Book of Sand

To make his horror perfect, Caesar, hemmed about at the foot of a statue by his friends' impatient knives, discovers among the faces and the blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son—and so Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out: It was not I who begot you. It was the dead -- my father, and his father, and their forebears, all those who through a labyrinth of loves in a dawn so ancient it has become mythology by now, May you be saved, by your sons  and glorious ghosts. I summon them and they respond, thronging out of the numberless past, I feel their multitudes. They are who we are, and you among us,  you and the sons to come that you will beget. In the black night, a time auspicious for the arts of rhetoric and magic, they loom over me, and I seek out the frailest, the most tenuous, and say to him: O friend, again Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. Let those who hate you wander without end inside your labyrinths of tim...

  Three poems, by J.L.B., randomly selected by the FB Borges group today. They are (in the order in which I encountered them): Al hijo [To the son] (El otro, el mismo, 1964) (SP, print, 245) [A.R.] A cierta sombra, 1940 [To a certain ghost, 1940] ( Elogio de la sombra, 1969) (PC, 331)(PD, 52, N.T.dG.) La trama [The plot] (El hacedor, 1960) (CF, 307, Hurley tr.)  =========================================================== I reordered the lines of the English translations a bit to make the breaks more coherent, then built a little random number generator to select some lines (about 10-15) and put them in a random order.   Here are a few of the results: DREAM AGAIN, DE QUINCEY Dream again, De Quincey. to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day in the future, in which I now beget you. May you be saved, Shakespeare’s island, by your sons and daughters Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out Et tu, Brute? Weave nightmare nets as a bulwark for your island. Nineteen c...

Acquired two new books from U of I Library: Piranesi, The Imaginary Views (Miranda Harvey) and Borges, The Passion of the Endless Quotation (Lisa Block de Behaar, William Egginton, tr.) Piranesi's imaginary views would, one might think, be restricted to his Carceri d'Invenzione (Prisons of Imagination), but he also produced numerous views of Roman ruins reconstructed to what they might have looked like prior to their desolation. This slim picture book does reproduce several of the Carceri plates, with a comparison of some of the early and the revised plates. The revisions always seem both more detailed, more crammed, but also darker and heavier.  Also included are many depictions of temples, domes and fora, in gleaming, pristine grandeur.  Having just completed Egginton's book on Cervantes, I am eager to see his translation of these critical essays on Borges by Block de Behaar.  I also need to complete the Barrenechea book as well as the Jaime Alazraki critical essays, a...

  El sueño de Pedro Henríquez Ureña  El sueño que Pedro Henríquez Ureña tuvo en el alba de uno de los días de 1946 curiosamente no constaba de imágenes sino de pausadas palabras. La voz que las decía no era la suya pero se parecía a la suya. El tono, pese a las posibilidades patéticas que el tema permitía, era impersonal y común. Durante el sueño, que fue breve, