Book of Sand

Today I read all of Alberto Manguel's With Borges , a recollection of his time as one of Borges' readers (meaning a person who read aloud to Borges after his blindness, in the mid-1960's.) I learned about the engravings by Durer (Knight, Death and The Devil) and Piranesi (a circular labyrinth) that adorned the walls of Borges' apartment.  I also learned of his admiration of De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars .*  I learned that Silvina Ocampo produced some strange and fantastical tales. That Bioy Casares was only 17 when he met the 31 year old Borges. That Borges' white cat's name was Beppo. That Las Delicias also figures in the story August 25, 1983 , in which Borges meets an older version of himself in a Buenos Aires hotel room. That he wrote two poems entitled Things , that are quite a bit different. He was afraid of two things, mirrors and labyrinths. "The labyrinth, first discovered as a child in a copperplate engraving of the Seven Marvels of the ...

 Page 6: ... no traces ... never lived at all [Page]9      stranger in his own life                      house as a metaphor 11-12          death as escape                    "no escape"                    Solitude                    Solitary                    disappearances 20          passed over in silence                absurdity               invisibility               failure 76          Giordano Bruno        ...

Los ingleses, que por impulsión ocasional o genial del escribiente Clive o de Warren Hastings conquistaron la India, no acumularon solamente espacio, sino tiempo: es decir, experiencias, experiencias de noches, días, descampados, montes, ciudades, astucias, heroísmos, traiciones, dolores, destinos, muertes, pestes, fieras, felicidades, ritos, cosmogonías, dialectos, dioses, veneraciones.   LA PENÚLTIMA VERSIÓN DE LA REALIDAD, J.L. Borges (1928) The English, who conquered India due to the occasional or brilliant impulse of the scribe Clive or Warren Hastings, not only accumulated space, but time: that is, experiences, experiences of nights, days, wastelands, mountains, cities, cunning, heroism, betrayal , pains, destinies, deaths, plagues, beasts, happiness, rites, cosmogonies, dialects, gods, venerations.  The Penultimate Version of Reality. J.L. Borges (1928) This essay is found in the volume Discusion (1932) which contains a few essays that have not been tran...

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was an admirer of Orlando Furioso and included a poem, Ariosto y los árabes ( Ariosto and the Arabs ), exploring the relationship between the epic and the Arabian Nights , in his 1960 collection, El hacedor . Borges also chose Attilio Momigliano 's critical study of the work as one of the hundred volumes that were to make up his Personal Library . (wiki) Also included in that volume is the Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote.  "Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king's army sought solace in the vast geographies of Ariosto, in that valley of the moon in which one finds the time that is squandered by dreams, and in the golden idol of Muhammad stolen by Montalbán ." - J.L.B. "Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote", The Maker (1960). From Chapter I, Don Quixote : "... he [Quijana] admired Reinaldos de Montalbán, especially when he saw him leave his castle and rob everybody he came...

Historia de los dos que soñaron El historiador arábigo El Ixaquí refiere este suceso: «Cuentan los hombres dignos de fe (pero sólo Alá es omnisciente y poderoso y misericordioso y no duerme), que hubo en El Cairo un hombre poseedor de riquezas, pero tan magnánimo y liberal que todas las perdió menos la casa de su padre, y que se vio forzado a trabajar para ganarse el pan. Trabajó tanto que el sueño lo rindió una noche debajo de una higuera de su jardín y vio en el sueño un hombre empapado que se sacó de la boca una moneda de oro y le dijo: “Tu fortuna está en Persia, en Isfaján; vete a buscarla”. A la madrugada siguiente se despertó y emprendió el largo viaje y afrontó los peligros de los desiertos, de las naves, de los piratas, de los idólatras, de los ríos, de las fieras y de los hombres. Llegó al fin a Isfaján, pero en el recinto de esa ciudad lo sorprendió la noche y se tendió a dormir en el patio de una mezquita. Había, junto a la mezquita, una casa y por el decreto d...

