudos to Flaubert’s irony. As a by-product of this essay, i think i understand better now what he meant when saying “I am Emma”.
In this essay Borges also uses the opportunity to explore the role of a fool in literature: “Logical vigour is one tradition and now almost instinctive tradition of placing “the essential words into the mouth of simpletons is another.” I can testify that in present day, the tradition is alive and well. It seems to be actively revived by László KrasznahorkaiAll his novels I’ve read so far have used a character of a “holly fool” to a different degree of effect. I am sure there are more examples. Also I feel that occasionally in a modern piece of fiction some character might come across as a fool without the explicite intention of the author. Back to Flaubert, Borges quotes someone who calls this novel “A story of Faust (two-headed) who was also an idiot.”. Sounds truly inviting!
Maybe I am just simply unlucky in my book choices but I lament the lack of essayism of such a daring quality and effortless erudition written in the 21th century. However, I always can come back to this collection and become Borges for another myriad of little moments.
I’ve read many of those essays before. But this time i wanted to read this book spanning practically his whole life in a chronological order. Of course, it brings up the whole another dimension: how his mind and probably his personality not necessary matures, but changes with age. It has allowed me to see how he approached the same themes, authors, ideas again and again but always found some different angle. Also his concerns metamorphosed while essentially staying the same: the youthful and optimistic concept of “eternity” changed into “a refutation of time” to be later transformed into “immortality” in his mature age.
He is an original thinker, an attentive and passionate reader, contagious to the others. At one of the essays, he quotes Valery saying:
The history of the literature should not be the history of authors and the course of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature; such history could be written without mentioning a single writer.
It is a fascinating idea. Other things equal, I prefer to go into a work without knowing anything about its author or her intentions. I like to experience the text on its own. Also recently i find more and more stimulating to figure out the personality of the author and infer her life experience solely based upon the text. The opposite way, reading about the author or searching her interviews for the contemporary ones, might be more beneficial if someone is interested in history or politics pertinent to the context of the work rather than its intrinsic art. There is no right or wrong way. In any case, if Valery’s approach would be the rule, Borges would often breach it. He is fascinated by the writers as people at least to the same extent as he is interested in their ideas. The book contains the whole section of “capsule biographies” - condensed short fragments about authors ranging from Isaac Babel to Virginia Woolf. In other essays, reviews, prologues the authors prominently feature as well.
Borges is a writer who manages to take someone else ideas or even the words, spend time playing with them, add his own invention into the mix and consequently render this mix in a totally new light. He is a dreamer who is able to create a thought experiment out of a handful of symbols and present it as if it is a concise literary fragment blending fiction and fact. This in turn sparkles imagination of his readers, at least in my case. Some of his mental experiments are like flowers, irregularly shaped, multidimensional and fresh that can be contemplated for a long time or simply enjoyed.
An example of this is his seminal essay “A new refutation of time” (1944-47). He treats time within the framework of a broader idealistic tradition quoting Berkley and Hume, Spencer and Schopenhauer but trying to go even further than those philosophers. I’ve read this essay at least three times within a few days: once for sheer flow of his prose; once to understand his idea; and the third time just to enjoy certain paragraphs, especially more personal ones.
He believes there is no such thing as time if by “time” we mean an irreversible linear sequence of events directed one way. He assumes each moment is autonomous and there is an infinite but countable amount of those moments, sort of hanging out there (please do not ask me where). But if this is the case then it is sufficient to postulate the possibility of two identical moments happening in a mind of an individual or two separate people “to disrupt and confound the series in time!” In other words - to break any perceived sequence.
They tell me that the present of the psychologists lasts between several seconds and a smallest fraction of a second, which is also how long the history of the universe last. Or better there is no such thing; as well there is no such thing as “a life of a man" nor even “one night of his life”. Each moment we live exists but not an imaginary combination of the moments.
This idea that the identical moments can happen to different people entails very interesting implication: “Are the enthusiasts who devote themselves to a line of Shakespeare are literally Shakespeare in that moment.”. It means when i read this line I am Borges at this particular moment. And when you would read this sequence of two preceding sentences, for a very short time you would become Borges and me in a quick succession:-)
But this theory also implies that “tumultuous and universal catastrophes - fires, wars, epidemics - are but a single sorrow multiplied in many illusory mirrors”.
So all we are is an infinite set of fragile mirrors reflecting an infinite set of moments from out there, presumably occasionally reflecting each other as well; that is unless these mirrors are identical and defined only for a moment by the moment.
I am not sure this idea of totally identical events is supported by probability theory or modern physics with its entropy for that matter. But it is certainly an elegant image, profound in its symbolism and literary beauty.
In one of those almost uncanny reading coincidences, I’ve come across the following in a story by Woolf:
At once the looking glass began to pour over her a light that seemed to fix her; that seemed like some acid to bite off the essential and superficial and to leave only the truth. It was an enthralling spectacle. Everything dropped from her - clouds, dress, basket, diamond - all that one had called the creeper and convolvulus. Here was the hard wall beneath. Here was the woman herself. She stood naked in that pitiless light. And there was nothing. Isabella was perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for nobody.
People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms.
This essay is in its most powerful when it blends philosophy with Borges’s personal recollections. It does it with sheer poetry. One thing is to postulate a theory and totally other is to relive, to feel the truth of your idea. There was a moment in Borges’s life when it seemed to have happen to him. In 1928, he has written a note “Feeling of death”. It was so important to him that he inserted the note in full into not one, but several of his essays. One of them is this one, and another - the earlier one “A history of Eternity”. With this short note, Borges has created his very own situation Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote. `the note reads quite differently in the context of the two different essays. The effect is amplified by the fact that it is included into this book in two different English translations. i am not sure whether i did become Borges while reading it, but the image he has created has certainly brought me closer to what he felt. Here is just one line:
Over muddy, chaotic earth a red pilled wall seemed not to harbour moonglow but to shed a light of its own. There is probably no better way to name tenderness than that red pink.
And it is just one essay. Elsewhere in this book he deals with philosophical questions such as time, space, mind and self; he deals with politics, especially the roots of nazism (he is puzzled by the fact how such a high culture as the German one could produce such an abhorrent mass movement) and the politics of his native Argentina; he is fascinated by the differences in cultural traditions and religions of so called East and West though he sees a lot of archetypical similarities and constant interactions between the two. The interactions are of course facilitated by the people.
The one of the longest but also very entertaining pieces in the book is devoted to the translators of “Thousand and One night” (1933). He picks up three translators of the text and shows how differently they approach it based upon their personalities and potential nature of their readership. To start with, the 18th century translator someone Mssr. Galland has included a half-dozen tales that were not in the original due to the knowledge of his local helper. Many of these tales are still the most popular ones such as Aladdin and The Forty Thieves. Borges ironically comments: “The mere mention of these names amply demonstrates that Galland established the canon, incorporating stories that time would render indispensable and that the translators to come - his enemies would not dare to omit.” The translator into English was Richard Burton, famous adventurer and traveller of the 19h century. “Richard Burton was solving the problem how to entertain 19th century gentlemen with the pulp fiction of the thirteenth century.” He seemed to do it through using a linguistic exuberance and underscore the perceived barbarism of certain tales. In contrast, the French translator, Dr Mudras aspired to be the most literary but ended up adding a lot of details and images and writing the most “readable” translation. He “translated not the words but its scenes” according to Borges but it was hardly a translation anymore. Enno Littmann, the German “could not tell a lie”. However, he seemed to tight himself into a very strict knot. And the result, according to Borges was “so very little”. Borges wished these tales to be “rethought” in German considering German literary tradition of dealing with the fantastic and the uncanny. I wonder how this situation has changed in hundred years since the essay has been written.
