Creating order in the mind: Borges' paradoxical mirror

Tusaaji: A Translation Review 6:6, 2018

This study sets out from the mutual concerns that biographers and translators face during the process of recreating a source for a new audience. It presents translation and biography writing as analogous forms of rewriting. Both biographers and translators are compelled to overcome the dilemma of the truth of the source vs. the authenticity of the rewrite. This requires them to consider matters such as fluency, (in)visibility, objectivity, fullness, accuracy, and competitiveness. Although each biography and translation offers unique solutions to these matters, they propose themselves as the "total"-exact, transparent, ultimate-representation of the source. Hence the rewriter's claim to authenticity. Based on this conceptual framework, in this paper I study the biographies Jorge Luis Borges by Jason Wilson and The Man in the Mirror of the Book by James Woodall as "authentic translations" of Jorge Luis Borges that aim to be the "total" English-language version of Jorge Luis Borges' life story. I discuss the subjectivities the biographers manifest in their works and the way in which each biography seems to present itself as total by highlighting different qualities depending on its biographer's agency.

Mind, 1970

THE CASE OF BORGES I. Borges the Artist and Borges the Thinker A LEADING historian confessed to me once that while he had been acting editor of the journal devoted to his sub-specialism he had one constant nightmare: he feared he might accept for publication a fabricated paper with fabricated documentation, so vast even a historical sub-specialism is. The nightmare represents not merely an expression of anxiety due to ignorance of certain areas-it expresses the terrible idea that the Cartesian demon can fake any symptom of reality and pass for real by any touchstone. Jorge Luis Borges is working for decades now on the execution of the nightmare. Perhaps his most celebrated instance is " Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ". It would take much work to sift the fabricated references in Borges' works from the ones deliberately misread from the over-emphasis on an author's casual remark, etc. 288 CRITICAL NOTICES: This, of course, is part of the game, for Borges wishes to shake in his reader the commonsensical confidence that one knows the difference between dream and reality-be this confidence based on any intuition or on any criterion to demarcate the two. Consequently, it is very hard to demarcate Borges' stories from Borges' essays. If we read the story ' Funes the Memorious ' we may view it as a short story or as a thought experiment about a Lockian mind with total recall. Now that A. R. Luria has published an empirical study of such a mind, one need not vindicate Borges, but may draw attention to additional treasures buried in his stories and essays. Normally one separates stories and essays functionally. The artist's task is to explore the emotional-experiential dimension. When a writer explores a new vision of the world in order to open up a new feeling, a new attitude, he is writing as an artist. As an artist he can also take a platitude and enhance it so as to make you feel its full significance. As an essayist he would rather draw from the platitude conclusions unexpected and unplatitudinous, or he would take an unnoticed fact or an outlandish thesis and show its merit and significance. This demarcation is not clear-cut. In particular, there is the area of overlap. Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited include essays thoughtful in their defence or mock-defence of outlandish theses, but also pregnant with a quaint atmosphere peculiar to these novels. So are most of Borges' writings. Like Butler, Shaw, and others, he uses a literary medium to advocate an unpopular philosophy. Like them he is in danger of being valued as a writer of note but as an advocate of a shallow philosophy. The philosophy he advocates is a variant of Schopenhauer's, and much akin to that of Erwin Schrodinger, well-known as a physicist but hardly as the accomplished writer and the intriguing philosopher that he was. It is the Schopenhauerian principle in Borges which makes him wonder what is real and what is illusory in our common experience. And it is this which makes him deliberately blur the borderline between his fiction and his essays: as if in order to imitate nature he blurs the boundary between reality and dream. The result may easily be that his essays be deemed a new form of fiction: besides the reportage novel we may see the non-fiction novel. The English translation of Borges' essays, Other Inquisitions, includes a prefatory essay of over seven pages, by James E. Irby of Princeton. His thesis is that all Borges' essays are works of fiction, in the sense in which Borges' beliefs are ' clearly not ' the ones seemingly advocated in the essays. This, I am tempted to say, is 'clearly' an indication of Irby's reluctance to accept Borges' challenge. In particular he apparently comforts himself by reference to the fact that Borges himself is dominated by skepticism. This would not be the first time that the challenger's skepticism is used as an excuse to maintain one's dogmatism. But, frankly, I do not think Irby's dismissal of Borges the thinker is rooted in dogmatism; more likely it is rooted in

May-Britt and Edvard Moser’s 2005 discovery of grid cells in the entrohinal cortex of rats has opened up new ways of thinking about how the brain processes visual stimuli. Jorge Luis Borges appears to anticipate these findings in his stories “The Library of Babel” and “Death and the Compass.” In “The Library,” Borges suggests that the hexagonal rooms are “a necessary form of absolute space, or at least, our intuition of space.” The hexagonal firing patterns of grid cells, which form, according to Edvard Moser, a “triangular array overlaid on the entire space available to a moving animal” appear to offer something very much like Borges’ necessary form. At the close of “Death and the Compass” the protagonist “looked at the trees and the sky subdivided into diamonds of turbid yellow, green and red.” This essay explores how the work of Borges demonstrates something fundamental about the embodied nature of our seeing, as highlighted by recent work in the field of neuroscience. I cite the work of Pascal, Kant, and Wordsworth in considering how Borges constructs his oneiric spaces and what these spaces in turn suggest about grid cells and their implications.

