Jorge Luis Borges

Borges’ A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell Excerpted at NYRB

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The NYRB has an excerpt from one of Borges’ lectures given in 1966. It is a lecture on Johnson and Boswell, although it doesn’t stop him from writing about particularly Borgesian preoccupations. It will be published by New Directions on July 31.

….Now, in the same way that we have seen how Johnson is similar to Don Quixote, we have to think that just as Sancho is the companion Quixote sometimes treats badly, we see Boswell in that same relation to Dr. Johnson: a sometimes stupid and loyal companion. There are characters whose role is to bring out the hero’s personality. In other words, often authors need a character who serves as a framework for and a contrast to the deeds of his hero. This is Sancho, and that character in Boswell’s work is Boswell himself. That is, Boswell appears as a despicable character. But it seems impossible to me that Boswell didn’t realize this. And this shows that Boswell positioned himself in contrast to Johnson. The fact that Boswell himself tells anecdotes in which he appears ridiculous makes him not seem ridiculous at all, for if he wrote them down, he did it because he saw that the purpose of the anecdote was to make Johnson stand out.

There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him. According to this theory, in other words, the I would be double: there is a profound I, and this I is identified with—though separate from—the other. Now, I don’t know what experiences you might have had, but sometimes this happens to me: usually at two particular kinds of moments—at moments when something very good has happened, and, above all, at moments when something very bad has happened to me. And for a few seconds, I have felt: “But, what do I care about all this? It is as if all of this is happening to somebody else.” That is, I have felt that there is something deep down inside me that remains separate.

Borges’ Manual de zoología fantástica Reviewed at La Jornada

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La Jornada has an all too brief review of a Borges curiosity, Manual de zoología fantástica (The Manual of the Fantastical Zoology). It is a mix of his writings about famous characters like the phoenix and those of his own invention. It sounds like an interesting mix.

El jardín zoológico borgiano es una recopilación extensa, variopinta, si bien ágil, de criaturas mitológicas y literarias que van desde centauros, arpías, ictiocentauros o centauros-tritones, unicornios o nagas, por mencionar a los más ampliamente difundidos que se presentan como auténticas especies fantásticas compuestas de numerosos individuos o bien seres únicos e irrepetibles, como Pegaso, Escila, Garuda, el Fénix, el Ave Rock, el Behemoth, el Cancerbero, el Kraken, al lado de entidades tan escurridizas y sutiles como los seres térmicos, crocotas y leucocrocotas, animales de los espejos, animales metafísicos o animales esféricos. Varias de las criaturas soñadas por Kafka asoman sus confusas y tímidas cabezas en estas páginas, así como las cantadas por otros grandes literatos como C. S. Lewis, Plinio, Dante, Ariosto, fray Luis de León y algunos poetas y sabios indios, chinos y musulmanes. Un verdadero deleite deparan al lector estas descripciones, amenizadas con el inimitable estilo de Borges, cazador de aporías, laberintos e hipálages, ilustrados con citas de grandes autores que, cuando no se ofrecen en el original castellano, que es en contados casos, se proponen en traducciones escogidas, selectas, salidas no pocas veces de la pluma del mismísimo Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), el hombre de letras más brillante que produjo el siglo XX hispanoamericano y quizá hispánico en su conjunto.

When Borges Lost the Premio Nacional Because of Politics

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The Nobel wasn’t the only prize Borges lost because of politics. He also lost the Premio Nacional in 1941, the year of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Revista Ñ has an article about the ins and outs of his loss. Mostly, though Borges was ahead of his time.

La pérdida del premio acaso no fuera tan inesperada. En la bibliográfica que publicó en Sur en mayo de 1942, apenas antes de que se conociera el dictamen del jurado, Bioy Casares fue clarividente y se adelantó a los reparos que el libro recibiría: “Estos ejercicios de Borges producirán tal vez algún comentador que los califique de juegos. ¿Querrá expresar que son difíciles, que están escritos con premeditación y habilidad, que en ellos se trata con pudor los efectos sintácticos y los sentimientos humanos, que no apelan a la retórica de matar niños, denunciada por Ruskin, o de matar perros, practicada por Steinbeck?”. Captando el clima de época, Bioy conjetura que “tal vez algún turista, o algún distraído aborigmpensa nacional, a una obra exótica y de decadencia (…) juzgamos que hizo bien.”