The love of books, the desire to reveal their place in what we call our reality is of course the main preoccupation of his work and his life as a whole, in fact. So it is hardly surprising that many great essays, lectures and reviews focus on different aspects of this phenomena.
In “On the Cult of Books.”(1949) he quotes “The Odyssey”’s “gods weave misfortune so the future generations will have something to sing about;” followed by Mallarme’s “The world exists to end up in a book”. However, the easiest way to summarise this essay is to say that according to Borges: The world IS a book. In Coleridge Flower (1945) he brings up Valery’s thought I’ve mentioned earlier to trace "the history of the evolution of an idea” between the work of three authors. He looks how they depict a situation when an imaginary cause having a real physical effect, an elusiveness of the border between the imaginary and real.
In “The Wall of the books.” (1950), he tells the story: “The man in China who ordered the building of almost infinite Chinese Wall was that first Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all the books that has been written before his time.” Borges explains this by the Emperor desire to cancel space and time in such a way to stop death. I’ve had less existential but more uneasy association with our time with the newly re-elected ‘the leader of free nations” who wanted to build another wall and whose views on banning some books might be rapidly emerging. Another anecdote that made me thinking about the present was a phrase by Clement of Alexandria who was afraid of the power of a book as opposed to oral tradition: “To write all things in a book is to put a sword in the hands of a child.”. I thought of a parallel with our modern information technology such as social networks, AI etc. A written book was perceived as a risky business in the 5th century but it worked out somehow for the humanity. Is it different this time?
Many essays I loved were devoted to a particular work of literature. I cannot leave without mentioning Nine Dantesque Essays (1945-1951). I’ve read them a few years ago while reading The Divine Comedy i’ve written a review then. But this time they were as fresh and original as ever. The most memorable, elegant essay in this category was about the book i have not yet read, “Defence of Bouvard and Pecuchet” (1955). Borges has got a few essays in the book devoted toGustave Flaubert and his work. But this one was particularly stimulating in terms of the idea of a relationship between an author and his/her characters:
More than five years of co-existence gradually transformed Flaubert into Bouvard and Pecuchet or (more accurately) Bouvard and Pecuchet into Flaubert. The two characters are initially two idiots, scorned and abused by the author, but in the eighth chapter the famous words occur: “Then a lamentable faculty arose in their spirits, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to tolerate it.
“Lamentable”. Kudos to Flaubert’s irony. As a by-product of this essay, i think i understand better now what he meant when saying “I am Emma”.
In this essay Borges also uses the opportunity to explore the role of a fool in literature: “Logical vigour is one tradition and now almost instinctive tradition of placing “the essential words into the mouth of simpletons is another.” I can testify that in present day, the tradition is alive and well. It seems to be actively revived by László KrasznahorkaiAll his novels I’ve read so far have used a character of a “holly fool” to a different degree of effect. I am sure there are more examples. Also I feel that occasionally in a modern piece of fiction some character might come across as a fool without the explicite intention of the author. Back to Flaubert, Borges quotes someone who calls this novel “A story of Faust (two-headed) who was also an idiot.”. Sounds truly inviting!
Maybe I am just simply unlucky in my book choices but I lament the lack of essayism of such a daring quality and effortless erudition written in the 21th century. However, I always can come back to this collection and become Borges for another myriad of little moments.
Each time someone loves an enemy, the immortality of Christ appears. At that moment he is Christ. Each time we repeat a line by Dante or Shakespeare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created that line.
I would say that I believe in immortality, not in the personal but in cosmic sense. We will keep on being immortal; beyond our physical death our memory will remain, and beyond our memory will remain out actions, our circumstances, our attitudes, all that marvellous part of universal history, although we wont know, and it is better that we won’t know it.
(from the lecture on Immortality (1978))
November 11, 2014
Another Borges book. Another 5 stars.
I mean this man is so brilliant I'm starting to turn into a dithering fanboy when reading his books.
Now, I've only actually owned this book for a couple of days, and to be honest I've only read a few of the hundred plus essays in here, but this isn't exactly a book to be read from beginning to end. In fact that seems like a pretty pointless exercise. You can gain so much from reading so little of Borges' writing that it seems like I may as well write a review now.
To get an idea of the spectacular diversity of his interests let me give you a quick list of some of the most intriguing essay titles:
A History of Angels
The Duration of Hell
Narrative Art and Magic
A Defense of the Kabbalah
A History of Eternity
On the Cult of Books
Personality and the Buddha
And if that seems a bit heavy for some people there's also things along the lines of:
The Art of Verbal Abuse
and
A History of Tango
But of course, essays make up only a part of this collection, there are also book reviews, film reviews, biographies, prologues and lectures - my favourite being simply titled 'Immortality' (I mean how can you not love this guy? It requires some serious audacity for an 80 year old man to give a lecture on the art of living forever...)
I think the reason why I immediately fell in love with this book was because of the way Borges manages to analyse a huge variety of infinitely complex themes using his trademark short, concise style. The minimalism of his fiction writing translates excellently into his non-fiction. In fact, many of these are essentially pieces of writing you can pick up and read in the space of 5 minutes, yet you could probably read the same piece a hundred times and still gain something from it. Borges will always find a way to surprise you.
Another reason for the 5 star rating is that from reading it you really get a sense of getting to know the author, from his wicked sense of humour to his (almost) overly critical view on the role of literature and film. You find out, for example:
1. He doesn't like King Kong.
'his only virtue, his height, did not impress the cinematographer, who persisted on photographing him from above rather than from below'.
2. He thinks Aldous Huxley, although writing with 'almost intolerable lucidity' is highly overrated.
His Stories, Essays and Poems being dubbed 'not unskillful, ... not stupid, ... not extraordinarily boring, they are, simply, worthless'.
3. He loves Kafka.
He argues Kafka's work shows us that 'each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.'
4. And from a young age he was a huge fan of James Joyce.
'I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand'.
That last quote pretty much sums up my Borges fanboyism. I'll never claim to fully understand, down the last details, every aspect of Borges work, yet at the same time I take huge enjoyment in trying to figure out the labyrinthine puzzles of his fiction and get to grips with the mystifying depth of his non-fiction.
In short, if you're a Borges fan, or have any interest in some of the things mentioned above, buy this book. Considering the length of the majority of the essays it will keep you entertained for hours just skimming through the pages and finding something that grabs your fancy. I may change my mind on it after reading through it a bit more but somehow I find that pretty unlikely!
I mean this man is so brilliant I'm starting to turn into a dithering fanboy when reading his books.
Now, I've only actually owned this book for a couple of days, and to be honest I've only read a few of the hundred plus essays in here, but this isn't exactly a book to be read from beginning to end. In fact that seems like a pretty pointless exercise. You can gain so much from reading so little of Borges' writing that it seems like I may as well write a review now.
To get an idea of the spectacular diversity of his interests let me give you a quick list of some of the most intriguing essay titles:
A History of Angels
The Duration of Hell
Narrative Art and Magic
A Defense of the Kabbalah
A History of Eternity
On the Cult of Books
Personality and the Buddha
And if that seems a bit heavy for some people there's also things along the lines of:
The Art of Verbal Abuse
and
A History of Tango
But of course, essays make up only a part of this collection, there are also book reviews, film reviews, biographies, prologues and lectures - my favourite being simply titled 'Immortality' (I mean how can you not love this guy? It requires some serious audacity for an 80 year old man to give a lecture on the art of living forever...)
