Jorge Luis Borges

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give me a break... borges is THE write of 20th century. this page should have been full of discussion about his books, stories, essays, and all that he wrote. get hold of his "ficciones" to become a borges-worshiper.

>>By eyekay   (Saturday, 25 Jan 2003 13:00)



does anyone know where i can get the text of poesia gauchesca online translated into english?

>>By mrspankyw   (Saturday, 8 Mar 2003 08:58)



Can anyone discuss Emma Zunz with me? I cannot fully understand it.

Thanks!

>>By Dashley   (Friday, 19 Sep 2003 17:15)



Borges is not only a fiction maker. His essays are also wonderfully entertaining, and highly erudite. A careful study of his essays, Dashley will give you some answers to Emma Zunz.

>>By dionysus   (Friday, 24 Oct 2003 09:14)



The thing about Borges is that he seems to sense an order to the universe which is hidden from the rest of us mere mortals.He is willing to share but only in a playful,indirect way,making you earn your wisdom.

>>By goddog   (Sunday, 26 Oct 2003 07:38)



goddog,
Borges' order is chaos. Take the Library of babel for instance, a story that encapsulates Borges' world view quite neatly. In thatr story, Borges says
"If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which thus repeated would be an order: the Order)" Borges claims in many of his interviews that there is no meaning to his stories. yet, if there is any meaning one was obliged to find, it would be in the story The Circular Ruins. There, a magician dreams a man and sends to a temple to worship the Fire god, who helped the magician to dream this new man into existence. Years later, he hears of a fire walking man , and he realises that man his the man he dreamt, and worries he will find out that he is not real but dreamt. Then, his own temple is caught in flames and he walks out of the furnace unscathed. then, with terrort, he realises that he too has been dreamed. The meaning here is not only that there is no meaning, and no garauntee of any order, but that even the narrative is unreal, because it has eaten its own tail.

Borges' task is not to write realist fiction. In fact, he doesn;t believe realist fiction is possible, since the writer of realist fiction relies heavily on the cultural stock of his time. Roland Barthes the ffrench philosopher argues this point very well in his S/Z. Instead of pretending to wrire realism, borges is content to play games with language, because he believes, Like William Morris, that all the books have been written (a la Library of babel) and when one has exhausted fiction, one must write aboput the exhaustion...It is a game of literature turned in on itself.

>>By dionysus   (Sunday, 26 Oct 2003 08:12)



Well Borges is one of the modt wonderful writters of our time.

We talks with mistery,about the mistery.

We will be for ever a poet of existence.

>>By theodoramaffat   (Thursday, 30 Oct 2003 04:56)



Iagree theodora,

Borges is magical, an artist that stands on his own...His intellect alone outshines the sun

>>By dionysus   (Thursday, 30 Oct 2003 05:07)



C'mon y'all, I love the man too but there's no use in discussing if all you're going to do is try to one-up each other's purple prose paeans to his genius. "Outshine the sun"? Geeze.
Borges is Kafka without the glumness.
Borges is a cosmic Poe.
Borges sacrifices emotional content for intricate internal logic and intellectual conceit.
Borges wasn't a good enough writer to sustain a novel (and/or) any novel Borges wrote would have ended up like some crappy version of "Pale Fire".
Borges' parables were painful examples of writer who could no longer practice his craft at a competent degree.
Also, dionysus, I'd be mighty careful about assigning"The Library of Babel" as an encapsulation of Borges' world view. Especially considering he wrote it while pottering away at a minimum-brain beauracratic lbrary cataloguing job. And most especially considering the fact that he has attributed the story to aforementioned shite job. And ESPECIALLY considering he wrote it in the first 1/3 of his career in ficiton, which, if it does encapsulate his worldview, does not speak well of the remaining 2/3 of his output (tired retreads of "Library" or failed attempts at working outside his realm of cognition?)
You literate hooligans must disagree with the statements above, if you feel as passionately about Borges' unique celestial abilities. Prove me wrong.

>>By Ortho Stice   (Friday, 19 Dec 2003 21:32)



Ortho,
I tend to agree. Borges is a lot of fun. Both my wife and I teach college classes, and have used Library of Babel, not for literature though, but for political science and law. It is a classic short piece (that the students often aren't familiar with) about history and the prospects of future history. World view? It's a solid world view regardless of when he wrote it, though as a neo-Marxist (a very broad category indeed), I'm a little more idealistically hopeful that eventually the subjugated will replace the bourgeois history by means of a historical revision that will at once embrace the Library of Babel's nihilism, while calling forth a new religious beginning that never forgets the limitless repression of will to power from which it was born.
No Qualities

>>By No Qualities   (Friday, 19 Dec 2003 22:44)



Que?