Borge’s Wife Demands Agustín Fernández Mallo’s “The Maker Remake” Be Taken Off The Shelves

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Moleskine Literario pointed me to this ridiculous bit literary guardianship. María Kodama, Borges widow, is demanding the Agustín Fernández Mallo’s El Hacedor (de Borges). Remake (The Maker by Borges. Remake), be taken off the shelves. It is an ironic position since Borges is well known for postulating that works can be expanded by others and reworked. You can read the brief note below and see an interview with Mallo about the book here. On the face of it, though, it sounds like an over sensitive widow. You can read a note at El Pais too.

María Kodama ha forzado a retirar El Hacedor (de Borges). Remake de Agustín Fernández Mallo de las librerías, según nos informan fuentes cercanas al autor. El libro, y damos eco a continuación a la información recibida, dejará de existir tal y como ahora está concebido. Por cuestiones legales, no se puede contar con detalles más específicos. Lo que aquí se está censurando no es un plagio, sino una técnica literaria, similar a la que se valen los dj cuando samplean una trompeta de Charlie Parker para una sesión (algo que, por cierto, también está siendo criminalizado).

Aunque aún no hemos podido contrastar a fondo la información con Agustín Fernández Mallo ni con la editorial Alfaguara, queremos hacernos eco de este atropello. Resulta tristemente paradójico que esto suceda con una obra que revisita y homenajea a Borges, un autor que siempre gustó de investigar el tema del plagio y el juego de espejos que se produce entre los textos de los autores a lo largo de la historia. Que María Kodama haya dado este paso nos parece triste, incongruente y condenable.

In Praise of the Late Works of Borges – Jorge Fernandez Diaz in El Pais

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El Pais has an article praising the late works of  Borges. I’m less a fan of these than his earlier works, especially Ficiones and El Aleph. In those earlier works Borges paid a bit more attention to the feel of the story, not just his famous paradoxes. I find it makes them more intriguing as stories not just essays in story form. They also seem fresher. Some of the later works seem to repeat themselves.

El informe de Brodie resulta un homenaje explícito a Conrad, y tiene ecos de Roger Casement, ahora héroe trágico de El sueño del Celta. El informe en cuestión condensa una originalísima civilización selvática, arcaica y perdida. En rigor de verdad muchos cuentos cortos de Borges suelen ser sinopsis de novelas. Ciego e impedido de escribir el gran género de la literatura moderna, el autor de El Aleph se dedicó a repudiarlo luego de haberlo leído con fruición.

En el comienzo de El duelo ofrece precisamente una explicación ingeniosa acerca de su procedimiento literario y, sobre todo, alrededor de su imposibilidad de escribir textos de largo aliento. “Henry James quizás no hubiera desdeñado la historia”, dice sobre el breve cuento que se dispone a escribir. “James le hubiera consagrado más de cien páginas de ironía y ternura, exornadas de diálogos complejos y escrupulosamente ambiguos. No es improbable su adición de algún rasgo melodramático”. A continuación, Borges confiesa que “lo esencial no habría sido modificado” si James lo hubiera escrito. Pero también que él ahora se limitaría “a un resumen del caso, ya que su lenta evolución y su ámbito mundano son ajenos a mis hábitos literarios”.

Un resumen del caso le permite despachar a su vez la novela que lo desveló a lo largo de décadas y que se llama El Congreso. Está en El libro de arena y Borges fracasó al llevarla a cabo, de manera que se contentó con redactar en su ancianidad la trama en pocos folios, como un guionista que escribe el tratamiento del guión sin atreverse a desarrollarlo. Ese, por su carácter autobiográfico, era el relato que más gustaba a aquel Borges crepuscular que había decidido ser cortés con el lector, aunque nunca condescendiente, siguiendo la máxima de Wells: “La conjunción de un estilo llano, a veces casi oral, y de un argumento imposible”.

An Interview with Borges Widow at El Pais

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El Pais has an interview with the widow of Borges. It is interesting, although not particularly controversial as the introduction of the article might lead you to believe.

PREGUNTA. Veinticinco años desde que acabó el viaje físico, la cercanía con Borges. ¿Qué supone para usted este viaje?