I think the reason why I immediately fell in love with this book was because of the way Borges manages to analyse a huge variety of infinitely complex themes using his trademark short, concise style. The minimalism of his fiction writing translates excellently into his non-fiction. In fact, many of these are essentially pieces of writing you can pick up and read in the space of 5 minutes, yet you could probably read the same piece a hundred times and still gain something from it. Borges will always find a way to surprise you.
Another reason for the 5 star rating is that from reading it you really get a sense of getting to know the author, from his wicked sense of humour to his (almost) overly critical view on the role of literature and film. You find out, for example:
1. He doesn't like King Kong.
'his only virtue, his height, did not impress the cinematographer, who persisted on photographing him from above rather than from below'.
2. He thinks Aldous Huxley, although writing with 'almost intolerable lucidity' is highly overrated.
His Stories, Essays and Poems being dubbed 'not unskillful, ... not stupid, ... not extraordinarily boring, they are, simply, worthless'.
3. He loves Kafka.
He argues Kafka's work shows us that 'each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.'
4. And from a young age he was a huge fan of James Joyce.
'I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand'.
That last quote pretty much sums up my Borges fanboyism. I'll never claim to fully understand, down the last details, every aspect of Borges work, yet at the same time I take huge enjoyment in trying to figure out the labyrinthine puzzles of his fiction and get to grips with the mystifying depth of his non-fiction.
In short, if you're a Borges fan, or have any interest in some of the things mentioned above, buy this book. Considering the length of the majority of the essays it will keep you entertained for hours just skimming through the pages and finding something that grabs your fancy. I may change my mind on it after reading through it a bit more but somehow I find that pretty unlikely!
July 31, 2025
Then I discovered words: I discovered their receptive and even memorable readability, and harbored many printed in prose and verse. Some—still—accompany my solitude; the pleasure they inspired has become a second nature to me.
My guess is that many of us on Goodreads have a visceral appreciation for the aforementioned quote from Borges. We sense words as companions through solitude and even through the simple or difficult movements of life. Sometimes I am in the middle of a crowd of people I know and feel an urgency to open a book, but I sense it would seem rude. This is why good prose is a necessity, for if we devour words at least let them appear nicely ordered on the page so that we "reread with the pleasure of remembering," as Borges writes in "Literary Pleasure." Perhaps this is the advice I will heed from this collection: to "reread with the pleasure of remembering."
"When Fiction Lives in Fiction, " is one of my favorite essays, as it elucidates the literary mind of Borges. It encourages the art of reading. It is brief, a capsule of literary intelligence, yet also so complex with personal probing, textual analysis, and comparative literature; it is the portrayal of a student in conversation with books:
This collection is erudite. It is a compilation of his compact writings: essays, book reviews, film criticism, lectures, and prologues. It is separated into seven parts and ranges from 1922-1986. Those interested in Dante may appreciate the esoteric NINE DANTESQUE ESSAYS in Part V more than I did. This collection is an ambitious reading feat that I completed in small doses, an hour or two here and there.
It's intriguing, sometimes even comical, when your favorite authors talk about your other favorite authors. Borges finds Eliot's poetry to be like Valéry's, "gloomy and inadequate" but thinks Eliot is an "exemplary prose stylist." In "Capsule Biographies" he writes about authors, some I have never heard about, but my favorite capsule biography is Virginia Woolf's. I admire how he writes about her, how he writes about her books, and about her prowess as a writer: "hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations now felicitously experimenting with the English novel." And in his "Book Reviews and Notes" he is as equally intrigued with Faulkner's vivid details and time play in "The Unvanquished" as he is with Lady Murasaki's visual details and "miraculous naturalness" in The Tale of Genji.
Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the essays on books. Borges describes James Joyce's writing as "delicate and intense," a description I would ascribe to Borges' writing and critique in this collection. Of Henry James he writes, "I have visited some literature of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
"On Oscar Wilde," he finds his syntax "always very simple," his "meter spontaneous, or seeks to appear spontaneous" and he states that "of the many British writers, none is so accessible to foreigners." Borges, as an editor of a literary magazine, was also the first to publish one of Julio Cortázar's stories, "House Taken Over." I smiled when I read this because although I've never read Cortázar's stories, his Save Twilight: Selected Poems is one of my favorite poetry collections.
I said my takeaway would be to "reread with the pleasure of remembering." Come to think of it, the more I read this book, the more I was inspired by the art of the personal library built as a way to learn the world. What will the personal library I've been building over the past few years say about me? Hopefully that I'm a student of the world. Borges was astoundingly well-read, and I find that awe-inspiring. He knew how to analyze a text, delve into an oeuvre, and uncover books that showcased parts of the world in unique ways. "I don't know if I'm a good writer," he writes," but I think I'm an excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one." His "Prologues to a Personal Library," is also one of my favorite in this collection because of the affecting way in which he writes about books:
My guess is that many of us on Goodreads have a visceral appreciation for the aforementioned quote from Borges. We sense words as companions through solitude and even through the simple or difficult movements of life. Sometimes I am in the middle of a crowd of people I know and feel an urgency to open a book, but I sense it would seem rude. This is why good prose is a necessity, for if we devour words at least let them appear nicely ordered on the page so that we "reread with the pleasure of remembering," as Borges writes in "Literary Pleasure." Perhaps this is the advice I will heed from this collection: to "reread with the pleasure of remembering."
"When Fiction Lives in Fiction, " is one of my favorite essays, as it elucidates the literary mind of Borges. It encourages the art of reading. It is brief, a capsule of literary intelligence, yet also so complex with personal probing, textual analysis, and comparative literature; it is the portrayal of a student in conversation with books:
Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.
This collection is erudite. It is a compilation of his compact writings: essays, book reviews, film criticism, lectures, and prologues. It is separated into seven parts and ranges from 1922-1986. Those interested in Dante may appreciate the esoteric NINE DANTESQUE ESSAYS in Part V more than I did. This collection is an ambitious reading feat that I completed in small doses, an hour or two here and there.
It's intriguing, sometimes even comical, when your favorite authors talk about your other favorite authors. Borges finds Eliot's poetry to be like Valéry's, "gloomy and inadequate" but thinks Eliot is an "exemplary prose stylist." In "Capsule Biographies" he writes about authors, some I have never heard about, but my favorite capsule biography is Virginia Woolf's. I admire how he writes about her, how he writes about her books, and about her prowess as a writer: "hers is indisputably among the most sensitive of the minds and imaginations now felicitously experimenting with the English novel." And in his "Book Reviews and Notes" he is as equally intrigued with Faulkner's vivid details and time play in "The Unvanquished" as he is with Lady Murasaki's visual details and "miraculous naturalness" in The Tale of Genji.
Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the essays on books. Borges describes James Joyce's writing as "delicate and intense," a description I would ascribe to Borges' writing and critique in this collection. Of Henry James he writes, "I have visited some literature of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."
"On Oscar Wilde," he finds his syntax "always very simple," his "meter spontaneous, or seeks to appear spontaneous" and he states that "of the many British writers, none is so accessible to foreigners." Borges, as an editor of a literary magazine, was also the first to publish one of Julio Cortázar's stories, "House Taken Over." I smiled when I read this because although I've never read Cortázar's stories, his Save Twilight: Selected Poems is one of my favorite poetry collections.
