Borgesian1 (u/Borgesian1)

Borgesian1 commented on Borges: Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays laphamsquarterly.org/roun... · Posted by u/drdee

karaterobot · 3 years ago

It would have been more Borgesian for every book on this list to be a completely made up citation, backed with excerpted quotes and a brief biography of the fictional author, sprinkled with actual facts so that you can't quite tell if it's real or not.

FWIW, I liked the book Professor Borges, which is (or purports to be) notes from an English literature class he taught. Whether it's accurate or not, it has a lot of what feel like the kinds of observations he would make.

Borgesian1 · 3 years ago

Glad you liked Professor Borges!! I can vouch for its authenticity. There should be a foreword explaining this (lest it has been removed in the English edition) The book is based on transcripts made from actual recordings of his lectures. The text is thus completely unaltered, there´s no significant difference between reading _Professor Borges_ and actually attending Borges´lectures back in the late ´60s It´s due to this that I always say it´s not just a book: it´s also, in a way, a time machine.

This is also the reason for the quote before the foreword:

"I know, or rather I should say that I'm told, for I am certainly unable to see it, that my classes are increasingly crowded, with more and more students attending, and that many of them are not even registered in the course. I thus think we can safely assume that they want to listen to my lectures, right?"

When he says above that many students are attending without being even registered he means that they´re attending in spite of his course not being a requirement for them. They´re attending as listeners, regardless of their earning no credit for it, out of sheer pleasure and genuine interest.

In Spanish: "Yo sé, o más bien me dicen, porque desde luego yo no puedo verlo, que mis clases se llenan cada vez más de alumnos, y que muchos no están ni siquiera inscriptos en la materia. De modo que debiéramos suponer que quieren oírme, ¿no?”

Borgesian1 commented on Borges: Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays laphamsquarterly.org/roun... · Posted by u/drdee

damnitpeter · 3 years ago

Any recommendation of a one of his works in particular to get into Borges? I've heard a lot about him but no clue where to start.

Borgesian1 · 3 years ago

You could get his _Selected Fictions_ Then read The library of Babel Funes the Memorious The God´s Script The Book of Sand The Garden of Forking Paths

The above are enjoyable for beginners - even though of course there are many more layers of meanings than are first apparent in those stories. But that deeper enjoyment can come later. They´re formidable narratives in their own right.

Borgesian1 commented on Borges: Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays laphamsquarterly.org/roun... · Posted by u/drdee

damnitpeter · 3 years ago

Any recommendation of a one of his works in particular to get into Borges? I've heard a lot about him but no clue where to start.

Borgesian1 · 3 years ago

The recommendations you´re getting are right on spot: Fictions (1944) The Aleph (1949) The Book of Sand (1975) I have to say, however, that not all stories in those books are equally palatable for newcomers. If you´d like more specific recommendations on which stories to read first, let me know. I have written a full page with recommendations for beginners on how to start.

Borgesian1 commented on Borges: Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays laphamsquarterly.org/roun... · Posted by u/drdee

redmalang · 3 years ago

These lectures by Borges are seriously under-appreciated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLV7t9DvN8

The fact that Borges was, apparently at this point blind and doing these lectures essentially from memory is just mind boggling to me.

Borgesian1 · 3 years ago

Borges´ memory was famously prodigious. But just as exceptional was his appetite for books. If you read his lectures or transcribed dialogues, you will feel that he has read everything He could cite the most obscure writers of any epoch and region by heart. Persian myth, medieval German writers, ancient Japanese poets or monks, Scottish folklorists, theologians and heresiarchs, belonging to antiquity, the Middle Ages or recent times. You name it. And then he would relate all of those with daily occurrences. He would hear a rhyme from a street peddler, find in it an implicit philosophical paradox and recite a verse from ancient Carthage or a medieval Chinese tractate to provide a solution. He also had a penetrating intuition, and his conclusions, reached by himself through personal intuition and later woven into his stories, often turn out to be confirmed by later scientific research. It´s hard to understand how he managed to grasp reality with such depth. It really seems as if his mind was of a greater order of complexity than that of mere mortals. In a way similar to Einstein´s.

Borgesian1 commented on Borges: Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays laphamsquarterly.org/roun... · Posted by u/drdee

blueyes · 3 years ago

One thing that surprised me when I first learned about Borges was the weight he gave to his English lineage, intellectually and culturally. Argentina has a fraught relationship with the UK, especially since the Falklands, but there are many historical events that link the two countries. The Welsh settlements in Patagonia being just one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonian_Welsh

Borgesian1 · 3 years ago

Borges´ paternal side of the family had strong British roots. His grandmother was called Frances Haslam - she was born in Staffordshire in 1842.

In 1871 she married Colonel Francisco Borges in the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. But the colonel died (or rather, deliberately got himself killed to prove his honor) in the Battle of La Verde (1874), final skirmish of a fruitless insurrection.

The couple had two children: Francisco Eduardo (who was to follow the military career of his late father) and Jorge Guillermo (who instead followed the bookish tradition of his British ancestors, and would eventually become the writer´s father)

After the colonel´s death, his widow, Frances Haslam was left to fend for herself - without ever having learned to speak proper Spanish.

British, Borges´ father was thus raised in a fully British atmosphere. His mother only spoke to him in English and he grew up reading reading English literature.

Colonel Borges´ premature death thus had the effect of duplicating his British widow´s British influence on coming generations. Even though Borges´ father was half "criollo" and half British, he was raised in a fully English household reading English literature.

He then passed this British tradition on to his son, the writer. Borges clearly states in his Autobiographical Essay that he first heard poetry in English and that his first acquaintance with literature was in English. He even remarked, that he first read that most famous of Spanish-language novels, Miguel de Cervantes´ Don Quijote, in English. And when he finally had the chance to read it in Spanish, he deemed the Spanish edition to be a poor translation from the English "original"