RESPUESTA. Borges entró en el gran mar, como llamaban a la muerte los florentinos. Lo que él me dio fue algo muy importante para una persona como yo, que era muy, muy tímida. Asistí a una conferencia. Yo tenía 12 años y la sala estaba colmada de gente. Vi a este señor que entraba y sentí que era tanto o más tímido que yo y ahí pensé que yo podía acercarme, aprender, él me podría enseñar… Pensé: “Si este señor puede hablar delante de toda esta gente yo también voy a poder dar un día una clase”. Lo que me dio, y me siguió dando, fue la convicción de que era posible realizar mi vocación, enseñar, hacer lo que verdaderamente quería hacer.

P. Ese viaje ha seguido después de su muerte. Pero, ¿cómo fue en vida?

R. Fui descubriendo su pasión por la literatura, su pasión por los idiomas, que compartíamos… Y fue maravilloso compartir también la pasión por las artes… Él decía que mi padre me había educado para él, porque me había llevado a los museos, me regalaba libros de arte apenas tuve uso de razón… Y Borges conocía bien los museos desde los tiempos en que estuvo en Europa. Él y yo rehicimos ese larguísimo viaje que en realidad fue nuestra vida alrededor del mundo, yendo a los lugares donde él había estado antes, ante los cuadros que él recordaba, rememorando escenas de obras que él había visto… Era maravilloso redescubrir su mundo, hacerlo mío mientras hacíamos este largo viaje que fue la vida con él.

P. Usted fue los ojos de Borges para la literatura.

R. Estudiamos primero anglosajón, después empecé a leerle en inglés y luego él me enseño a pronunciar en alemán para poder leerle en esa lengua. Por la mañana, Borges dictaba a la persona que llegaba, un periodista o un estudiante, y por la tarde él y yo releíamos eso que él había dictado. Él lo iba puliendo, era un fascinante proceso que cada día fue más acentuado, más productivo, más cercano.

Javier Cercas Talking His Writing and Borges on Nostromo

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For all of you Javier Cercas fans out there who speak Spanish, Nostromo has an hour long interview with the author. It is an excellent interview where they cover in depth 3 of his books, Anatomy of a Moment, Soldiers of Salamina, and a third one I can’t remember. Cercas and the interviewer also have an interesting discussion about Borges and Bioy Casares. Their take on the Invention of Morel was a little different than I have come across. All in all it was a great interview and Cercas seemed quite animated. I saw him on El Publico Lee some time ago and he seemed like he couldn’t be bothered to answer the questions. I will say if your Spanish is a little week he can be a bit of a challenge as he talks quite rapid.

Reworking Borges, What Could be More Borges – Agustín Fernández Mallo

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Canal-L has an interview with Agustín Fernández Mallo about his new book El hacedor (de Borges), Remake  {The Maker (by Borges), Remake}. It is a work that takes its inspiration from Borges. If it was anyone else besides Borges, I would be doubtful, but following from Borges seems to make sense.

“Crear no es más que ver la realidad como si fueras un marciano” / To create is nothing more than to see reality as if you were a Martian.

Kafka and Adolfo Bioy Casares – at the Quarterly Conversation

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Scott Esposito has a fascinating article about the literary cross currents in the work of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Franz Kafka. If you are familiar with one and not the other (or Borges for that matter) you should definitely read the article. I like realism in my works, but I also love the approaches fashioned by Casares, Kafka, and Borges.

Realism, with its insistence on mimicking the flow and feel of reality as we construe it, is often declared more rigorous and difficult to write than other novelistic genres. Reality, this argument goes, though perhaps infinite, is also real: is rule-based and thus is difficult to mimic well, whereas fantasy—especially hysterical fantasy—permits anything to happen, and thus the fantastic makes room for the arbitrary and the sloppy. Jorge Luis Borges neatly reversed this: the fantasy novel, he argued, is in fact far more rule-based than most Realist fiction. It may rely on rules that are not of our world, but its rules are very strictly adhered to. Fantasies are in fact far more tightly wound than the chaos of realism, which makes room for big, baggy books likeWar and Peace and Ulysses. These are the books—embracing everything from the Napoleonic Wars to defecation—where anything can happen, even, to Borges’s great chagrin, nothing at all.1

Borges tailored this argument explicitly for his good friend, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares. Fifteen years his junior and a consummate heartbreaker, Bioy is generally considered an odd match for the persnickety, mamma’s boy Borges, but Borges took the young writer under his wing and the two forged a genuine, lifelong friendship. They spent long afternoons talking animatedly over coffee in Buenos Aires; they collaborated on some playful but altogether unremarkable detective stories; and Borges even made Bioy the protagonist in his fiction “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