>>By Dibs   (Tuesday, 30 Dec 2003 11:34)



A tribute to Sir Jorge Luis Borges

An orthograph's enigma is the augurer of the enitre phone drawing the figure to a time; endlessness is a single precautionary step ....the ghost of writing : the Hand. anand bose

Dreamt of of an entire library called the Book. In the dream he wrote another book.

Ask the Sphinx why it breathes the alphabet as the riddle ....


Less or more or more or less ...All of Literature less as Borges and more as Borges....There are so many authors too...

>>By Anand Bose   (Wednesday, 21 Jan 2004 16:55)



Borges sacrifices emotional content for intricate internal logic and intellectual conceit.

"Read the writing Of God"....the story of Mayan Priest ....


anand bose

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 24 Jan 2004 17:02)



orthograph


C'mon y'all, I love the man too but there's no use in discussing if all you're going to do is try to one-up each other's purple prose paeans to his genius. "Outshine the sun"? Geeze.
Borges is Kafka without the glumness.
Borges is a cosmic Poe.

Borges sacrifices emotional content for intricate internal logic and intellectual conceit.

Are you not a troglodite shennanigan, a preachy moralist who incapable of the very thought of creation -the Fabula

Borges wasn't a good enough writer to sustain a novel (and/or) any novel Borges wrote would have ended up like some crappy version of "Pale Fire".

Borges' parables were painful examples of writer who could no longer practice his craft at a competent degree.



The mustard is a parable ....the seed is philosophical in the
III versions of Judas ....



At that stage of his life, there was his blindness and he could afford to be authorial ....Its painful to read you as there's hardly a literature in your writing about Borges, not even the enjoybale art of malcious gossip!


It easy to read your discourse as a social value ....Hang round man if you have got a silver spoon in your dirty mouth

Also, dionysus, I'd be mighty careful about assigning"The Library of Babel" as an encapsulation of Borges' world view. Especially considering he wrote it while pottering away at a minimum-brain beauracratic lbrary cataloguing job.

What about symbolism ....the cultural and religious art of
encountering the symbol ....Borges is creative ..



And most especially considering the fact that he has attributed the story to aforementioned shite job. And ESPECIALLY considering he wrote it in the first 1/3 of his career in ficiton, which, if it does encapsulate his worldview, does not speak well of the remaining 2/3 of his output (tired retreads of "Library" or failed attempts at working outside his realm of cognition?)

You literate hooligans must disagree with the statements above, if you feel as passionately about Borges' unique celestial abilities.

Prove me wrong......You can't prove llitearture ....feel it as would feel your pulse ...Or ....k of F and in ...read poem
as Onan's day off.

Read his essays on the War, his reviews ....His problematic thesis about the very content on short stories...Its the poverty of your very thought that irks me `...

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 24 Jan 2004 17:29)



goddog,
Borges' order is chaos. Take the Library of babel for instance, a story that encapsulates Borges' world view quite neatly. In thatr story, Borges says
"If an eternal traveller were to cross it in any direction he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which thus repeated would be an order: the Order)"


Borges claims in many of his interviews that there is no meaning to his stories. yet, if there is any meaning one was obliged to find, it would be in the story

You have missed the catch of the story ---" The circular ruins".
The beginn ing sentence...

" No one saw him slip off the boat that unanimous night" ...is crux that makes the whole story ...


The Circular Ruins. There, a magician dreams a man and sends to a temple to worship the Fire god, who helped the magician to dream this new man into existence. Years later, he hears of a fire walking man , and he realises that man his the man he dreamt, and worries he will find out that he is not real but dreamt. Then, his own temple is caught in flames and he walks out of the furnace unscathed. then, with terrort, he realises that he too has been dreamed. The meaning here is not only that there is no meaning, and no garauntee of any order, but that even the narrative is unreal, because it has eaten its own tail.

Technique of faulty reading is a figure of speech .....

>>By Anand Bose   (Sunday, 25 Jan 2004 15:54)



Without all the experience and training that some of you seem to have, I have always enjoyed Borges as a kind of literary excercise. Like Ortho Stice said, he's kinda like Kafka in that you get the sense that he wrote what he wrote not to entertain college students but to stretch his imagination, and thereby weaken his dependency on reality.
His stories usually don't operate on one imagined premise, but build against the laws of logic and physics into complete works of imagination. That would be the goal, anyway.

>>By Patterson   (Wednesday, 28 Jan 2004 19:27)



Kung-fu Monkey-Great20 Wall04

Prologue

"In the thesis of Dr. Sun-moon-Zen, the sun and moon were huge blotches of ink, largesse of lines, which he devotedly called the art of emptying concentration." Mantra Mandarin, xx-th stanza.

I asked the Monk, "why teach a Monkey Kung-fu?"

Uttering an animal cry he thundered: "Monk…Key…"

He said, "are you a drunken monkey"?

"No" said I bursting into laughter…."I am trying to draw

a monk-key calligraphy."



Great Wall of calligraphy

A fiddler on the great wall saw a drunken monkey learning to fly off while fiddling the monkey.

He laughed so much realizing that it was a drunken monk drawing a drunken monkey in monkey calligraphy. He is still laughing wondering why the wall and writing are just the same, so similar as writing.

Epilogue

Dr. Sun-Moon-Sin died that night grinning sweetly of the calligraphy he’s left to posterity as a tea drinking-monkey, lip wetting, leaf reading monk-key. The Mandarin, the official newspaper of the peoples Republic of China brought the official version along with a liberal version in Hong Kong called the Mandarin edible paid rich tributes to their legendary calligrapher

>>By Anand Bose   (Friday, 30 Jan 2004 15:45)



Two II Ghosts pf Borges

orthograph's enigma is the augurer of the entire phone drawing the figure to a time; endlessness is a single precautionary step ….the ghost of writing : the Hand.

The text if interpreted is the labyrinth; it contains all the books; the exception is a single book could have been left out. On the other hand if the writing is lying there's the silence, medically called rigor-mortis

Of all the writers there's Borges who writes the full-stop and leaves you thinking that you have written the story!

The name of the shortest fiction in the world is the Mask.

On the other hand Borges wrote nothing as he was dreaming
about writing the dreaming......

>>By Anand Bose   (Monday, 2 Feb 2004 09:31)



© anand bose


Garden or the path of Borges
The wish to be an author was another’s art of writing about the wish. As another author wrote, the author’s prize, he left a fictional epitaph. In the writing of literature, the writing of the author is strangely admired; all of fiction is not left to chance, a little to magic and a negligible mite to the hand and least but not last, the marvel of having written nothing.

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 13 Mar 2004 15:20)



© anand bose

Anagram or Agraman and Borges
“The hand of Ibin Moosa built the Taj Mahal and the Shajahan butchered the hand as he was afraid of seeing another building called the lovers epitaph.”

All of Borges, said the masked figure is a myth of speech murdering the every dayness of the symbol.

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 13 Mar 2004 15:21)



© anand bose
Memory of Borges in poem
As the Poem was being written, the poet was visible as a stream of moving images which copied symbols, modulated their vibrations, connoted them as others; The poet Borges was writing, if the mask of the poem was ever written!

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 13 Mar 2004 15:22)



© anand bose
Noble Borges Nobel Borges
Sir Alfred Nobel having read all of Borges was kindled with the spirit of Proteus to award the Nobel.
Sad to say Borges he left all of Borges’s writing to the awards committee. The committee’s chairperson Sir Rakoslinikoff said he was all in favour of awarding Borges the Nobel Prize. On the day of the award he decided to cast his vote against the Borges. Rakoslinikoff developed a literary disease called the madrigal deficiency and this stimulated him to assume, had Borges won the Nobel prize, others might have been left out; since others are winning, Borges is left out of the Nobel prize and so Borges continues to remain as literature.

>>By Anand Bose   (Saturday, 13 Mar 2004 15:23)



JLB the Maestro

In the interview with JLB, the reporter from New York Times queried about the strange nature of the Borgesian book title – ‘Name or the symbol’.
Borges laughed heartily and replied, “That’s because I’ve forgotten my signature.

