مختارات الفانتازيا والميتافيزيقا: قصص ومقالات وأشعار

by Jorge Luis Borges, خورخي لويس بورخيس, خليل كلفت (ترجمة وتقديم)

أبحر عبر مختلف بحار العالم - أو عبر البحر الواحد بمختلف الأسماء - وكان جزءا من أدنبره ، ومن زيوريخ ، ومن القرطبتين ، من كولومبيا ومن تكساس ، وعاد فى نهاية أجيال متغيرة إلى بلاد آبائه وأجداده القديمة ، إلى الأندلس ، وإلى البرتغال ، وإلى تلك المقاطعات ، التى تحارب فيها الساكسون مع الدانمركيين وامتزج بدمهم ، وتاه فى متاهة لندن ، الحمراء والهادئة ، وشاخ فى مرايا كثيرة جدا ، وجرى سُدى وراء التحديق الرخامى للتماثيل ، واستنطق المطبوعات الحجرية ، والموسوعات ، والأطالس ، ورأى الأشياء التى يراها البشر ، الموت ، والفجر الوسنان ، والسهول ، والنجوم الخافتة الوميض ، ولم ير شيئا ، أو لم ير شيئا تقريبا باستثناء وجه فتاة من بوينوس أيرس والوجه لا يريد لك أن تتذكره. بورخيس عالم من الفانتازيا والميتافيزيقا ، جمع بين الكتابة الشعرية والنثرية ، وهو في الكتابتين يحمل الروح ذاتها.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

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

Reviews

[Tawfek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire, The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

I started this book August of 2016 and i finished it April 2024
Tawfek are you crazy? No i have a very good reason for this, So first this book is short Stories, Articles, Poems By Borges
And it's divided to 3 parts in that order, when i read the short stories back in 2016 i thought the translation was bad, it was my second year of reading at the time, and most things went over my head.
So i decided i ll return to it later, and i never did until now!
Turns out, the translation is actually really good, i just wasn't a good enough reader back then sadly.
If i understood these Articles even though most of them were Philosophical i should have understood the short stories too.
What i remember about the stories are probably the three i liked the most.
One about a library full of books that nobody understands, because it's from a language that no one knows, there was such mystery in that story.
Another story was about someone who created a son or something, and that son left searching for a soul or something like that, i really don't remember, but i think it was a good one too.
Third story was very similar to the Philosophical article about time, and i remember after finishing it being star struck, because the story was pretty convincing about time not being real, or about time being only the moment we live in no past no future.
So yeah and even if i wanted to get my thoughts from 2016 i wasn't really writing as many updates as i do these days lol

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.

Okay now to the part i read in April of 2024 i didn't take a week to finish the rest of the book.
There was two kinds of articles, One Philosophical and the other about literature.
The Philosophical ones were about time, God is a perfect Ball, A turtle that made Philosophers think that you can never get anything done if you keep halving the rest of the time needed to get it done infinitely, Which is really like the mathematical issue of dividing 1$ by 3, you get 33 cents for each one, where did the last cent go? we had this fun equation asked by a teacher when i was in highschool, these fun teachers really made me love math so much.
Last article was about The Great wall of china and the emperor who ordered it built, and how he ordered all books to be burned and that he gets named the first emperor of china, Pretty much the man fabricated the history of an entire nation, which is really sad, i didn't dig into the subject and i hope some books did survive that maniac, i don't care if they are speaking of fake gods or flying dragons, i think books should always be preserved for future generations, to see where we was, where we got to, and what they have become and achieved.

The sadness of the present, isn't more real than the happiness of the past.

Someone will ask me, Tawfek what do we learn from Philosophy?
Really you are asking me? is it because i try to even read it?!
I don't know, But philosophy really feels (each time i read it) That it's food for our minds, That it's Cure for our wondering Minds, You really do find this weird solace reading stuff like this, because even if you are a beginner reading philosophy like me, some ideas do stick, and you do ponder on them, and it heals or even expands your mind somehow, and it's beautiful, even though it's exhausting for beginners of reading philosophy the couple thousand books i read... mean absolutely nothing when i am reading something this high level, i am back as a student, and i am learning, and i am a horrible student, because i don't read as much as i should of philosophy.

And i can't be sorry for losing love or a friendship without thinking for a long time, that we only lose what we never really owned.

The part of the articles that was about literature, included a piece of Don Quixote which made me really happy that me and Someone as great as Borges are thinking on the same line of thought, but it's really because we are both lovers of books, lovers of literature, and above all we both read the chivalry epics of old that Don Quixote was mimicking in the first place.
You really won't understand that Don Quixote wasn't made to dismantle Chivalry Novels or as i call them Epics, But it was made as a goodbye, farewell, sayonara, To these books, and that's why it made such an impact on me and on my heart, even though i have about 7 of such books the least of them is 1000 pages, usually each is 2000 pages, and i even have one about a an fictional Arab queen that is over 4000 pages long .
It touched my heart, and it made me sad, even though i never read all of them, i only ever read like 4 one of them was huge and exhausting to finish, but satisfying at the same time, amusing and funny.

Another article was about Kafka, it was about the idea which writers in history were similar to Kafka, and how only through the emergence of Franz Kafka, that we can draw a comparison between him and these writers who came centuries before him in the first place.

One article was about Valerie, that mentioned a bunch of Poets i only know by name, so it flew over my head, i didn't connect with it.

The last Article was about Rubayat Omar Al Khayyam and Fitzgerald the English man who translated them and made them famous, and the Philosophical musing of how tied they are for eternity, or how Fitzgerald could be the incarnation of Omar, or how Fitzgerald could have been a lost soul that Omar Al Khayyam's soul took over to guide and make it reach safe harbor again.
It's literally one of the best articles i ever read in my life, It touched my heart, it made tears come to my eyes, it makes me smile like i am on my death bed and have done everything i ever wanted to do in life, and i am in piece with everything.

The last part was the poems, i loved the first poem so much, enjoyed the rest, and there was symbolic tale at the end as well.

I had a musing of my own while reading this, Why does humans keep coming up with the divine where ever they are? Worshiping fire, the sky, the sun, water, animals, invisible imaginary friends, insects sorry Anansi i love you but you know?
Maybe there is a god, and through our searching for that god, we made so many horrible gods, that ruin our lives, make us go to war, make us hate according to which religion you are or you are not, Maybe that god does exist, maybe he left something in us that longs for him, and we manifest that with our creations of horrible vessels that present us not him, that are in our image not his/hers/theirs, We will never find him as long as we are consumed by the fake gods and their hatreds and their wars on everything human and beautiful and good, maybe this book made me agnostic till i figure out these feelings more and make sense of them more.

Overall this has been an amazing experience, probably could have been more amazing if i reread the short stories from 2016, i am giving this 3 stars, because really the translation ended up being good, so it was me back then all along, not the translator.

[code · Rating 4 out of 5]

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