 

Interview Cesar Arias and Review of Newest Book El error at El Pais

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El Pais has a long interview with Cesar Arias which is worth reading (and running through Google translate if need be). One of the things I found most interesting is that although he publishes something every year, his total lifetime out put is less than a 1000 pages. (via Moleskine Literario)

P. ¿Forma parte de su manera de escribir empezar contando una historia que después va abandonando?

R. Eso se me ha dado ahora, recientemente, porque he notado que muchas de mis novelas eran prácticamente una sola escena. Quise probar otras técnicas. Publiqué hace poco una novelita que se llama El divorcio, cuatro historias independientes metidas dentro de un marco. En este caso quise empezar con una historia y seguir con otra para ver qué pasaba, hacer una especie de díptico. Nunca son cosas deliberadas, voy improvisando las novelas a medida que las voy escribiendo, sin un plan.

P. ¿Arranca con la idea de una historia que quiere contar?

R. Sí, siempre empiezo con una idea. Tiene que ser una idea sugerente, no muy definida, de modo que me permita aventurarme en algo desconocido, pero siempre hay algo que me lleva a empezar. A veces es una idea más conceptual y a veces un lugar, los gimnasios, por ejemplo, o una ciudad.

P. Cuando empezó a escribir

El error, ¿existía el bandolero Pepe Dueñas?

R. No. La idea con la que empecé fue pequeñísima, la que está en las primeras líneas del libro, alguien que entra a la novela por una puerta que dice “error” y se justifica diciendo que era la única puerta que había. Esa fue una idea pequeñísima y tonta que se agotó en las tres primeras líneas, pero justamente es la clase de idea que me gusta porque me da completa libertad.

My idea of a writer:

P. Es curioso que mucha gente diga que es usted un autor prolífico, porque la verdad es que usted publica mucho, pero escribe poco. Lleva unos 60 libros publicados pero, en total, no serán más de 800 páginas.

R. Sí, a veces llego a publicar cuatro libros en un año, pero uno tiene 14 páginas, el otro 80 y alguno llega a las cien, o las pasa. Es mucho menos de lo que escribe cualquier periodista con una columna semanal. Yo escribo muy lento, media paginita por día. Escribo a mano. Y escribo en un café; todas las mañanas hago mi horita de escritura y tengo todo un fetichismo de lapiceras, cuadernos, papeles. Me gusta eso.

 

 

El Pais has a short review of Cesar Arias’ new book El Error. If you like Borgesian fiction, then this is a book for you, granted right now it is only in Spanish. Fortunately, he has many works translated into English. (Via Moleskine Literario)

(Emphasis mine)

La literatura como acto radical de fingimiento. Esto enseña siempre Aira, tal vez tras los pasos de Borges. Precisamente una palabra muy borgiana es el laberinto. Un concepto. Pues bien, en El erroralguien, el narrador, entra en un laberinto de historias hasta desembocar en su comienzo, pero ya sin su propia identidad. Destruido (u olvidado), el sujeto de la historia que se nos contaba se ha diluido en otras historias que ya nada tienen que ver ni con su voz ni con su existencia. Se ha impuesto la narración, la peripecia, distintos dramas, épicas, zozobras. La ficción pura. Empecemos por el principio, por definir un punto del que no estamos muy seguros que exista en esta novela. Un hombre (el narrador) y una mujer entran en el jardín de un escultor. Sabemos luego que dicho escultor mantiene una relación epistolar con una mujer que está presa (y condenada a cadena perpetua) por haber cometido un homicidio. Esta mujer nos conduce luego al mundo editorial. O a un mundo editorial muy sui géneris. De aquí saltamos a un relato épico en torno a la figura de un bandolero. A estas alturas el narrador primigenio ya está desaparecido. Y todo termina con Pepe Dueñas, el bandido legendario, y su mujer, Neblinosa. O mejor dicho, termina con el escultor del principio de la novela.