Borges quote: Al cabo de los años he observado que la belleza, como la felicidad, es frecuente. No pasa un día en que no estemos, un instante, en el paraíso. No hay poeta, por mediocre que sea, que no haya escrito el mejor verso de la literatura, pero también los más desdichados. Prólogo a "Los conjurados*", Jorge Luis Borges, 1985 Over the years I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent. Not a day goes by that we are not, for a moment, in paradise. There is no poet, no matter how mediocre, who has not written the best verse in literature, but also the most unfortunate. Prologue to "Los conjurados", Jorge Luis Borges, 1985     * Los conjurados should be translated as The Conspirators (from conjurado , one who participates in a conspiracy), and yet it also invokes one who conjures or those who conjure, the conjurors.  Addendum (8/1/22): "Years of solitude had taught him that days, in memory, tend to be the same, but that there is not a day,...

I came across the following quotation: "El mundo es tal vez un bosquejo rudimentario de algún dios infantil, que lo abandonó a medio hacer, avergonzado de su ejecución deficiente." Jorge Luis Borges "The world is perhaps a rudimentary sketch of some infant god, who abandoned it half-finished, ashamed of its poor execution." Jorge Luis Borges The actual quote I believe is from "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins", Collected Non-Fictions, (translated by Eliot Weienberger): "This world," wrote David Hume, "was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity, and ever since his death has run on . . ." ( Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion V [1779] ).  The quote is attributed to Hume, then. What did...

Things I learned today; The hotel in Adrogue, that Herbert Ashe resides in, and that the narrator translates Urn Burial in (Tlon, Uqbar...) is the Hotel las Delicias .  This is also the Triste-Le-Roy hotel that appears in "Death and the Compass". (Confirmation found in Fishburn and Hughes, 246). In 1977, Borges gave a lecture about "Adrogué in his books" at the celebration of the first "Week of Culture" of the Almirante Brown Partido .  The city issued a book about it in the same year, entitled Adrogué by Jorge Luis Borges , with illustrations by his sister, Norah Borges. The book apparently contains the following excerpt (presumably in Spanish): "Wherever in the world I might sense the smell of gum trees , I feel as if I had been taken back to Adrogué. And that is exactly what Adrogué was: a large and quiet maze of streets surrounded by lush trees and country houses, a maze of many peaceful nights that my parents liked to traverse. Country houses...

Spent all morning translating a poem by J.L. Borges, Religio Medici, 1643; which was found in El Oro de los Tigres (1972).  I did not have an English translation of it, so I attempted to produce one.  Then later, in someone's blog post , I discovered a translation by Alastair Reid, that was quite a bit more elaborate and that I think it quite a bit better; posted at RdlR.  It was attributed to The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (A Duel-Language Edition with Parallel Text (Penguin Classics), edited by Suzanne Jill Levine and Stephen Kessler), which I could not find.  In that reference this poem appears in In Praise of Darkness (1969), but Poesia Completa does not have it there. Nor does the 1969 translation by Norma Thomas di Giovanni (which I was able to find). Oddly however, The Gold of the Tigers (1972) paired with Book of Sand in a Penguin edition dated 1971, translated by di Giovanni, does not include Religio Medici, 1643 among the selected works translated. In the...

Today I started with a poem of JLB, from El Hacedor (The Maker), in Spanish: Dios ha creado las noches que se arman de sueños y las formas del espejo para que el hombre sienta que es reflejo y vanidad. El Hacedor, Jorge Luis Borges   Translated as: God has created nights well-populated  with dreams, crowded with mirror images,  so that man may feel that he is nothing more  than vain reflection. That's what frightens us. (Translated by: A.Reid) from Los espejos (The Mirrors)   ======================================== Real Art Ways in Hartford put on a multimedia presentation project All things hushed celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke. A multi-faceted arts experience, the production includes dance, visual art, video, original music, and an intergenerational cast ranging in age from 15 to 68.   From Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, I found: Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll ein Mann ihm folgen durch ...