>>By Anand Bose   (Monday, 15 Mar 2004 07:32)



Garden or the path of Borges

The wish to be an author was another’s art of writing about the wish. As another author wrote, the author’s prize, he left a fictional epitaph. In the writing of literature, the writing of the author is strangely admired; all of fiction is not left to chance, a little to magic and a negligible mite to the hand and least but not last, the marvel of having written nothing.

Anagram or Agraman and Borges

"The hand of Ibin Moosa built the Taj Mahal and the Shajahan butchered the hand as he was afraid of seeing another building called the lovers epitaph."

All of Borges, said the masked figure is a myth of speech murdering the every dayness of the symbol.



Memory of Borges in poem

As the Poem was being written, the poet was visible as a stream of moving images which copied symbols, modulated their vibrations, connoted them as others; The poet Borges was writing, if the mask of the poem was ever written!

Noble Borges Nobel Borges

Sir Alfred Nobel having read all of Borges was kindled with the spirit of Proteus to award the Nobel.

Sad to say, he left all of Borges’s writing to the awards committee. The committee’s chairperson Sir Rakoslinikoff said he was all in favour of awarding Borges the Nobel Prize. On the day of the award he decided to cast his vote against the Borges. Rakoslinikoff developed a literary disease called the madrigal deficiency and this stimulated him to assume, had Borges won the Nobel prize, others might have been left out; since others are winning, Borges is left out of the Nobel prize and so Borges continues to remain as literature.

>>By Anand Bose   (Monday, 15 Mar 2004 07:40)



Hi all,
i'm a student of English Literature, going to write my MA thesis on Borges.
before every thing i have to know about all his works but unfortunately i didn't find his story THE GARDEN OF THE FORKING PATHS if any body has the text could you please send it to me by: mitra_ghaffari2002@yahoo.com
if so, i would be so grateful.
you can also visit my personal profile at http://www.flork.com/mitra.html
Hoping to have kind messages and suggestions from you all.
Best Wishes
Mitra

>>By Mitra   (Thursday, 1 Apr 2004 14:57)



.

© anand bose 2004

Hebraic Aleph in Borgesian story

As I am reading the story Aleph again and again, my thoughts about it seem to be changing…And I am noting down my thoughts as they occurred to me … I am strangely wondering whether the woman in it Borges referred to as Beatrice is Dante’s Beatrice. It’s really amusing to connote Beatrice’s brother as //Dante. // Daneri is a brilliant poet but parodied by Borges himself as the first person, as concupiscence of burlesque flesh! Beatrice too in the Borgesian story is no longer alive; her memory is resuscitated to life as a lover, as mystic fetish that adorned that glorious mansion containing the Aleph. Borges is a shaman mourning the fruit of withered Beatrice and a dialectical philosopher trying to unite the spirit with at-least a representation. Its is humorous to juxtapose the II-nd Corinthian thought: “ the letter killeth: but, the spirit giveth life and the esoteric wisdom of the kabbala that Aleph is Ensof or boundless wisdom of creation. And still, the aleph is only oxen’s head in earliest origin.

The connotation of the Aleph as a “point in space containing all the points” adds own the pompous abstraction of creative causality as chance occurrence of representative consciousness striking exactitude to the art of the symbol! Its paradoxical to infiltrate this idea with literature: as the death of God is the death of unrecognised symbol. The art of cognition to consciously adopt life is to understand the mere representation of the symbol and translate it to the spirit as being consciously done.

As the story of the Aleph progresses we find the state of the mansion containing the Aleph to be dismantled to more propitious need of commerce. Daneri wails as if possessed by a child and invites Borges to traverse a long and winding cellar where the Aleph is kept as a treasure. There’s a child’s journey into a looking glass where geography, fantasy and fable mingle into amazing wonder of being the joy literature. To the reader’s consternation, we find that the Aleph in Daneri’s mansion is false. The real is left to a baffling nature of being invited!

My readings of the Aleph are from Prof. Andrew Hurley’s translation, Penguin edition

>>By Anand Bose   (Thursday, 8 Apr 2004 18:21)



© anand bose 2004

The Librarians Secret

If you want to know Borges, yours must be the effort”. Miniatures of a giant, NY times- 1997.