El error es una novela. Y la vez su alegoría. Tiene un mecanismo para que la novela funcione y a la vez es el mecanismo mismo de la ficción al desnudo. El humor, como en toda la literatura de Aira, juega en esta novela la función de contrapunto. El bandolero, Neblinosa, la presa que se cartea con el escultor, están descritos siempre al filo de la sonrisa inevitable. Pero la tristeza y la soledad y la incertidumbre que los afligen forman parte de su destino. Y este destino, Aira lo resuelve magistralmente con la descripción de una pesadumbre distantemente irónica. Y con algo de la impronta del maestro Macedonio Fernández. Al final, hemos disfrutado con una de las caras de la ficción, que como la vida tiene varias e ignotas. Nos enseña César Aira que la verdadera vida no está en otra parte. Está en la parte que miramos. Pero no vemos. Y en la vida que vivimos. O nos cuentan.

Spanish Short Stories – The Forgotten Greats and the New Voices

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El Pais has an excellent article on short story writers from the 20th century and beyond, with special emphasis on the forgotten during the post war and the new young writers. If you are interested in short stories the article is a must. What is fascinating from my own reading and notes of the author is the interest in playing with reality. Despite the oft cited interest in Americans like Carver, there is a definite interest in authors like Poe, Borges and Cortazar.

One could spend a year reading all these books:

Para estar al corriente de los tiempos que se avecinan, Gemma Pellicer y Fernando Valls nos proponen Siglo XXI (Menoscuarto), subtitulado Los nuevos nombres del cuento español actual. Siguiendo la pauta de un libro anterior a cargo de F. Valls y J. A. Masoliver, Los cuentos que cuentan (1998) (con el que este reciente volumen dialoga), se recoge aquí también una breve reflexión sobre el género firmada por cada uno de los autores escogidos. Sin ánimo de entrar a debatir algunas de las afirmaciones vertidas en la presentación del volumen ni matizar el tono de regusto canonizante que preside esta gavilla de relatos, sí quiero apuntar un par de cuestiones. Al margen de la fecha de publicación de los relatos aquí reunidos (todos posteriores a 2000, en efecto), a menos que admitamos que el siglo XXI empezó en 1989, aproximadamente la mitad de estos “nuevos nombres” pertenece al último tramo del XX, no sólo por haber empezado a publicar a principios de los noventa sino por su específica filiación literaria; en este sentido, faltan autores incontestables. Por eso del subtítulo me sobra el “los” y cuestiono la pretendida novedad, aunque es cierto que la nómina de autores de trayectoria más breve y reciente está más equilibrada, destacando la justa y merecida presencia de escritoras como Berta Vias Mahou, Elvira Navarro, Berta Marsé o Cristina Grande.

Esta última publica Agua quieta (Vagamundos): 36 narraciones próximas a la intensidad y el lirismo de la prosa poética, que apuntan el latido cotidiano del presente al modo diarístico (una breve escapada a Escocia o la lectura sosegada de la vida de Chéjov según Natalia Ginsburg), o se desplazan en el tiempo evocando historias de familia y los juegos y paisajes de la niñez.

Al modo de novela de formación o aprendizaje podría leerse Conozco un atajo que te llevará al infierno (e.d.a. libros), del valenciano Pepe Cervera: dieciocho estampas que atraviesan la adolescencia, juventud y primera madurez de Andrés Tangen, de las cuales en Siglo XXI se recoge la penúltima, ‘Como un hombre que sobrevuela el mar’.

Una de las autoras-revelación incluida en Siglo XXI es Patricia Esteban Erlés, que publica su tercer libro de relatos, Azul oscuro (Páginas de Espuma), cuentos de un gran despliegue imaginativo en los que la realidad o la vida cotidiana queda alterada por la irrupción de un elemento extraño, de un acontecimiento tan inesperado como incomprensible o de un comportamiento ingobernable. Algunos textos alcanzan grados de condensación casi poéticos y por lo general ocultan más de lo que dicen, con finales abiertos, tan inquietantes como sugestivos, o un cierre sorpresivo en el mejor estilo de Poe. Destacaría el que da título al libro, ‘Azul ruso’ -donde encontramos a la nueva Circe Emma Zunz, que “fue convirtiendo en gatos a todos los hombres que cruzaron la puerta del viejo edificio con aires de teatro cerrado donde vivía”- y ‘La chica del UHF’ -protagonizado por Antonio Puñales, un “técnico en pompas fúnebres” que se desvive por crear amor y belleza allí donde dominan el horror o la avaricia.

