Jorge Luis Borges
Forum
Anand Bose....you do a very good pastiche of Borges...somewhat akin to the many Tolkein cults that have learnt to speak in elven
>>By Orphée (Saturday, 26 Jun 2004 05:17)
Poet’s Preface
Borges the poet became charmed by the phrase: ‘the illusion of time in the ending circle.’ He longed to pen in its meaning as the conglomeration of vehicles for carrying literature.
Borges referred to the work of the mortal called ‘unlimited genius’ who called himself as the ‘master echo of prose’ who made references about the embellishment of the ‘word’ as just another fancy called ‘literature and eternity.’
Borges the poet became so captivated by the idea, that he could only render its nature as the magnificence of laughter: mortal is the resolution the immortal is resolving. So saying, he never wrote the preface for the magnum opus the ‘story of literature’.
>>By Anand Bose (Monday, 2 Aug 2004 18:58)
ParadisicallY
"Borges is Blind and sees the adeificium without sight..."
Lovers flee from paradise, as if they knew it was the paradise.” A poet refrained his ability to insert this all too familiar archetypal verse in the manuscript: the gardening of verses.
The poet’s silence was interpreted as abstinence puzzled the poetic medium with generations of imagery or the art remedying the fruit of dualism into freedom of coinage called creatively as chance insertions of metaphysical solipsism.
Thus Homer though Blind could see Helen…Dante tormented Hell into grammatical circle of taunt and torment and revised prophetic visions of Heaven. Blake drew calligraphy and transformed his consciousness as the sensous circle and the secrets of ritual.
Borges withdrew into mortal as verses of time writing just the vain possibility of its corollary.
The Qabbalists allude the paradox of the Tetragrammaton and of its inversions as creations that drew taste of speech in the fruit of recognition. Writing and rewriting they are creating infinity through the sleight of the hand and its secrets as the tree of life. Very often their efforts end in failure due to the single chance insertion of a wrong way of writing; and this obstructs the orthography into systemic reversal of what they are doing.
Shakespeare divined the earth and exuded his caliber as secret of exhibiting shadows. All of the Shakespearean drama compressed epithets as the struggling revisions of the of the absence of magic in catharsis and pleasure of the world, the secret of the word and the covering of flesh.
Goethe plunged Faust into the art of resistance, and the medium of the senses had to be camouflaged as they hardly resisted their reasons of being celebrations. The torment was inserted to reason the possibilities infinity and the arts.
The knowledge of the poem was denounced as a truism and is still being rightfully crafted by the guild of poets with their options of hiding in secret of fraternities. The last version will be one of discovering that poet who made the beginning was never conscious of his allusion as paradise of just the writing…Thus saying the manuscript ended: Paradise was not only the art of writing but the paradise of writing lay only in the beginning as just his imagination of thinking.
>>By Anand Bose (Wednesday, 11 Aug 2004 16:28)
Circling Paradise
“Lovers flee from paradise, as if they knew it was the paradise.” A poet refrained his ability to insert this all too familiar archetypal verse in the manuscript: the gardening of verses.
The poet’s silence was interpreted as abstinence puzzled the poetic medium with generations of imagery or the art remedying the fruit of dualism into freedom of coinage called creatively as chance insertions of metaphysical solipsism.
Thus Homer though Blind could see Helen…Dante tormented Hell into grammatical circle of taunt and torment and revised prophetic visions of Heaven. Blake drew calligraphy and transformed his consciousness as the sensous circle and the secrets of ritual.
Borges withdrew into mortal as verses of time writing just the vain possibility of its corollary.
The Qabbalists allude the paradox of the Tetragrammaton and of its inversions as creations that drew taste of speech in the fruit of recognition. Writing and rewriting they are creating infinity through the sleight of the hand and its secrets as the tree of life. Very often their efforts end in failure due to the single chance insertion of a wrong way of writing; and this obstructs the orthography into systemic reversal of what they are doing.