I said my takeaway would be to "reread with the pleasure of remembering." Come to think of it, the more I read this book, the more I was inspired by the art of the personal library built as a way to learn the world. What will the personal library I've been building over the past few years say about me? Hopefully that I'm a student of the world. Borges was astoundingly well-read, and I find that awe-inspiring. He knew how to analyze a text, delve into an oeuvre, and uncover books that showcased parts of the world in unique ways. "I don't know if I'm a good writer," he writes," but I think I'm an excellent reader, or in any case, a sensitive and grateful one." His "Prologues to a Personal Library," is also one of my favorite in this collection because of the affecting way in which he writes about books:
A book is a thing among things, a volume lost among the volumes that populate the indifferent universe, until it meets its reader, the person destined for its symbols. What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe. 'The rose has no why,' said Angelus Silesius; centuries later, Whistler declared, 'Art happens.'
November 12, 2020
Moved to gwern.net.
Read
February 18, 2021Really difficult to read? It's hard to tell how much of that is the translation and how much was Borges's brilliance. At some points, I felt like I was deciphering incredible wisdom. At other points, I wasn't able to rise to the challenge. I think this is one of those books that reads very differently depending on your ability to read it. I'll try again when I'm a bit wiser.
August 8, 2023
Poem of the Gifts
Jorge Luis Borges
No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God; who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch.
***
Disarming Writing.
It begins simple, timid even, as if undressing a lover, there is restraint, then humour, insight - and then, suddenly, something bizarre. Marvellous.
Octavio Paz says no one had ever written like this in Spanish, before Borges. Thus I refute this and say, no one has ever written like this, in any language, ever.
Borges served two very contrary gods: Simplicity and Strangeness, an ability which perhaps can never be repeated. It is a Borgesian ability in itself. To read Borges carefully is to activate an awareness of literature in which he has gone farther than anyone else, to leap beyond the walls of mirrors, to reach out to change the general landscape of awareness. Unmistakeably Borges. All comparisons are lies: Borges, above all, resembles Borges.
Borges. Borges. Eternally Borges.
Tacitus, in his "Life of Agrippa", says, "Non cum corpore periunt magnae animae," the great souls do not die with the body. Eternal and immortal Borges is, because he understands it himself: "I have devoted the last twenty years to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I know many Anglo-Saxon poems by heart. The only thing I don't know is the names of the poets. What does it matter, as long as I, reciting the poems from the ninth century, am feeling something that someone felt back then? He is living in me in that moment, I am that dead man. Every one of us is, in some way, all the people who have died before us."
Others brag of writing books, Borges brags of reading them.
When Socrates was imprisoned and awaiting trial, as they took off his shackles and he was no longer feeling their weight, he tells his friends: "How strange. The chains weighed me down, it was a form of pain. Now I feel relieved because they have taken them away. Pleasure and pain go together, they are twins."
To recall a few lines by Rupert Brooke: "after death we will feel, those who have laid out groping hands away/ and See, no longer blinded by our eyes".
Gustav Spiller, in an excellent treatise on psychology, says that if we think of other misfortunes of the body- a mutilation, a blow to the head-they are not beneficial to the soul. It is hard to imagine that a cataclysm of the body is good for the soul. Nevertheless Socrates, who believes in these two realities, the body and the soul, argues that the soul that is freed from the body can dedicate itself to thinking.
This recalls the myth of Democritus. It is said that he tore out his eyes in a garden in order to think and not be distracted by the outside world.
It is interesting to note that Socrates, on the afternoon of his death, did not want to say goodbye pathetically. He expels his crying wife and friends, he wants to talk calm, to simply keep on thinking and talking. The fact of personal death does not affect him. His role, his custom, is something else: to discuss, to discuss, to discuss.
Socrates is talking, death interrupts him.
For us, these ideas of the body and of the soul are suspicious. To briefly recall the history of Philosophy: Locke said that the only thing that exists are perceptions and feelings, and the memories and perceptions of those feelings; that matter exists and that the five senses inform us about matter. Then Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a consciousness that perceives them. What is red? Red depends on our eyes, and our eyes belong to a system of perceptions. Then comes Hume, who refutes both hypotheses, and destroys the soul and the body. What is the soul but that which perceives, and what is matter but that which is perceived? If nouns are suppressed in the world, they must be reduced to verbs. We ought not to say, "I think," because "I" is a subject; we should say, "It is thought," much as we say, "It is raining." In both verbs we have an action without a subject.
When Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," he should have said, "Something thinks," or "It is thought," because "I" assumes an entity, and I have no right to assume that. He would have to say, "It is thought, therefore something is."
To speak Dante or Shakespeare is to be that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created the line. There is no self.
Lucretius in "De Rerum Natura" argues: "You are pained because you will lack the future. Yet you believe that before you there was an infinite time, that, when you were born, the moment had already passed when Carthage and Troy battled to rule the world. It doesn't matter to you. So why should it matter what shall come? You have lost the infinite past, what matters if you lose the infinite future?"
Perhaps this can be put into simpler words: Language is a creation, a kind of immortality of the peoples who have created it before us. I am now writing in the English language. How many dead English are living within me?
For why should we suppose that we are going to continue in another life with our memory? Why should we always return to that? It it a mere literary recourse: I could forget it all and keep on being and all that would live within me although I do not name it. Perhaps the most important things are those we don't remember in a precise way, that we remember unconsciously.
After blindness and fame, Borges stated he does not want to continue being Borges. He wanted to be someone else. He hoped his death will be total, he hoped he would die in body and in soul.
Borges hoped, death interrupted.
Let us cite St. Thomas Aquinas, who left us this sentence: "Intellectus naturaliter desiderat esse semper," the mind naturally desires to exist forever.
To which we might respond that it also desires other things. To keep the Borgesian sentiment alive. Not by name, but by reading his writings and making them ours. To read Borges is to return to the language of ancestors. I am reclaiming that language. It is not the first time I speak it; when I had other names this was the language I spoke.
Jorge Luis Borges
No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God; who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch.
***
Disarming Writing.
It begins simple, timid even, as if undressing a lover, there is restraint, then humour, insight - and then, suddenly, something bizarre. Marvellous.
Octavio Paz says no one had ever written like this in Spanish, before Borges. Thus I refute this and say, no one has ever written like this, in any language, ever.
Borges served two very contrary gods: Simplicity and Strangeness, an ability which perhaps can never be repeated. It is a Borgesian ability in itself. To read Borges carefully is to activate an awareness of literature in which he has gone farther than anyone else, to leap beyond the walls of mirrors, to reach out to change the general landscape of awareness. Unmistakeably Borges. All comparisons are lies: Borges, above all, resembles Borges.
Borges. Borges. Eternally Borges.
Tacitus, in his "Life of Agrippa", says, "Non cum corpore periunt magnae animae," the great souls do not die with the body. Eternal and immortal Borges is, because he understands it himself: "I have devoted the last twenty years to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I know many Anglo-Saxon poems by heart. The only thing I don't know is the names of the poets. What does it matter, as long as I, reciting the poems from the ninth century, am feeling something that someone felt back then? He is living in me in that moment, I am that dead man. Every one of us is, in some way, all the people who have died before us."
Others brag of writing books, Borges brags of reading them.
When Socrates was imprisoned and awaiting trial, as they took off his shackles and he was no longer feeling their weight, he tells his friends: "How strange. The chains weighed me down, it was a form of pain. Now I feel relieved because they have taken them away. Pleasure and pain go together, they are twins."
To recall a few lines by Rupert Brooke: "after death we will feel, those who have laid out groping hands away/ and See, no longer blinded by our eyes".
Gustav Spiller, in an excellent treatise on psychology, says that if we think of other misfortunes of the body- a mutilation, a blow to the head-they are not beneficial to the soul. It is hard to imagine that a cataclysm of the body is good for the soul. Nevertheless Socrates, who believes in these two realities, the body and the soul, argues that the soul that is freed from the body can dedicate itself to thinking.