The Best Short Stories of the 20th Century-the View from Spain

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El Pais had a brief take on some of the best short stories of the 20th Century. It is a very anglophone list, but interesting as a view from the other side of the Atlantic.

Raymond Carver
Cathedral (1983)
James Joyce
The Dead (1914)
Henry James
The Beast in the Jungle (1903)
Juan Rulfo
No oyes ladrar a los perros (1953)
Julio Cortázar
Graffiti (1981)
Ramón del Valle-Inclán
El miedo (1902)
Truman Capote
Deslumbramiento (1982)
Jorge Luis Borges
El espejo y la máscara (1975)
J. D. Salinger
The Laughing Man (1953)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Return to Babilonia (1929)
Ingeborg Bachmann
Problems, Problems (1972)
Katherine Mansfield
The Fly (1922)
Ring Lardner
Champion (1924)
Medardo Fraile
The Album (1959)
Flannery O’Connor
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
Katherine Mansfield
In the Bay(1921)

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Peron Books Reviewed at Book Slut

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Jesse Tangen-Mills has a review of three of  Tomás Eloy Martínez’s books, Saint Evita, The Novel of Peron, and the Tango Singer at Book Slut. He gives a good overview of the books, ones I should have read some time ago, especially since I own a copy of the Novel of Peron in Spanish. Both of the Peron novels are intriguing approaches to story telling. He gave an interesting interview here where he discussed some of what he wanted to do with the books.

His first attempt, The Perón Novel, took him thirty years to complete, and took me nearly six months to find. Big Spanish-language publishing houses have bases in more than one country, certainly in the biggies like Mexico and Argentina. The really big publishing houses have a base in every country in South America, and publish roughly a dozen autóctonos novels in each country, that will only be sold within that nation. The Argentine novelist, and contemporary of Martínez, Ricardo Piglia recently described it as “the Balkanization of literature in Spanish.” A less brilliant mind might just say it sucks. Every bookseller I spoke to in Colombia had read the novel, but didn’t have it. The translation was much easier to get used. In the end, I decided to read a bootleg version first (bootleg PDFs abound in Spanish) on my grime-covered laptop, before turning to the translation.

I didn’t mind starting The Perón Novel on a laptop because it was as good as I had expected, although I should warn the the reader that despite the straightforward prose with which the novel is written, without a good foundation in Argentine history, the book’s plot — and its many unbelievable characters — will be confusing. So before I get into the novel, I need to provide some background. Perón was what no American president has ever been, but always promises to be: bipartisan. He’s a Fascist-socialist-dictator-populist. And depending on who you ask, he is all or none of those labels. He’s Mussolini, an orator he greatly admired; he’s Lenin. His second wife was Evita, Miss “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” until her death in 1952 (Martínez devotes another novel, Santa Evita, to her). Then in 1955, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu led a coup, and Perón was forced into exile for nearly twenty years. And then one day he came back. That’s where this novel begins.

It should be said that Martínez never intended these books to be nonfiction. He was adamant about that. He said it was fiction correcting the so-called “truth.” The entire book, in fact, reconstructs the arrival of Perón to Argentina and the mayhem that followed. The whole historical cast is here: José López Rega, astrologist, maniac, the Iago to Perón’s Othello; Isabel Martínez de Perón, who is also a star-reader; the dictator Aramburu’s guerrilla assassins for whom Perón is like Trotsky; the counter-insurgent Archangel, a poor boy trained in the art of taking abuse. I’m not sure if that last one is real, and all of them appear to be fictional. Astrology? Really? Yes? It’s all quite unbelievable.

Interview with Borges Translator Suzanne Jill Levine

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3 Quarks Daily has the transcript of an interview with Suzanne Jill Levine about Jorge Luis Borges. It is a lengthy interview and worth a look. It goes beyond his stories and talks about his non fiction works, something that he is not necessarily well known for in the US. You can also listen to the interview here.

In the nonfiction in these collections, are these a different Borges than you see in the fictions, or is it all of a piece, to your mind?

Both are true. In some ways, in order to understand, truly, his fictions, you have to look at his nonfiction work as well as his poetry to see where this language is coming from, where these ideas are coming from. What we wanted to do was bring forth to the reader not only the Borges they already know, but also expand their concept of who Borges is. For example, On Argentina is an aspect completely missing from the Selected Nonfictions, which is a wonderful volume. It’s just that that volume wanted to capture, let’s say, a more universal, international, and maybe more Anglo-oriented Borges.