Shakespeare divined the earth and exuded his caliber as secret of exhibiting shadows. All of the Shakespearean drama compressed epithets as the struggling revisions of the of the absence of magic in catharsis and pleasure of the world, the secret of the word and the covering of flesh.
Goethe plunged Faust into the art of resistance, and the medium of the senses had to be camouflaged as they hardly resisted their reasons of being celebrations. The torment was inserted to reason the possibilities infinity and the arts.
The knowledge of the poem was denounced as a truism and is still being rightfully crafted by the guild of poets with their options of hiding the secrets of fraternities. The last version will be one of discovering that poet who made the beginning but was never conscious of his allusion as paradise of just the writing. Thus saying the manuscript ended: “Paradise was not only the art of writing but the paradise of writing lay only in the beginning as just his imagination of thinking”.
>>By Anand Bose (Wednesday, 11 Aug 2004 16:36)
AnOrthobiography of Borges
“What is remarkable about birth is what happens after the birth. On the other hand there’s nothing more remarkable than birth” Greanadius anonyma
Nothing surprises the reader as much as an unusual biography. As I start writing, my fingers don’t tremble.
They seem to be opening into the cube and counting as 24 openings or edges, which in fact relate to the mystery of the cube or to just to a chronology of the scythe and the wizard who proclaimed the birth of Jorge Luis Borges on 24th of August 1899.
One little incident that could not be left out here is, while Jorge Luis Borges was being baptized, he came part of the preordained ritual when he emptied in all babyish innocence, a fountain that came gushing out of the Borgesian tap. It’s with a little laughter that the contents fell unknowingly on the vestments of divinity.
The Argentinean town of Palermo is tinged with the folklore of its Italian counterpart and more or less bloodied like the Father Sicilian. And little Borges grew in its suburbs with its underworld, its knife wielding goondas or compadritos, its cankerous politics, the haven of worehouses, where lusty men became Brutus’s at the slightest retort and also where whores handed out nights as unusually long days. The incendiary Gauchos are flamboyant when they burst the torrent of steel, shining it as gladiators piercing flesh. It was here that Borges learnt the rules of enchanting the nib.
His father Jorge Guillermo Borges was a teacher and a failed writer. He instilled into his son Borges the conundrums of philosophy and literature. Thus the moving chess players and the silence of the thought became an exposition for Zeno’s paradox. His mater Leonor Acevedo de Borges has descended from a family of militarists and their deeds and valours where kept alive to Borges through the art of incessant story telling.
It was Borges Grandmother whose husband was English that Borges learnt the same as sun that would go on setting and rising in new ways. English became the Borgesian anima and Spanish the animus.
His sister Norah, two years younger to him was his soul friend. During their sojourn at the summerhouse Androgue they became acquainted with labyrinths and libraries and the fragrance of fresh pine and the pleasing odour eucalyptus. In the zoo, the tiger was like a creature of sorcery. The art of its colouring similar to wheat fields of yellow and strips of black scythes running over it, ever in motion, impinged his mind into the as a wondrous carnival of id which has also become the source for many of his literary allusions. Thus we find the long tiger fang of childhood curiosity and terror being replaced by an unusually long letter or even the missing finger. The tiger tooth imported from India became a constant source of intellectual nourishment. It was replaced for the Hebrew letter Peh, in the spy and the hidden circle.
The quintessential middle-class life left Borges as funny and lonely kind within himself inventing and creating and being inspired. By the age of six, the writer in him delivered many babies who were inspirations of Cervantes. By nine he translated the happy prince of Oscar Wilde into Spanish which won him some commendation from the local newspaper El pais.
By this time Borges was also attending school. His father developed morbid feelings of Argentinean nationalism. Borges became disgusted with the putrid decadence of his companions and also was subject to their irony ridicule and taunting which he could not back up with might but pride. Thus school life became a period of resentment though he came out in flying colours.