This recalls the myth of Democritus. It is said that he tore out his eyes in a garden in order to think and not be distracted by the outside world.
It is interesting to note that Socrates, on the afternoon of his death, did not want to say goodbye pathetically. He expels his crying wife and friends, he wants to talk calm, to simply keep on thinking and talking. The fact of personal death does not affect him. His role, his custom, is something else: to discuss, to discuss, to discuss.
Socrates is talking, death interrupts him.
For us, these ideas of the body and of the soul are suspicious. To briefly recall the history of Philosophy: Locke said that the only thing that exists are perceptions and feelings, and the memories and perceptions of those feelings; that matter exists and that the five senses inform us about matter. Then Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a consciousness that perceives them. What is red? Red depends on our eyes, and our eyes belong to a system of perceptions. Then comes Hume, who refutes both hypotheses, and destroys the soul and the body. What is the soul but that which perceives, and what is matter but that which is perceived? If nouns are suppressed in the world, they must be reduced to verbs. We ought not to say, "I think," because "I" is a subject; we should say, "It is thought," much as we say, "It is raining." In both verbs we have an action without a subject.
When Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," he should have said, "Something thinks," or "It is thought," because "I" assumes an entity, and I have no right to assume that. He would have to say, "It is thought, therefore something is."
To speak Dante or Shakespeare is to be that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created the line. There is no self.
Lucretius in "De Rerum Natura" argues: "You are pained because you will lack the future. Yet you believe that before you there was an infinite time, that, when you were born, the moment had already passed when Carthage and Troy battled to rule the world. It doesn't matter to you. So why should it matter what shall come? You have lost the infinite past, what matters if you lose the infinite future?"
Perhaps this can be put into simpler words: Language is a creation, a kind of immortality of the peoples who have created it before us. I am now writing in the English language. How many dead English are living within me?
For why should we suppose that we are going to continue in another life with our memory? Why should we always return to that? It it a mere literary recourse: I could forget it all and keep on being and all that would live within me although I do not name it. Perhaps the most important things are those we don't remember in a precise way, that we remember unconsciously.
After blindness and fame, Borges stated he does not want to continue being Borges. He wanted to be someone else. He hoped his death will be total, he hoped he would die in body and in soul.
Borges hoped, death interrupted.
Let us cite St. Thomas Aquinas, who left us this sentence: "Intellectus naturaliter desiderat esse semper," the mind naturally desires to exist forever.
To which we might respond that it also desires other things. To keep the Borgesian sentiment alive. Not by name, but by reading his writings and making them ours. To read Borges is to return to the language of ancestors. I am reclaiming that language. It is not the first time I speak it; when I had other names this was the language I spoke.
Read
March 16, 2012I've been a Borges fan for as long as I can remember. We like to imagine Borges as this sort of hermetically sealed creature, but these nonfiction pieces totally demystified him for me. Turns out he loved crummy Westerns and detective movies, for instance. You also get to see his whole process, and you see in some of these pieces the ideas that would eventually coalesce into The Library of Babel, The Aleph, and all the other stories for which he would become known. While I'd previously imagined Borges frowning in a darkened study (the labyrinth! the labyrinth!), I now imagine him laughing in the streets of Buenos Aires.
March 25, 2011
Borges is brilliant, though he does tend to repeat himself. So rather than try to review this collection, I'll use this box to give instructions for the game of "BORGES BINGO", usable not only on nonfiction but also his fiction and poetry.
The grid is 5X5. Of course, the center box is "LABYRINTH" (free space). Fill the 24 boxes around it with the following motifs/moves/topics, in random order. Whenever a topic gets mentioned in the book you're reading, check it off. First to 5 wins!
MINOTAUR
LIBRARY
KIERKEGAARD
SWEDENBORG
SHAKESPEARE
INFINITY
GAUCHO
DANTE/DIVINE COMEDY
TIGER
REVIEW OF NONEXISTENT BOOK
MIRRORS
SCHOPENHAUER
TANGO
BUENOS AIRES
EL QUIJOTE
ZENO'S PARADOX
JAMES JOYCE/ULYSSES
ADOLFO BIOY CASARES
ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
DETECTIVE
MARTIN FIERRO
THE QUR'AN
WILLIAM JAMES
BLINDNESS
And that's it! Share it with your friends.
The grid is 5X5. Of course, the center box is "LABYRINTH" (free space). Fill the 24 boxes around it with the following motifs/moves/topics, in random order. Whenever a topic gets mentioned in the book you're reading, check it off. First to 5 wins!
MINOTAUR
LIBRARY
KIERKEGAARD
SWEDENBORG
SHAKESPEARE
INFINITY
GAUCHO
DANTE/DIVINE COMEDY
TIGER
REVIEW OF NONEXISTENT BOOK
MIRRORS
SCHOPENHAUER
TANGO
BUENOS AIRES
EL QUIJOTE
ZENO'S PARADOX
JAMES JOYCE/ULYSSES
ADOLFO BIOY CASARES
ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
DETECTIVE
MARTIN FIERRO
THE QUR'AN
WILLIAM JAMES
BLINDNESS
And that's it! Share it with your friends.
May 2, 2009
Man I love this! I read Borges for the same reason I read Valery: for straight talk about the essential questions, the "modest mysteries," of reading and writing.
October 22, 2013
Dear editors of 'selected' editions,
no, you don't need to include that. I recognize that you're fascinated by the idea that someone opposed fascism, but by and large, that's only worth a footnote. You also don't have to include this. Sure, it's interesting every now and then to see what a favorite author thinks about a book, but not *every* book. Don't you see, editor, what a disservice you're doing to these people? Just choose the very best, and leave the rest for later volumes.
On the other hand, who am I to complain? This is a lovely looking volume, despite the horrid ruffled pages (did all the book-cutting machines in the world break at the same time? Why do so many books come with this rubbish? How do you expect me to flick forward and back?), and contains wonders and wealth.
The downside to including so much is that Borges' world starts to look a little more restricted and a little less fascinating. There are only so many times you can go over the same themes, many of which are treated more effectively and more entertainingly in the fiction. There are a number of absolute must reads, particularly the Dante essays, and the writings brought together in section II.
One solution to my problem, of course, would just be to read what looks fascinating to you. But I like to finish books, so here I am: fascinated at times, but ultimately a bit disappointed that Borges wasn't treated better by Weinberger.
no, you don't need to include that. I recognize that you're fascinated by the idea that someone opposed fascism, but by and large, that's only worth a footnote. You also don't have to include this. Sure, it's interesting every now and then to see what a favorite author thinks about a book, but not *every* book. Don't you see, editor, what a disservice you're doing to these people? Just choose the very best, and leave the rest for later volumes.
On the other hand, who am I to complain? This is a lovely looking volume, despite the horrid ruffled pages (did all the book-cutting machines in the world break at the same time? Why do so many books come with this rubbish? How do you expect me to flick forward and back?), and contains wonders and wealth.
The downside to including so much is that Borges' world starts to look a little more restricted and a little less fascinating. There are only so many times you can go over the same themes, many of which are treated more effectively and more entertainingly in the fiction. There are a number of absolute must reads, particularly the Dante essays, and the writings brought together in section II.
One solution to my problem, of course, would just be to read what looks fascinating to you. But I like to finish books, so here I am: fascinated at times, but ultimately a bit disappointed that Borges wasn't treated better by Weinberger.