But On Argentina shows you how Argentine Borges was. This really is a revelation. You understand how committed he was, politically, socially, culturally, to his particular country. That’s a part that many people aren’t aware of. It gives them insights they wouldn’t otherwise have about his fictions.

It is kind of, I don’t know if “fraught relationship” is the right term, he has with Argentina. It’s one that develops. You can flip through this book and see change: he’s come more to terms with Argentina. What was the process of his point of view on his country? He didn’t seem to like it very much early on, and at the end he’s still saying, “Here are the things we can’t do in Argentina,” but he’s matured.

It’s a very complex relationship. For me to sum up the history of Argentina and Borges’ ideas on it would be very ambitious, and probably wouldn’t work as well as the reader just picking up this lovely volume and reading the brilliant introduction by Alfred MacAdam, which does tell the story very well, as well as the essays themselves. He loved this culture, but was very pained by limitations, by a sense of a a lack of civic-mindedness, of a lack of, let’s say, political development. In other words, he saw it as a culture that was very rich, but, unfortunately, a country that was in the hands of, as he said, “gangsters.”

Naturally, at the time he was writing, regionalism was a very big movement. It really was a continuation of good old-fashioned European naturalism and realism. He wanted Argentina to find its own voice. He didn’t want writers to feel they had to write about certain subjects in a certain way. The fact of being Argentine was, whatever they wrote, it would be Argentine. This concept of identity was shocking, refreshing, and makes total sense.

How Not To Write a Borges Article

~ bythefirelight

I shouldn’t even bother with this, but when you write about Borges in the NY Times and make it so boring, what is the point? I love Borges, though not later Borges, and can’t seem to soak up enough articles about him. Still, I want something new and interesting. The article starts out badly, telling us the inadequacies of writing about him. I should have stopped there. Since the writer obviously can’t describe his work, I don’t need to read it.

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.

What the real problem is, though, he writes about Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrecker devoting time to an analysis of the book and Borges’ fascination. Sounds good. I want to hear about his sources. But, alas, he falls short and has to resort to the same generalities he was going to avoid. Borges can be difficult to write about and say something new. But it helps when you put the article into a cogent framework.

In “The False Problem of Ugolino,” an essay on Dante not included in “On Writing,” Borges quotes from an essay by Stevenson that makes the rather Borgesian claim that a book’s characters are only a string of words. “Blasphemous as this sounds to us,” Borges comments, “Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to it.” Borges then adds: “The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.” The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles.

Among the vast books that do not really exist, and that Borges has commented on, are the innumerable pages of the future. Borges’s work answers the unanswerable weight of his reading, the boyish and the arcane at once. The pages of both what he wrote and what he only traced the shadows of present us with their own wavering interrogations; we are happy and afraid to be lost amid our insufficient and unceasing responses. Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson. We still do not know how to create Borges.

Félix J Palma’s English Debut and New Short Story Collection

~ bythefirelight

Last month Spanish novelist and short story writer Félix J Palma published a new book of short stories, The Smallest Show in the World (El menor espectáculo del mundo). In it he mixes the fantastic with the comic to explore “human relations, most of all those of love, are microcosms inhabited only by those who are living it” (relaciones humanas, sobre todo las amorosas, son microcosmos habitados únicamente por los protagonistas de la historia.  Revista de Letras Spanish only.) He treats the subject with humor and his use of the fantastic sounds interesting. In one story, a character doubles every time he has to make a decision (via Spanish only) . Instead of the Garden of Forking Paths, the character becomes the path, turning the Borges classic on its head. As Palma notes in an interview at Canal-l (Spanish only) many Spanish short story authors follow one of two paths, either those of Borges, Cortizar, and other Latin American authors who tended towards the fantastic, or those of Americans like Raymond Carver. He, by his own accounting, is in the first camp. While I’m not sure if he is one of Spain’s best short story writers as the Revista de Letras article says, I am sufficiently intrigued to get a copy of his book.

For those of you who can only read English, his successful novel The Map of Time will be coming out in English sometime this year. I don’t know much about it and from the description Publisher’s Weekly gave I’m not sure if I should be afraid or hope for something interesting. Given that it got a six figure deal, I’m a little leery.