Due to failing health Borges’s father moved the family to Geneva where he and his child attended the grammar school. It was here that he became acquainted with German, French and Latin and also his talents were noticed with greater hindsight. At college Calvin, he became acquainted with symbolist literature. Thus Mallarme,
Verlaine and Rimbaud are learning from them the art of transmutation and of its development as metaphoric motifs. From Carlyle he learnt the art of inventing the book as finding the correct passage where a winged flight of hiding places would just open and secret as a possibility. From Schopenhauer, he emulated that the craft of reason was genius hiding in towers, which were not consistent as the recesses of the mind or its processes to be artifacts of pure reason. This skill he could put into consistencies of prose, creating arcane imagery and their powerful modes of existing in multiple times and myriad metaphors. Here onwards there was no going back. It was a do or die situation of writing literature. However the attempts in French and English were both unsuccessful. Then Borges decided to migrate to his native Argentina and write in Spanish. After many unsuccessful attempts of joining literary circles and print, Borges finally found enlightenment at the circle of literature called the ‘Ultraists’. The andalusian poet Rafael Cansinos-Asséns became a source of his enlightenment. We find here an assimilative character of his literary path. Thus rather than confinement, tradition to his mind being open innovations of creation.
This part below is not Mine: as I have resorted its course as surrealism in disguised as thief on a mimetic course …This I do so for as my work is unpaid and moreover unlimited as the art deliberate literary stealing or Pilferage.
The Borgesian family returned to Buenos Aires in March 1921. The poet Macedonio Fernandéz became a kind protean mentor. He instilled into the art of the cynic disdain for the things of the word/world. By 1923 Borges had felt ready to bring out his first collection of poems. Called Fervor de Buenos Aires, the 64-page book was financed by his father. Rather hastily printed, the cover boasted a Norah woodcut, and without much thought in the way of profit, almost all of the three hundred copies were distributed freely – and often surreptitiously, such as slipping copies into the pockets of editor’s overcoats!
1923 the family returned to Switzerland so his father could continue his eye treatment, and in Spain Borges was disappointed to find that the ultraist movement had petered out; but while in Spain he managed to have a few of his poems published, and a favorable review of Fervor de Buenos Aires appeared in Revista de Occidente, a Spanish magazine. When Borges and his family returned to Argentina in 1924 he discovered that he had developed a small reputation as a poet! It seemed that his guerilla tactic of covert book placement had paid off . . . .
The years from 1924 to 1933 were quite prolific and exciting for Borges. He founded several more literary magazines with varying amounts of success, and he contributed a variety of pieces to many existing magazines, most notably Martin Fierro. Ironically, his contributions to this magazine were to take an unexpected turn when the editors of the magazine decided to “invent” a literary feud. The publicity stunt involved two groups of writers – the aristocratic and intellectual “Florida” group, and the streetwise “Boedo” group, steeped in gaucho lore. Because of his European attachments and his reputation as an intellectual, Borges was assigned to the “Florida” group, a decision that he unsuccessfully appealed. He wanted to write common literature filled with danger and local color – but nevertheless his reputation had merited the “Florida” designation. Disappointed, he spent the next few years attempting to divorce himself from that image, and as a consequence he spent many hours exploring the less reputable areas of the city, talking with the hoodlums, learning the tango, and absorbing the Italian/Portuguese dialect. (All to the dismay of his mother.) As a result, several more books of poems and essays were to issue from his pen, including Luna de Enfrente in 1925 and Cuaderno San Martín in 1929. Named for the brand of notebook in which he wrote them, Cuaderno San Martín netted him the Second Municipal Prize, a handsome sum of 3000 pesos. (One of the things he bought with the money was a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a purchase that would serve him well over the years.) In 1930, he wrote a book about his boyhood hero, the poet Carriego, who had died of tuberculosis in 1912. Unfortunately the book, Evaristo Carriego, became more of a reminiscence of old-time Buenos Aires than a biography of the poet, and it was not very successful. (He revised it in 1955.)
It was also during this period that he struck up two important friendships with women: Victoria Ocampo and Elsa Astete Millán. Ocampo, whom he met through his family in 1925, was a translator who would later promote Borges’s writing as an editor of the influential Sur literary magazine; and Millán was a 17-year old beauty with whom Borges fell in love. Unfortunately she married someone else; but some forty years later the two would reunite and marry in 1967.
