Borges' birthday

[gbsteve]

After writing "There are more things", JLB himself wrote a short game called El rastro del rastro. The game is played by two correspondents, each of which is a seeker after a different terrible truth. Each must name this truth with some kind of nonsense word (typically something backwards such as Egnaro or Drawoh) but never describe it. The players

Comments

[mytholder]

Like. +1. Etc.

[richgreen01]

plus another one!

[kruku]

:)

[princeofcairo]

Actually, that's not entirely correct. Borges didn't invent the game out of whole cloth; he says in the introduction to Metaficciones that he "borrowed the conceit from a chapter in a Buenos Aires edition of Potocki's novel The Saragossa Manuscript that I have not seen in any other edition since." He goes on kind of a Borgesian tear about the origin of an unoriginal story, but the bottom line is there were a lot of weird pirated editions of Potocki in the 19th century, and not all the editors were shy about adding extra stuff, although it was usually anti-clerical porn instead of weird meta-game stuff.

Also, in his biography of Borges, Bioy Cesares claims it was he and not Borges who wrote the letter to HPL (although he used Borges' stationery to do it), but he also claims that he got a letter back from "Providence, U.S.A." that he threw into the fire unread, so you pays your money and you takes your chances.

[gbsteve]

Adolfo Bioy Casares, I think you mean. His biography of Borges of course was only published posthumously and never in English. So I think you must have misread some of the nuances (although you did well to get that far). Bioy Casares was not recounting fact in this section but rather it was an allegory of Borges' contribution to Bioy's own fictional works, and as such as response to Williamson's reading of Borges oeuvre as constituting his autobiography (in his Borges: a life authorised by Borges' widow Kodama