#003 Fri (6/24/22) - maps and mysteries about Adrogué and its quiet hotel, Las Delicias

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 in which you could guess how life was behind those country houses. In some way, I have always been there, I am always here. You take the places with yourself, the places are within yourself. I am still among the gum trees and labyrinths, that place where you can easily get lost. I guess you might as well get lost in Paradise. Bizarre statues turn pretty, a ruin that is not a ruin, a tennis court. And then, in the very Las Delicias Hotel, a big room with mirrors. I have certainly found myself in those infinite looking glasses. Many arguments, many scenes, many poems that I imagined were born in Adrogué or were fixed in Adrogué. Whenever I talk about gardens, whenever I talk about trees, I am in Adrogué; I have thought about that city, it is unnecessary to name it." (1981).

This quote appears on the wikipedia page Adrogué. There the quote is attributed to Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges by Jaime Alazraki (1987). I was able to find a searchable copy at Internet Archive and a pdf (not searchable) from ZLib. The quote, which does not appear anywhere within this volume, is given as (1981)? The book was reissued in 2011 on the 112th anniversary of the author (1899+112 = 2011). 

This still does not explain the provenance of the attributed quotation, the anomalous date or the translator; nor does the edit history or the talk page at wikipedia shed any light on the subject.  The quote appeared long before the attribution to Alazraki.  In its first appearance the (1981) date was already affixed. 

I was able to find this unattributed quote from Adrogue:

These words appear in the Poesia Completa, under the collection El Hacedor (1960).  A translation by Alastair Reid is found in Selected Poems, p. 133.

In An Autobiographical Essay (which appears in the Alazraki book, also in the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translation) there is the following quote:

"During all these years, we usually spent our summers out in Adrogué, some ten or fifteen miles to the south of Buenos Aires, where we had a place of our own—a large one-story house with grounds, two summerhouses, a windmill, and a shaggy brown sheepdog. Adrogué then was a lost and undisturbed maze of summer homes surrounded by iron fences with masonry planters on the gateposts, of parks, of streets that radiated out of the many plazas, and of the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus trees. We  continued to visit Adrogué for decades."

This A.E. seems to have been included in The Aleph & Other Stories (1970). 

I was also able to find a fine, detailed map of the city of Buenos Aires dated 1906. Posted in RdlR.

 Androgue is too far south to appear on this map.