September 27, 2016
The knowledge Borges brings to his non-fiction writings draws upon sources vast and obscure. His scope makes parallels between the ancient past and dreams of the future. He charts such subjects as the histories of angels, dreams, archetypes, languages, and ideas, these among many epistemological topics. He presents coincidence and irony as governed by forces beyond the human sphere, yet Borges rejects transcendent order. He chooses instead to be captivated with the human origin of immortality. He deciphers the needs of the human mind in a way that reveals how every act and thought is a result of the human will to control things.
In essence, his essays journey to the marrow of his own thinking. He presents the idea that illusion is realistic, that the obverse of something is equally true. The writings want to affirm how feelings are concrete and how art is representative of reality. Borges’s depth of imagination has him pursuing nothing short of trying to encompass the cosmos as he attempts to give meaning and significance to life’s gamut of mysteries. He makes readers consider the fascination of dreams. He sees life as an act of something greater than we can know. For Borges, the infinite and the idea of immortality are a product of memory, of passing something on, of leaving something behind. And to him the human mind is more numinous than anything we can possibly fathom. His visions and beliefs have survived with great renown, and his non-fiction writings capture the complexity of his thinking.
In essence, his essays journey to the marrow of his own thinking. He presents the idea that illusion is realistic, that the obverse of something is equally true. The writings want to affirm how feelings are concrete and how art is representative of reality. Borges’s depth of imagination has him pursuing nothing short of trying to encompass the cosmos as he attempts to give meaning and significance to life’s gamut of mysteries. He makes readers consider the fascination of dreams. He sees life as an act of something greater than we can know. For Borges, the infinite and the idea of immortality are a product of memory, of passing something on, of leaving something behind. And to him the human mind is more numinous than anything we can possibly fathom. His visions and beliefs have survived with great renown, and his non-fiction writings capture the complexity of his thinking.
October 6, 2025
Know that it pains me to give such a low rating to one of my favorite authors, but this became more of an obligation to finish and the lows outweighed the highs for me personally. Borges' knowledge and ability to draw what seem like instant references and examples from the whole of literature is breathtaking. His subject matter holds multitudes--from reviews of popular movies to delighting in Dante's The Divine Comedy (the epitome of literature in his opinion). The collection itself gathers essays, lectures, book/movie reviews, and all matter of other nonfiction pieces grouped mostly chronologically and ending with dictations (presumably, the pieces he could no longer write himself due to his increasing blindness). But the very things I adore in his fiction (the erudite certainty which creates such immediate fictional universes) feels merely pedantic in nonfiction form as if one is merely being talked to about magic instead of experiencing it. And, whereas, his brevity works wonders in fiction, it leaves you feeling unsatisfied in nonfiction. Probably unfair to make this comparison, but there are other writers whose nonfiction I enjoy far more than their fiction. The pieces on Argentine and German culture, nationalism, hatred and Nazism, as well as The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, and The Divine Comedy stood out, but overall, I personally would have enjoyed a much slimmer collection consisting of only the finest of his work.
What does delight is the sheer joy and pleasure Borges takes in literature and how he identifies himself as a reader. His favorite books are not so much the best of literature as they are the ones he has enjoyed the most.
What does delight is the sheer joy and pleasure Borges takes in literature and how he identifies himself as a reader. His favorite books are not so much the best of literature as they are the ones he has enjoyed the most.
December 16, 2013
I just spent my last review (slightly) bashing Borges's poetry, so I feel I should sing some of my praises for Borges the essayist.
Has any man ever been more well-read! Borges appears to have a deep acquaintance with every major Western author of the last three thousand or so years. That he accomplished this feat while being blind for nearly half of his life, having to depend on others to read works aloud for him, is even more astonishing.
I think Borges's most significant contribution to literature may indeed be his essays. Like his beloved Emerson, Borges has a winning combination of a "happy spirit" (that's Borges on Emerson for you) and a near infinite knowledge of literature's collective wisdom. The contents of this collection are astounding in their variety and their similarly near infinite re-readbility. The dust jacket of said collection informs me, that as a North American, I have little knowledge of Borges the essayist, and that I think of Borges as mainly as a short story writer, a creator of fictions. This has never been the case. I have always thought of Borges the librarian, the reader of Gibbon, on the bus going to his job at Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, finishing the great works of literature with a special kind of joie de vivre. Reading these essays, this impression is even further confirmed. I think it is in the essays you best find the attribute that nearly all Latin American authors, from Mario Vargas Llosa to Bolaño, love Borges to death for -- his special kind of ineffable, humanistic, hyper-intelligence.
Has any man ever been more well-read! Borges appears to have a deep acquaintance with every major Western author of the last three thousand or so years. That he accomplished this feat while being blind for nearly half of his life, having to depend on others to read works aloud for him, is even more astonishing.
I think Borges's most significant contribution to literature may indeed be his essays. Like his beloved Emerson, Borges has a winning combination of a "happy spirit" (that's Borges on Emerson for you) and a near infinite knowledge of literature's collective wisdom. The contents of this collection are astounding in their variety and their similarly near infinite re-readbility. The dust jacket of said collection informs me, that as a North American, I have little knowledge of Borges the essayist, and that I think of Borges as mainly as a short story writer, a creator of fictions. This has never been the case. I have always thought of Borges the librarian, the reader of Gibbon, on the bus going to his job at Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, finishing the great works of literature with a special kind of joie de vivre. Reading these essays, this impression is even further confirmed. I think it is in the essays you best find the attribute that nearly all Latin American authors, from Mario Vargas Llosa to Bolaño, love Borges to death for -- his special kind of ineffable, humanistic, hyper-intelligence.
December 22, 2018
As this collection is chronological, it starts off with some typical problems of young writers--wanting to show off their linguistic expertise and stating opinion as fact. However, as he matures, he reaches the same kind of dizzying heights that he achieves with his fiction.
June 26, 2025
An absolute chore to read. I love Borges but not this. Only an occasional gem like defining eternity as "the simultaneity of the three tenses."
June 17, 2024
Utterly brilliant!
March 29, 2016
A cornucopia of numerous wonderfully odd but interesting pieces of often very short fiction. I've been unable to read this cover-to-cover, because it takes too much effort and concentration. I also find that, like Updike, Borges sometimes confuses and annoys me by interjecting a little too much of his wide and obscure learning into his stories, so that many allusions are lost to me. While I perhaps know too little to appreciate them as they should be appreciated, I keep going back for more. The pieces remind me of dreams which are not always fully comprehensible but which make indelible imprints upon the imagination.
December 26, 2021
Kafka and his precursors - 5 Stars
Verbiage for Poems - 4 Stars
An Overwhelming Film (Citizen Kane) - 5 Stars
The Enigma of Shakespeare - 5 Stars
Our Poor Individualism - 4 Stars
Pascal's Sphere - 5 Stars
The Enigma of Shakespeare - 4 Stars
Dantesque Essays
1. Prologue - 4.5 Stars
2. The Noble Castle of the Fourth Canto - 4.5 Stars
3. The False Problem of Ugolino - 5 Stars
4. The Last Voyage of Ulysses - 4 Stars
5. The Pitying Torturer - 3 Stars
6. Dante and the Anglo-Saxon Visionaries - 4 Stars
Verbiage for Poems - 4 Stars
An Overwhelming Film (Citizen Kane) - 5 Stars
The Enigma of Shakespeare - 5 Stars
Our Poor Individualism - 4 Stars
Pascal's Sphere - 5 Stars
The Enigma of Shakespeare - 4 Stars
Dantesque Essays
1. Prologue - 4.5 Stars
2. The Noble Castle of the Fourth Canto - 4.5 Stars
3. The False Problem of Ugolino - 5 Stars
4. The Last Voyage of Ulysses - 4 Stars
5. The Pitying Torturer - 3 Stars
6. Dante and the Anglo-Saxon Visionaries - 4 Stars
November 21, 2011
St. Thomas Aquinas referred to Averroes as "The Commentator." With respect to the style and intellectual scope of the modern and ancient worlds, I feel a similar awe towards Borges.