The twenties were also to bring a new – albeit mild – political awareness to Borges. In an interesting and controversial break with family tradition, he supported the campaign of former president Hipólito Yrigoyen, a figure whom he compared favorably to an old family enemy, the Dictator Rosas. Yrigoyen served as president from 1916 to 1922 but, as the National Constitution barred the re-election of a president, Yrigoyen had to bide his time, pulling the strings of his party from behind the scenes. In 1928 Borges, perhaps attracted to Yrigoyen’s unusual campaign, featured prominently in the Committee of Young Intellectuals, a group dedicated to his re-election. Unfortunately, the only fruit to spring from his efforts was disillusionment – Yrigoyen won the election with more than 60% of the votes; and to the disappointment of many of his younger supporters, he proved to be too out of touch with the times to be an effective ruler. Borges’s dismay increased when a military junta, which would turn out to be only the first of many more repressive governments, overthrew Yrigoyen. Finally, like many of his generation, Borges’s disgust with politics became complete.
Sadly, the myopia he saw in the political world was becoming reflected in his own personal physical world: blindness was beginning to manifest itself in Borges as it had in his father, who was now completely blind. In 1927 he had an operation for cataracts; it would be the first of a long series of eight operations. None would succeed, and by the end of his life he would be totally blind.
Later Borges would write off this period of his life and virtually disown the literary output from these years, all of which he now disavows as being overtly derivative of others’ styles. He claims that several pieces were so drenched in local color that “the locals could hardly understand it.” His later embarrassment is such that he was actually known to buy up any copies he found of these works and burn them.
Putting politics behind him, the thirties were to see his talent taking new directions, both in the topics of his writing and in the fundamental style of his expression. In 1932 he published another collection of essays, Discusión. Many of these essays revolved around a more recent, non-literary passion – the magical world of the cinema. His work began to appear in the magazine Megáfono, literary endeavors, which brought him recognition in the form of a round table discussion about his writing in 1933. His first short story – an art form he would later perfect – was called “Streetcorner Man” and, inspired by the death of a local compadrito, the story had a gritty realism with an interesting twist at the end. Published in Crítica, a local newspaper, Borges was sufficiently uncertain about his effort that it appeared under the pseudonym of “Francisco Bustos,” the name of one of his ancestors. It was a tremendous success; but Borges had no intentions of settling down as a mere writer of populist dramas. In 1933 Borges began a series of sketches called Historia universal de la infamia, or “A Universal History of Infamy.” Published between the years 1933 and 1934 in Crítica, these stories took characters and ideas from other published works and “re-invented” them. Blending fact and fiction, often mythic in resonance, many of the stories had a vague feeling of surrealistic authenticity; and later more than a few Latin American “magical realists” would cite Borges as their primary inspiration. But his career was just really beginning: in 1935, he wrote what is considered to be the prototype of the typical “Borgesian” story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” a review of a fictional novel. In 1936 he published another collection of essays, Historia de la eternidad, or “A History of Eternity.”
Although Borges was finally coming into his own as a writer, the thirties were of course not all that kind; the world was in an economic crisis, and Borges’s father was now completely dependent on his mother. It was clearly time for Borges to rely on a more steady income than his writing allowed, and in 1937 he landed a $70/month job as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library. His work involved classifying and cataloging the library’s holdings, and it was a disappointingly simple job in which he was actually advised by his colleagues to slow down so that they could spread the task out as long as they could! He remained in the library for nine years, nine years of “solid unhappiness” leading a “menial and dismal existence.” He worked among colleagues who were less concerned with literature than with horse racing and girl watching, and to add insult to injury, his superiors and colleagues didn’t realize that he was the same Jorge Luis Borges who wrote some of the very same stories, which they were cataloging! Usually, Borges would finish his work in the first hour of his day and spend the rest of the time in the basement, reading the classics or translating modern fiction into Spanish. (Borges was the first to translate Woolf and Faulkner into Spanish.)
In 1938 two tragedies were to occur. First, his beloved father died; and then on Christmas Eve, Borges himself had an accident that would be complicated by a serious illness. (He would later recast this incident into fiction in the story “The South.”) While running up a stairway, he grazed a freshly painted casement with his forehead, and soon after the wound became infected and he fell ill, hallucinating in bed for a week. After an operation in the hospital, he developed septicemia, and for a month hovered between life and death.
Borges’s biggest fear was that he had lost his creative ability; that the disease had burned it out of him. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth – he was about to embark on a creative arc that would eventually carry him to world fame. In an attempt to discover whether or not he still possessed his creative faculties, he penned a new story, an attempt at something different, something unique. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Next he wrote “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Both were well received and published in Victoria Ocampo’s Sur. Delighted at his new surge in creativity, he began writing stories in the basement of the library, and so while his co-workers above obliviously frittered away their time on gossip, Borges was busy in the basement planting the seeds of postmodernism. “The Library of Babel” became his nightmare allegory for his job, and other stories quickly followed. In 1941, a collection of these stories was published, The Garden of Forking Paths, which would later be added to Artifices and retitled Ficciones in 1944. In 1942 he published a series of spoof detective stories with his younger friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, under the joint pen name of “Bustos Domecq.”
In addition to his new stories, which ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery, Borges also began to write political articles again. Appearing in El Hogar, these articles didn’t so much support any one political system as criticize many of the general trends of the time: anti-semitism, nazism, and the increasing decline into fascism. Ironically he gained wider recognition for his articles than for his brilliant, but largely unnoticed, fictions – a fact that was to cause him problems when the fascists came into power in the mid forties. In 1946 Juan Perón was elected president, and due to his political affiliations, Borges was “promoted” to “Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets.” He immediately decided to resign, remarking that “dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against the monotonous is one of the many duties of writers.”
Fortunately for Borges, being fired revealed itself as a mixed blessing. Soon after leaving the library, he accepted positions as a lecturer on American and English literature. He traveled across Argentina and Uruguay, giving talks on subjects that ranged from Blake to Buddhism. He was paid well, and for the first time in a long while, he was happy – although he could not conceal his pain at the direction taken by his country. The Perón regime, though coming short of directly detaining him, did attempt to make life more difficult for his family and friends. After taking part in a protest, his mother and Norah were arrested in 1948; his mother was placed under house arrest, but Norah was thrown in a jail primarily reserved for prostitutes. (When given the opportunity to be set free – if she wrote a letter of apology to Evita Perón – Norah elected to remain in jail.) Borges could rarely give a lecture without the presence of a police informer in the audience . . . although on a very Borgesian note, he actually came to know the agent, who himself was less than thrilled with his duties but needed to earn a paycheck. Still, his work went on. In 1949 his second major book of short stories appeared, The Aleph. It is perhaps notable that the title story concerns a disillusioned man who painfully denies his enemy the chance to experience the entire universe.
In 1950 Borges was elected President of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (The Argentine Writer’s Society.) The SADE had mainly political overtones – as in non-Peronista – and was under scrutiny. A typical meeting eventually fell into an interesting pattern, whereby the artists would airily discuss complex literature and philosophy until the police agents present would be bored into sleeping or departing, after which the real political discussions would take place. Despite their precautions, however, the SADE was eventually closed.
In 1952 Borges published his major collection of essays, Other Inquisitions.
In 1955 the “Revolución Libertadora” took place, and Borges was back in favor. Even though the government was still military in nature, they decided that too much culture was wounded under the gentle graces of Juan Domingo and his lovely wife Evita. The SADE was reopened, and much to his amazement Borges was appointed Director of the National Library, the job of his dreams. By this time Borges was going completely blind; interestingly two of the previous directors of the National Library had also been blind. He took it as stoically and gently as possible: “I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.” He took his job very seriously, and determined to make the library into a cultural center, he started a program of lectures and resurrected the library’s journal. In 1956 he was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, a position he was to hold for twelve years; and later that same year, he unsurprisingly won the National Prize for literature. By the late fifties, he was astonished to find out that books were being written about his life and work, and he rapidly attracted a wide circle of dedicated students. It was around this time that he wrote one of his most intriguing pieces, “Borges and I.”
With the assistance of his students and of his mother, who had begun to translate English classics into Spanish, he continued his career. To compensate for his loss of vision, he turned again to poetry, a form of writing that he could more easily revise in his head than on paper. He also continued his pursuit of knowledge, acquiring a taste for the old Anglo Saxon language and Old Norse. In 1960 he published El hacedor or “The Maker,” which was later re-titled in English as Dreamtigers. Essentially a collection of prose pieces, parables, and poems, Borges considered El hacedor to be his best, and most personal, work.
Although it was the 1940’s that first gave Borges the glimmer of international fame, when Ibarra and Callois translated his works into French, it wouldn’t be until 1961 that he would gain genuine worldwide recognition. That year he and Samuel Beckett were jointly awarded the second-ever International Publishers Prize (the Formentor Prize, which included an award of $10,000), and he found that the global spotlight was suddenly turned upon him. His work was translated into English, and all at once he became in demand. Ficciones was translated into several languages and made its way into many countries, becoming the first Latin American work to achieve such attention. He was invited to the University of Texas, and in 1961, in the company of his mother, he experienced America for the first time, a country that he had always considered in semi-mythic proportions. He spent six months travelling across America, lecturing at universities from San Francisco to New York. He would visit the United States numerous times over the rest of his life, giving lectures, readings, and informal discussions.
In 1963 he traveled again to Europe, revisiting many locations from his childhood memories and meeting again with old friends and associates, and in 1967 he was invited by Harvard to spend a year in the U.S. as a visiting professor. There he met Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who would become a good friend, a literary collaborator, and one of his principal translators. That same year he also married his old friend Elsa Astete Millán, whose husband had died in 1964. Unfortunately it was not a fulfilling marriage for either of them – Elsa had grown used to a settled, married existence, or Borges was still too much the explorer. In addition, Elsa spoke only Spanish and felt uncomfortable in English-speaking countries and in front of English-speaking guests. The marriage lasted for less than three years, and in 1970 Borges and Millán obtained a divorce, and Borges moved back with his mother. Throughout these years, however, Borges still traveled quite extensively, visiting Europe, England, Scotland, and Israel. He wrote many more volumes of poetry, and a few collections of short stories and essays. In 1967 – the year that Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published – he and his old friend Bioy-Casares published another “Bustos Domecq” book The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. In 1970 a collection of more traditionally “Argentine” stories came out, El Informe de Brodie, “Dr. Brodie’s Report.” He developed an acquaintance with one of the students who attended his lectures, María Kodama, an Argentine with Japanese ancestry. She agreed to work as his secretary, and eventually their association blossomed into a collaborative friendship. He would later marry her during the last year of his life.
In 1973, Juan Perón, recently returned from exile in Spain, was again elected president of Argentina. Although Borges’s fame was now extensive enough to render him immune from persecution, the writer refused to be a part of a Perón government. In 1973 he resigned as Director of the National Library, and decided to spend the next few years travelling and lecturing, producing another collection of stories, El libro de arena, or “The Book of Sand” in 1975. That same year, his mother died at the age of 99. Long ago people had begun mistaking Borges and his mother for brother and sister.
Life still had much in store for Borges, however. In 1976, the Japanese Ministry of Education invited him to Japan, and he finally got to visit a culture that had long fascinated him. When Isabel Perón was replaced by another military coup later that year, Borges began another one of his periodic flirtations with politics. In a similar vein to his earlier experience with Yrigoyen, Borges at first accepted the new government with a certain amount of trust and tolerance – a stance that won him the surprised disappointment of many of the Argentine left. But as mounting evidence revealed that the new government was just as abusive of power as any other traditional Argentine junta, Borges began to criticize its policies, until the “absurd war” over the Falkland Islands instigated yet another disgusted withdrawal from the world of politics.