In a dilapidated journal of Buenos Ares standing by the sheer strength of quixotic friends, Borges wrote a parable titled the literary quip.
In a rare but common morning called the literary sunrise, there stood in vast expanse a strange and secret space, gigantic, but deaf as the stone that speaks silently to a secret wish of architecture called the tower. All the people who adorned the tower never had the time to translate the common language of the people—literature. The excuse, being the writing of a hieroglyph and its puzzle to contain the form of all speech as the labyrinth and figures of an old stranger called sphinx. Borges started wondering how to translate this strange dream of writing into another’s dreaming. This Borges surmised ruefully that it was a part of great dream. The time spends to write was another’s secret and could be written down in the manual called the librarian’s labyrinth. A strange nature of possession overtook Borges and he found wondering why the labyrinth was deciphered as an ordinary thing by another who never wrote the words as time and the universe! So Borges decided to collect this strange nature of thought as book that was writing. With this strange thought in mind, he added a footnote, the unfinished! With a little doubt and comic humour, Borges added what could not be added …Act of God in the art of literature!

>>By Anand Bose   (Thursday, 8 Apr 2004 18:23)



Crikey, Anand, you seem to be doing most of the work here!

I think brevity is part of Borges' genius, so it would be wrong to criticise him for not sustaining full-length novels. He has the art of suggesting more than he states - through such devices as the characteristic incongruous list, which suggests more than it contains. I like his account of Wilkins' universal language in 'Otras inquisiciones' - 'Other Inquisitions'. Although Borges only had a second-hand account to go on, he manages to convey the essence of Wilkins' ideas in the most stimulating way, and his version is much quoted. More recently, Umberto Eco has given an account of the same proposed language, in "The search for the perfect language". Eco had the advantage of being able to read Wilkins' actual texts, and many other relevant books, and his account is far more detailed and authoritative. But it is in every other way inferior to Borges, and I would still say that if you want to capture the essential magic of Wilkins' language, Borges is much the best account to read.

I'm sure others remember the account, from the same essay, of a mythical Chinese encyclopedia with wildly heterogeneous categories?

>>By Plegmund   (Tuesday, 18 May 2004 23:43)



Borges is a classic Virgo. But I love him anyway. He is definitely one of my favorite minds: ordered, economical, poetic, precise, uncertain. In esscence, human. He loves knowledge so much that he realizes that you can never truly possess it fully, which is of course the ultimate knowledge. Joy is in the Labyrinth and the Mirror. He can use those symbols over and over and I always love them. They are perfect. And he is better than any other writer for the fact that he did not need to write a massive novel out of arrogance and ego. I like the extremes though, the few massive works (like Joyce) or the wealth of short ones like Borges. Stories, essays, and poems, all brilliant.

>>By smirkbot   (Friday, 11 Jun 2004 21:32)



Allegorical Manuscript

“The remains remained projected …the presence of the present, the imaginations of its past and anticipation of the future…All of the Mortal lived just to be meaning. Immortals remained buried as the writing of the undying.” Dictionary of magic realism


Borges was puzzled about JLB’s title in a manuscript called the ‘stranger’ and baffled by its description of him as the stranger and his encounter with an ever familiar motif of literature assuredly rewritten and overwritten in prefaces of great works of fiction spanning decades, clans, centuries, fictions having conceptualizations as truth of time.

On rereading statements in it connected to the verbosity of being scantily clad, Borges by sheer imprisonment of reason and the effort of its liberation in fiction deduced that conjectures just possibly exists! So too the irony of this became unreason as meaning of fiction became consistently logical as a drawing of a lettered by poly-deciphered script, alluding to a dubious manifestation of phonic poltergeist as the dreaming game of the labyrinth.

On reinterpreting the desert of textual insertion it became coherent to Borges that the art of literature called the “period” lay in a closed-door ritual of memorizing a single letter as the meaning of eternity and of its phone as the magical possession of the permanence called in lay literature of all periods as the “permanence of the symbol

Error of punctuation is a departure to the grammar of immanence. Denigration was blasphemy as it involved the manipulation of the original myth or magic of the writing. This was how the translator left the paragraph.

Borges concluded that this particular “symbol” was assassinated to diverge its power to hold to a single truth of meaning. Heterogeneity was warring with the logic of allusion and figures as deception were truthful as the meaning of being idiomatically hidden. It was written here, “woe to you mortals as time is a memory of just another’s memory.

Borges concluded his penultimate that he would be pen writing about the very ignorance of being anything other than a labyrinth. Turning back on his chair, he felt amused at his effort to talk to another called in literary jargon as a simple word: the alter ego.

>>By Anand Bose   (Tuesday, 15 Jun 2004 17:58)



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