Though some of these are presumably just repetitions--like Tlön, Babylon and Ruins all apparently involving noplaces between Asia Minor and Iraq. Borges always preferred his noplaces there or, Kafka-style, China, though "The Immortal" is set in Northern Africa I think ( Read more... )

Forgot another intrallusion: Quain's and Menard's identical conviction that all ideas belong to everyone, that literary genius must not be reserved for the few. Too tired to quote.

Forgot one--highly spoiling:

E. Quain's God of the Labyrinth: There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding converation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been ( Read more... )

Not to mention his allusions to works as yet uncreated (spoiler alert):

A. Quain: Toward the end of 1939, he published Statements, perhaps the most original and certainly the least praised or known of his books. Quain had taken to arguing that readers were an extinct species. 'Every European', he declared, 'is either potentially or actually a ( Read more... )

Continuation of previous:

5. Quain: Still more unconventional is Quain's 'retrogressive, branching novel' April March, whose third (and only) part appeared in 1936. (See story for full description!)

&

Tlön: The books are different too. Fictional works embrace a single plot, with all conceivable permutations.

& of course...

Garden: The garden ( Read more... )

I read the eight stories in The Garden of Branching Paths again, the versions that Di Giovanni put up on his website in anger and which Borges translated with him. He's since taken them down because of intimidation by Kodama's lawyers, but last I checked you can get to them via Google Cache. Hadn't really paid attention to the volume's intra- ( Read more... )

Borges interviewed:

We saw the Russian Revolution as a sort of beginning for peace among all men. My father was an anarchist, a Spencerian, a reader of The Man Versus the State, and I recall that in one of the long summer vacations we took in Montevideo, my father told me to take a good look at many things because those things were going to ( Read more... )

Twenty new translations in Poems of the Night, seventy in The Sonnets. Not always great, but something every page or so to startle me. My sister's allegedly learning Spanish. I think about doing the same, but imagine it would be the last nail in the coffin of my French--much like French murdered my Russian which obliterated my Latin ( Read more... )

Borges fetishism news: snagged discarded review copies of the two new poetry collections by mail from Housing Works for $15 total. Looks like all five volumes of this year's Penguin relaunch are edited by Suzanne Jill Levine, the weirdest and presumably least reliable of the three translators of the otherwise totally great Selected Non-Fictions ( Read more... )

Highly spoliative thoughts on The Invention of Morel1. It's interesting when authors of this kind of book leave things in that are not explained (i.e. figured out by the main character): when the narrator first sees Morel, his beard looks false. If it is, it implies he's already dying from having used his invention on himself earlier. This partly ( Read more... )