His travels continued, and accompanied by María Kodama he journeyed around the world and compiled a travel atlas – he provided the text, and she the pictures. The resulting work, Atlas, was published in 1984, and presented their journeys as an almost mythical voyage of discovery, a travelogue through both time and space. It was during these travels that he finally had the chance to fulfill a childhood dream – stroking the fur of a living tiger. Unfortunately, the tiger’s thoughts are unrecorded.
Two years later, near the end of his long and wondrous life, he and María were married. On June 14, 1986, at the age of 86 and having never won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jorge Luis Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva.
“Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lineage was that of his own face.”
“What is literature…Just the faint beating of the heart…the hearing of its whispering as faint allusion to another image…and the art of reading about the writing. I Jorge Luis Borges was never dead. I was continually being reborn”
>>By Anand Bose (Saturday, 14 Aug 2004 16:48)
Can someone tell me, what the hell he is writing about? I just don't get the line.
>>By Ceres (Friday, 24 Sep 2004 22:53)
I grow anxious, curving the imagination of the ring ....I am the circle that opposes the ring...ing....Read the Imaginary Rabbi by Jorges Luis Borges
>>By Anand Bose (Sunday, 3 Oct 2004 13:37)
Not sure if this one should go in the Calvino or Borges page, but, in "If on a winters night a traveller" In one of the middle chapters there was a pages about the master of stories, did anyone else get the impression this was a nod to Borges ?
Also, hats off to both of them - I've found no other writers who can create and deal with the infinite like these two, and include the act of reading in the "plot".
After reading everything that's been translated by these two I'm stuck...
Any suggestions ?
>>By invisibletechnologies (Wednesday, 13 Oct 2004 04:20)
wow. is anand bose writing his thesis online? i don't even have time to read all that you wrote. just looking for some brief conversations. you seem to be regurgitating something. . .
>>By smirkbot (Wednesday, 13 Oct 2004 08:39)
To Ceres,
you're not meant to unerstand a thing, mate. It is something Derrida would call logorrhea
>>By Orphée (Sunday, 7 Nov 2004 01:13)
Orphée,
I would not call it logorrhea, but monologue. God knows how hard is to get an audience these days...
To tell you the truth, I think he's regurgitating ( using smirkbot's terms)the Aleph he'd previously swallowed.
>>By nandocax (Monday, 29 Nov 2004 00:24)
Borges’ is answering:
1. Discovering the audience is like an art: unlike the disfiguring audience.
2. Orphee; An illiterate medium littering unknown letters.
3. Borges is unable to suppress fang laughter; incisions are now smiling, Cano/nising;
>>By Anand Bose (Saturday, 11 Jun 2005 18:19)
Hi
Anyone read "Book of Imaginary Beings"???
f.
>>By Felina (Thursday, 15 Sep 2005 09:25)
Hi, can anybody help me with Emma Zunz? I've read the story 3 times and I'm still confused. All I understood is that her father died, told Emma before he dies that Zeoue...(however you spell his name) is the thief and Emma kills Zeou...(that guy). I still don't know what exactly Zeou is the thief of and why she has to kill him. I still don't know why she randomly slept with a stranger either...Can somebody please help me with this, I would be really grateful! Thanks!
>>By ManiiRani (Thursday, 20 Sep 2007 19:44)
Anand Bose: a postmodern regurgitation of everything nonsensical
>>By Nikhilesh (Monday, 10 Dec 2007 03:48)
Argentinean fiction maker, Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay, “Coleridge’s dream,” argues that Coleridge’s vision in a dream is less than ordinary and goes on to cite examples in literary history of similar occurrences- the case of Giuseppe Tartini, the violinist and composer who dreamed that the Devil, his slave, was playing a marvellous sonata on the violin. When Tartini awoke, he composed from imperfect memory the “Trillo del Diavolo.”; there is the case of Caedmon, a lowly old shepherd who in his dream one night was asked to sing “about the origin of created things.” When he awoke, he repeated them word for word to the monks at a monastery in Hild. Caedmon’s ability to sing the creation of the world, the monks report, was not learnt from men, but from God. Borges highlights, however, a more curious ‘fact’ about Coleridge’s dream. In the 14th century Persian text, “Compendium of Histories” by Rashid al-Din, one line reads: “East of Shang-tu, Kublai Khan built a palace according to a plan that he had seen in a dream and retained in his memory.” The person to whom this line is attributed is Ghazan Mahmud, a descendant of Kublai Khan. So, a man dreams of a palace, builds it, and then it ends in ruins. Five centuries later, an English poet dreams a poem about the very same dreamt palace. A dream about a dream. The ambiguity that fascinates Borges is not a question of who dreamt it up first, but who has dreamt whom.