https://litteraemundijcherken.blogspot.com/ 2021/08/jorge-luis-borges-life-as-accessoryto. html?m=1, 2021

A presentation of the different “encounters” between the author and the work, and life, of Jorge Luis Borges, during more than half-a-century, and in dissimilar venues in South America and Europe. It underlines the evolution in the perception of the work of the Argentine writer, one of the most “universal” who lived in the 20th century, as well as to the whys his poetry was immediately welcomed, not so however the majority of his short-stories, which only began to “arrive”, and to be accepted as “traveller’s companions” in the 1980s. The visitation of Nordic landscapes, English and Scandinavian, as well as the interpretation of old Anglo-Saxon, and Old-Icelandic (or Old-Nordic) as the last “refuge” of the Argentine writer, helped to gain a more integral, and more relevant, vision.

The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, 2013

The 'greatness' of Jorge Luis Borges is something of an invention of the 1960s and after, based on the reception, often through translation, of a relatively small body of work from the 1940s (most notably the stories collected in Ficciones and El Aleph [1944 and 1949]). It was in this decade that 'Borges' was created: the cosmopolitan, erudite, philosophical but ingeniously playful weaver of cerebral, labyrinthine, and slippery narrative puzzles. This version of Borges is hugely reductive, as there is a strongly referential dimension to his short fiction. This interest in reality rather than fiction and in the local as well as the cosmopolitan paves the way for an understanding of Borges's deeply felt connection with what one might call popular culture. The focus of much of the author's life and work is the popular or even the vulgar: the gaucho code; the exploits of Buenos Aires hoodlums; pirates, cowboys and gangsters; detective stories and other genre works; classical Hollywood movies; tangos; and so forth. This essay explores the notion of the orilla to investigate the ways Borges's literary and other outputs constantly straddle opposing impulses: the rural and the urban, the local and the universal, the abstract and the referential, the 'high' and the 'low', the traditional and the modern.

Studies in 20th & 21st century literature, 1993

In his most "philosophical'' texts, Jorge Luis Borges paradoxically posits the act of reading as the scene of affectively "immediate" experience: his reader reads a reader reading (ad infinitum). This sort of hypermeditated, specular imitation actually comes to mirror the substantive preoccupation of the "philosophical" text itself. Borges thereby breaks down what Theodor Adorno calls "concept fetishism'' by making mimesis his textual concept. Given Italo Calvino's claim for the novelty of "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" in relation to modern genres, I propose a twofold thesis: first, that this typically Borgesian narrative juxtaposes concept and mimesis (a traditional philosophical antinomy) and then subverts the difference between them as a mediation of immediacy itself. He creates thereby a second-level "rhetoric of immediacy." Borges thus arrives at a re-inscription of the kind of narrative technique upon which traditional texts, even texts that form a part of a sacred canon, operate. The drama and rhetoric of immediacy exploited by Borges-and what is allegory, if not a "rhetorical drama''?-far from amounting to the last innovation of modem forms, as Calvino claims, might more accurately be called the oldest trick of presence in the book of absence.

This paper appraises the scope and nature of the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Borges. The philosopher who came closest to describing the riddle of the universe in Borges’ view, Schopenhauer outlines the irrational metaphysics of the cosmic Will that gives rise, in his eyes, to a pessimistic philosophical outlook on human existence. The discussion here focuses primarily on the intensive presence of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in Borges’ poetics and theoretical stance. Offering a new Schopenhauerian reading of Borges’ story “The Zahir”, I will demonstrate the refined link between genuine aesthetic observation (which, in Schopenhauer's view, belongs only to the genius creator) and the vision of microcosmic objects.

Institute of Latin American Studies, 2002

This paper examines the prevalent critical outlook concerning Borges' attitude towards philosophy, demonstrating that he is generally regarded as a dogmatic sceptic or nihilist. A close analysis of his writings reveals that this interpretative paradigm is imprecise, however. In its place, I aim at offering a new perspective regarding the place philosophy holds in Borges' writing and thought, illustrating how he conceives philosophy not as an enclosed theoretical system but rather as a dynamic, incessant and thus incomplete quest for genuine knowledge. Reflecting the classical tension of philo-sophia as the constant craving for wisdom, Borges thus seems to be closer to Socrates than the dogmatic sceptical tradition of the Sophists. This Socratic stance is dominant throughout his fictional and poetic writing. Hereby, he creates a series of literary symbols, such as the labyrinth and the absolute map, that represent and prompt the philosophical search – returning the reader to the primary experience of profound thaumazein (wonderment).