From Publisher’s Weekly

Johanna Castillo at Atria won an auction for Felix J. Palma’sThe Map of Time via Thomas Colchie, who sold North American rights for six figures (in collaboration with Palma’s principal agent, Antonia Kerrigan, on behalf of Algaida in Spain). Set in Victorian London with characters real and imagined, Palma’s English-language debut features three intertwined plots, in which H.G. Wells is called upon to investigate incidents of time travel and save the lives of an aristocrat in love with a murdered prostitute from the past, a woman attempting to flee the strictures of society by searching for her lover somewhere in the future and Wells’s own wife, who may have become a pawn in a plot to murder him as well as Henry James and Bram Stoker. The book was just published in Spain.

Perhaps Not Borges – Alex Epstein and Israeli Flash Fiction

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

PEN and the Jewish Daily Forward have an interview and excerpts from the Israeli writer Alex Epstein’s new book of flash fictions. They are sometimes metaphysical, sometimes meta-fiction, often cryptic, but play with simple images and frozen moments to capture the essence of a thought, an idea, or a impression.  I didn’t like them all, but several, especially those at the forward (The Name of the Moon and Blue Has No south) used brief images to create a larger picture of really is happening in the unwritten story, which is the mark of a good sudden fiction. I would like to give the book a look, but I’m afraid I would find his work a bit repetitive.

I don’t know about you, but I get tired of the Borges moniker attached to any author who writes about books and doubles. Enough, already, and lets just say writing about book is just one of those things writers do, in part, because that is what they know so well. I love Borges (well until the Aleph or so, after that he starts to repeat himself) but I also want to know there is something else out there too.

Review at TQC on Borges’ Lectures from the Argentine Master

~ bythefirelight

Daniel Pritchard has written an interesting review at the Quarterly Conversation of Borges’ Lectures from the Argentine Master: Seven Nights. I’d been curious if the book was worth reading. Although it has his similar themes, they sound perceptive and erudite in a way that I find his late fiction isn’t. His latter stories, while continuing with his themes of the other and mirrors, often seem repetitive and don’t have the fictive sparkle of Ficiones, as if he just wanted to write philosophy. By the time 1977 rolls around, I think lectures might have been the best vehicle for him.

The assertion of Jorge Luis Borges’s literary genius is today assumed and completely unremarkable, and since many superior critics have elaborated it, I will refrain from boring you with redundancy. However, it is occasionally overlooked that Borges is also a philosophical genius—philosophical, that is, in that he is completely in love with knowledge, with the pleasure that knowledge for its own sake provides him—and although he is a lover of knowledge, he never declines into reverential pedagogy. Knowledge, to Borges, is not for the knowing, nor for the asserting over and condemnation of others, nor for proving others wrong, but for the pleasure of discovery.

In these lectures, Borges uses his genius to provide that gift of discovery, an experience akin to poetry, “something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water.” Of the truths themselves, he is always humble. One believes or else one does not; the mind is a malleable thing so that, as he says in the lecture on nightmares, “we may draw two conclusions, at least tonight; later we may change our minds.” And besides, most of what is believed is only an illusion, “our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality.” Like Socrates, Borges is most sure only of the fact that we are mostly ignorant, that there are obscure mechanisms imperceptibly at work in our lives. Whether we decide to call these machinations magic, or God, or fate, each explanation is yet another expression of the consequences of unknown acts.

Borges Lost Translations at the Guradian

~ bythefirelight

The Guardian UK (via Words Without Borders) has a short bog post about some translations Borges put together with Norman Thomas di Giovanni of some of his works. It sounds like a true Borges-like project.

Nonetheless, what they produced during this period were not simple translations. Some of their time was given to the collaborative composition of original versions of Borges’s stories in English. Borges’s grandmother was from the Midlands, and he was consequently fluent in English, albeit in a reportedly antiquated turn-of-the-century style. So di Giovanni earned equal writing credit for versions of stories including Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Library of Babel and The Lottery in Babylon.

New Borges in May from New Directions

~ bythefirelight

New Directions is going to publish a new book of Borges. It is unclear weather it has new material in English or is just a different approach at compiling his work.

Everything and Nothing collects Borges’ highly influential work – written in the 1930s and ’40s – that forsaw the internet, quantum mechanics, and cloning. In one essay, he discusses the relationship between blindness and poetry. As Roberto Bolaño succinctly said: “I could live under a table reading Borges.”