Narrativa completa

by Edgar Allan Poe

En un soneto de "El otro, el mismo", que lleva por título "Edgar Allan Poe", Borges lo evoca como "inventor de pesadillas", y lo imagina, ya "del otro lado de la muerte", erigiendo todavía "espléndidas y atroces maravillas". Y, sin embargo, el reverendo Griswold, que nutrió la bien abastecida lista de los enemigos que Poe cosechó en vida, asegu­raba que "su conversación alcanzaba a veces una ­elocuen­cia casi sobrenatural" y que "las imágenes que em­pleaba procedían de mundos que un mortal solo puede ver con la visión del genio". Son quizá esas imágenes las que merecieron los adjetivos de los dientes de Berenice, los ojos de Eleonora; un gato tuerto, un corazón que sigue latiendo bajo la tarima; una navaja de afeitar esgrimida con violencia infinita, como el Polifemo de Góngora; un retrato que vampiriza a la retratada; un emparedamiento en vida; unas ratas que, royendo con habilidad condicionada, elevan a paradoja el hecho de que la cuchilla del péndulo mortal no divida a su víctima; un cadáver que en un instante se resuelve en polvo, se encoge, se deshace, se pudre entre las manos, expresión física del conocido verso de sor  "es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada"... Al lado de las imágenes, asuntos el doble, el sueño, la realidad repetida y vivida por alguien que fue otro y es ahora el mismo; la metafísica de "Revelación mesmérica", y el hombre como sueño de un Dios, que ilustra otro verso de "Mi dios, mi soñador, sigue soñándome". Existen también afinidades con Hoffmann, por ejemplo en "El Ángel de lo Singular", y en algunos otros recintos escondidos de su prosa. Hay un doble de el humorista. Borges, como la mayor parte del imaginario colectivo de lectores, que son legión, congregó en su soneto "los glaciales símbolos" de las "pompas del mármol", la "negra anatomía", "los gusanos sepulcrales", "el triunfo de la muerte". Prefirió eludir al el irónico, el satírico, el humorista Edgar Allan Poe.

1024 pages, Paperback

Published November 12, 2013

About the author

The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.

The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. Edgar was the second of three children. His other brother William Henry Leonard Poe would also become a poet before his early death, and Poe’s sister Rosalie Poe would grow up to teach penmanship at a Richmond girls’ school. Within three years of Poe’s birth both of his parents had died, and he was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond, Virginia while Poe’s siblings went to live with other families. Mr. Allan would rear Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman, but Poe had dreams of being a writer in emulation of his childhood hero the British poet Lord Byron. Early poetic verses found written in a young Poe’s handwriting on the backs of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal how little interest Poe had in the tobacco business.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_al...

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very best...
nada más.

[Andy delaEse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compañero de vida. De vez en cuando, lo releo.
Alta fidelidad a Poe, por siempre, con pequeños escarceos amorosos a sus acólitos menores jjjjj