In Borges’ short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the narrator says, “All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.” Borges’ thoughts on Coleridge’s dream is at best a simplistic and, dare we say, romantic idealisation of the dream vision inspiration. However, Borges is unwittingly pointing us towards what Shakespeare’s Prospero would call “the dark backward and abysm of time.” He is pointing us towards that dark space that Blanchot calls the space of death, where dying allows us entry into a multiplicity of loci-less voices, an absence that must be present before speech or writing can occur.
In Borges’ “Circular Ruins,” a magician dreams another man to put him into reality. After many repeated attempts, working amidst the ruins of an ancient temple, he finally succeeds, but in order to bring him to life he requires the help of the God of Fire, previously worshipped at the temple which now lies in ruins within the abyss of time. There he meditates on his project. In return for the help received he sends the newly dreamt man, essentially his son, down the way to another ruined temple to worship the Fire God. He is concerned, however, that his son might discover the fact that he has been dreamed because he learns of rumours of a man who can walk on fire without being burned ( a clear sign of his insubstantiality), and worries that if his son were to walk through fire and remain unscathed, he would soon discover his shadowy origins. Such a humiliating discovery he would not want to wish upon anyone, let alone his son.
Years later, when his own temple is surrounded by a forest fire, he walks into the flames, and is relieved to find that he is unscathed. Then, he understands with terror that he, too, is an illusion, that someone else had been dreaming him. The circular inversions of the dreamer and the dreamt, of dreaming and being dreamt, is firstly suggested by the epigraph, the incomplete thought implied when Tweedledee and Tweedledum explain to Alice that she is part of a dream the red King is dreaming at the moment: “And if he left off dreaming about you…” Alice is confronted with the possible unreality of her self, since to be dreamed is to be nothing. This is a delightful infinite regress since the Red King is part of Alice’s dream. The dreamer in Borges’ story fashions a text, and immerses it into reality, not realising, or having forgotten the words of another dreamer: “There is nothing outside the text.” The Dreamer suffers the very same vertigo from which he hopes to protect his son. Set amidst the ruins of ancient temples, themselves the beatific visions of earlier dreamers, all sense and all reason crumble. He and his son are nothing more but the voices that congregate in “the caverns measureless to man” where can be heard a woman wailing for her demon-lover, ancestral voices prophesying war, or a damsel in dulcimer singing of Mount Abora. This dark space, Borges’ “unanimous night,” is the space of death. It is not an in between, not a utopian other, but a crack or lesion in the skin of the empirical and conceivable.
The annihilation of Borges’ dreamers in the fires of Reason and Sensation is not without some promise, however. If each dream engenders yet another, and every dreamer always already implies another, then the dreamer must find meaning in his or her unremitting resurrection within the abyss. To enter the abyss, to plunge into a chorus of floating voices that cancel each other out, so that the cacophony melds into a silence, in order to re-emerge subsequently in the form of a dream, dreamt by another, is to establish language’s incessant hunger for the world, not its rejection of it.
>>By Nikhilesh (Tuesday, 11 Dec 2007 00:12)
"Borges claims in many of his interviews that there is no meaning to his stories. "
This statement makes a lot of sense, if we Remember that Borges consideres "Meaning " to be the Creator Himself. As simple as that.
>>By gatubelo (Friday, 25 Jan 2008 10:40)
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