February 4, 2021
A lot going on in this book. I loved some of the essays, liked many others, and couldn’t relate to some. Borges was certainly a genius and I’m thankful for being able to enjoy his work.
October 28, 2024
I only gained two unfortunate insights from this book. One, that the obvious is true and Borges' poems and fictions are miles and miles better, more concise and beautiful. Two, that is it is possible to know an author so well that they become repetitive and dull.
Read
February 16, 2025“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”
Borges’s knowledge knows no bounds.
Borges’s knowledge knows no bounds.
February 19, 2025
Not as riveting or fascinating as his fictional short stories, but Borges still manages to amaze me with the breadth of his knowledge in this collection of his essays from youth to old age. It's fun to see how he evolves as a writer, from the slightly awkward beginnings when he feels a bit too try hard to the end of his life when he just writes (or dictates, after he turned blind) whatever he feels like.
Aside from the enjoyment I got out of reading Borges' essays I also got a lot of book tips from him in this book, as besides some actual book reviews being scattered through this thing Borges also casually drops so many references in his essays to more or less obscure writers and thinkers, many of which I end up searching up on Wikipedia and then adding to my want to read list (that I realise now will never stop growing).
Good book, recommend.
Aside from the enjoyment I got out of reading Borges' essays I also got a lot of book tips from him in this book, as besides some actual book reviews being scattered through this thing Borges also casually drops so many references in his essays to more or less obscure writers and thinkers, many of which I end up searching up on Wikipedia and then adding to my want to read list (that I realise now will never stop growing).
Good book, recommend.
April 18, 2017
The source of fascination, captivating versatility of universe, rendering things in mysterious ways,
the scope of the modern and ancient worlds is beyond description, gorgeously written, dazzling and illuminating!!!
the scope of the modern and ancient worlds is beyond description, gorgeously written, dazzling and illuminating!!!
March 14, 2018
"The Nothingness of Personality" is the first essay in this collection, and it might also be the best. It's a calmly executed manifesto that suggests how Borges was able to conquer every form of literature thus far discovered by mankind: essay, fiction, and poetry. The first essay lays out Borges' intent to write anti-individualistic literature. Some of the strongest essays in this collection are original insight into language itself. Far from taking a reductive approach, Borges found completely original ways to perceive, use, and glorify the Word. It's almost unfortunate that most of this book consists of outstanding literary criticism.
Borges was stuck in the past, and proud of it. Only a small portion of this collection deals with modernity: essays on the Nazi regime, film reviews, and a few notes on the Argentian character - which Borges constantly struggles against. There are also a handful of personal essays, especially towards the end of the book / his life. But these only further strengthen the impression of a man obsessed with books, which becomes clear pretty quickly - if it wasn't already obvious from our interpretation of his fiction. (I want to say you HAVE to read his fiction before reading this; but to each their own.) Borges never seriously discusses his childhood, which leaves me to believe that it was simply unremarkable; he references books he read when he was young, or fondly recalls the silly impressions he had about the world, but I can't recall anything about his family or education.
In the lit-crit portion of the essays, Borges pretty consistently finds himself trying to understand where authors' ideas come from. The central questions that seem to persist throughout the collection are how their lives were affected by the content of their work; and the reverse, how writers' lives are reflected IN their work, which wouldn't be unique if not for Borges' attraction to all of the most enigmatic literature he could find. These essays manage to get past easily-held assumptions about particular works or authors. There is compassion in tyranny, genius in ignorance, and humanity in everything.
Borges wasn't just interested in fiction and poetry, but philosophy and theology. In these essays, he usually shows a more cynical side - but it's all a game; a way to uncover something hilarious in ourselves. In these essays, Borges isn't satisfied with merely refuting the most absurd ideas that Western thought has propagated - he mercilessly takes these arguments to their logical conclusions. These arguments seem to stem from an embarrassment on behalf of religion. (Borges was a modest Catholic).
I love that Borges had esoteric taste and wasn't afraid to expound the qualities of these unheralded works. But, his disinterest in modernity is a problem for me. I would've loved to hear more of his opinions on how existentialism and capitalism were changing the world. In the World War II essays, the surface of the conflict is barely even approached - the war was an excuse for Borges to talk about German culture and history. Still, I'm given a view of Borges as somebody who was as capable of handling reality as any other great writer, but found it too boring and predictable and sluggish. Book lovers should be able to relate.
Borges was stuck in the past, and proud of it. Only a small portion of this collection deals with modernity: essays on the Nazi regime, film reviews, and a few notes on the Argentian character - which Borges constantly struggles against. There are also a handful of personal essays, especially towards the end of the book / his life. But these only further strengthen the impression of a man obsessed with books, which becomes clear pretty quickly - if it wasn't already obvious from our interpretation of his fiction. (I want to say you HAVE to read his fiction before reading this; but to each their own.) Borges never seriously discusses his childhood, which leaves me to believe that it was simply unremarkable; he references books he read when he was young, or fondly recalls the silly impressions he had about the world, but I can't recall anything about his family or education.
In the lit-crit portion of the essays, Borges pretty consistently finds himself trying to understand where authors' ideas come from. The central questions that seem to persist throughout the collection are how their lives were affected by the content of their work; and the reverse, how writers' lives are reflected IN their work, which wouldn't be unique if not for Borges' attraction to all of the most enigmatic literature he could find. These essays manage to get past easily-held assumptions about particular works or authors. There is compassion in tyranny, genius in ignorance, and humanity in everything.
Borges wasn't just interested in fiction and poetry, but philosophy and theology. In these essays, he usually shows a more cynical side - but it's all a game; a way to uncover something hilarious in ourselves. In these essays, Borges isn't satisfied with merely refuting the most absurd ideas that Western thought has propagated - he mercilessly takes these arguments to their logical conclusions. These arguments seem to stem from an embarrassment on behalf of religion. (Borges was a modest Catholic).
I love that Borges had esoteric taste and wasn't afraid to expound the qualities of these unheralded works. But, his disinterest in modernity is a problem for me. I would've loved to hear more of his opinions on how existentialism and capitalism were changing the world. In the World War II essays, the surface of the conflict is barely even approached - the war was an excuse for Borges to talk about German culture and history. Still, I'm given a view of Borges as somebody who was as capable of handling reality as any other great writer, but found it too boring and predictable and sluggish. Book lovers should be able to relate.
May 10, 2021
I have an incredibly hard time imagining a critic more perfect than Borges.
One of the most inspiring books I've read.
One of the most inspiring books I've read.
November 14, 2017
I must confess I have always been under a misapprehension when it comes to reading Borges. His writing is said to be convoluted and it could be. However, I would not be able to be the judge of that since I have never read his stories or prose or essays in Spanish that is why I decided to read this translation, which has left me suitably impressed. The reason why I have embarked on reading him – in English at least – boils down to my curiosity being piqued by a friend. This friend of mine always quotes him and owing to the fact that he tends to mention Borges every now and again in passing, I thought why not read this writer? As I have come across this superb translation, which must have been academically challenging to work on, I can now say Borges was one in a million. This translation taught me one very important lesson: I have a lot of more reading to catch up on. Anyone who wishes to get to know Borges and whose Spanish needs a little brushing up, this is the book to read. And I promise you will learn beyond reason. I know I have.
February 5, 2020
Borges’ nonfictions are just as fantastical as his fictions.
In this collection, I didn’t read the book reviews, prologues, Dantesque essays, nor film criticisms.
Favorites:
The translators of The One Thousand and One Nights p. 92
Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine p. 155
A New Refutation of Time p. 317
The Scandinavian Destiny p. 377
A History of the Tango p. 394
“In this feat of Manco [One Hand] Wenceslao - as Suaréz is now known - certain mild or polite touches (his trade as rope maker, his scruples about leaving his mother alone, the two flowery letter, the conversation, the lunch) happily tone down or amplify the barbarous tale, giving it an epic or even chivalrous dimension that we do not find (unless we are determined to find it) in the drunken brawls of Martín Fierro or in the similar but paltry version about Juan Muraña and the Southside man.”
“We would seem to have, then, men who lived in utter poverty, gauchos and others from the banks of the River Plate and the Parana, creating, without realizing it, a religion that had its mythology and its martyrs - the hurt and blind religion of courage, of being ready to kill and to die. A religion as old as the world, but rediscovered in the American republics and lived by herders, stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and hoodlums whose music was the estilos, the milongas, the first tangos. I have written that this religion is an age-old cult; in a twelfth-century saga we read:
“Tell me thy faith,” said the count.
“I believe in my own strength,” said Sigmund.
The Argentine Writer and Tradition p. 420
“Furthermore, I do not know if it needs to be said that the idea that a literature must define itself by the differential traits of the country that produces it is a relatively new one, and the idea that writers must seek out subjects local to their countries is also new and arbitrary. Without Going back any further, I think Racine would not have begun to understand anyone who would deny him his right to the title of French poet for having sought out Greek and Latin subjects. I think Shakespeare would have been astonished if anyone had tried to limit him to English subjects, and if anyone had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no right to write Hamlet, with its Scandinavian subject matter, or Macbeth, on a Scottish theme. The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult that nationalists should reject as a foreign import.
A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist,or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; her knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.”
Blindness p. 473
“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”
Immortality p. 483 (kind of parallel to “a new refutation of time”)
“Our “I” is the least important thing for us. What does it mean for us to feel ourselves as an I? In what way can if I differ that I feel myself Borges than that you feel yourselves A, B, or C? Absolutely not at all. That I is what we share, it is what is present, in one form or another, in all creatures. We could say that immortality is necessary - not the personal, but this other immortality. For example, each time that someone loves an enemy, the immortality of Christ appears. At that moment he is Christ. Each time we repeat a like by Dante or Shakespeare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created that line. Immortality is in the memory of others and in the work we leave behind. What does it matter if that work is forgotten?
I have devoted the last twenty years to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I know many Anglo-Saxon poems by heart. The only thing I don’t know is the name of the poets. What does it matter, as long as I, reciting the poems from the ninth century, am feeling something that someone felt back then? He is living in me at that moment, I am that dead man. Every one of us is, in someway, all the people who have died before us. And not only those of our blood.
Of course, we inherit things in our blood. I know - my mother told me - that every time I recite English poems, I say them in the voice of my father, who died in 1938. When I recite Shakespeare, my father is living in me. The people who have heard me will live in my voice, which is a reflection of a voice that was, perhaps, a reflection of the voice of its elders. The same may be said of music and of language. Language is a creation, it becomes a kind of immortality. I am using the Castilian language. How many dead Castilians are living within me?”
In this collection, I didn’t read the book reviews, prologues, Dantesque essays, nor film criticisms.
Favorites:
The translators of The One Thousand and One Nights p. 92
Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine p. 155
A New Refutation of Time p. 317
The Scandinavian Destiny p. 377
A History of the Tango p. 394
“In this feat of Manco [One Hand] Wenceslao - as Suaréz is now known - certain mild or polite touches (his trade as rope maker, his scruples about leaving his mother alone, the two flowery letter, the conversation, the lunch) happily tone down or amplify the barbarous tale, giving it an epic or even chivalrous dimension that we do not find (unless we are determined to find it) in the drunken brawls of Martín Fierro or in the similar but paltry version about Juan Muraña and the Southside man.”
“We would seem to have, then, men who lived in utter poverty, gauchos and others from the banks of the River Plate and the Parana, creating, without realizing it, a religion that had its mythology and its martyrs - the hurt and blind religion of courage, of being ready to kill and to die. A religion as old as the world, but rediscovered in the American republics and lived by herders, stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and hoodlums whose music was the estilos, the milongas, the first tangos. I have written that this religion is an age-old cult; in a twelfth-century saga we read:
“Tell me thy faith,” said the count.
“I believe in my own strength,” said Sigmund.
The Argentine Writer and Tradition p. 420
“Furthermore, I do not know if it needs to be said that the idea that a literature must define itself by the differential traits of the country that produces it is a relatively new one, and the idea that writers must seek out subjects local to their countries is also new and arbitrary. Without Going back any further, I think Racine would not have begun to understand anyone who would deny him his right to the title of French poet for having sought out Greek and Latin subjects. I think Shakespeare would have been astonished if anyone had tried to limit him to English subjects, and if anyone had told him that, as an Englishman, he had no right to write Hamlet, with its Scandinavian subject matter, or Macbeth, on a Scottish theme. The Argentine cult of local color is a recent European cult that nationalists should reject as a foreign import.
A few days ago, I discovered a curious confirmation of the way in which what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason to single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist,or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned; her knew he could be Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines can be like Mohammed; we can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.”
Blindness p. 473
“A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.”
Immortality p. 483 (kind of parallel to “a new refutation of time”)
“Our “I” is the least important thing for us. What does it mean for us to feel ourselves as an I? In what way can if I differ that I feel myself Borges than that you feel yourselves A, B, or C? Absolutely not at all. That I is what we share, it is what is present, in one form or another, in all creatures. We could say that immortality is necessary - not the personal, but this other immortality. For example, each time that someone loves an enemy, the immortality of Christ appears. At that moment he is Christ. Each time we repeat a like by Dante or Shakespeare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created that line. Immortality is in the memory of others and in the work we leave behind. What does it matter if that work is forgotten?
I have devoted the last twenty years to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I know many Anglo-Saxon poems by heart. The only thing I don’t know is the name of the poets. What does it matter, as long as I, reciting the poems from the ninth century, am feeling something that someone felt back then? He is living in me at that moment, I am that dead man. Every one of us is, in someway, all the people who have died before us. And not only those of our blood.
Of course, we inherit things in our blood. I know - my mother told me - that every time I recite English poems, I say them in the voice of my father, who died in 1938. When I recite Shakespeare, my father is living in me. The people who have heard me will live in my voice, which is a reflection of a voice that was, perhaps, a reflection of the voice of its elders. The same may be said of music and of language. Language is a creation, it becomes a kind of immortality. I am using the Castilian language. How many dead Castilians are living within me?”
May 26, 2014
Brilliant, illuminating, but not, despite Maria Kodama's best efforts on the jacket, something for the casual Borges reader. A deep intimacy with not only the man himself, but also his idols and their work is required to get the most out of this volume. Carlyle, Kafka, and Dante I could manage; Bloy and the half-dozen translations of The Arabian Nights Borges could quote from memory, not so much. Borges' adoration of Faulkner and disdain for Joyce's "unreadable" later works will probably be the highlight for many like myself, but his opinions on a myriad of other obscure subjects arise throughout the collection, everything from King Kong to Akutagawa.
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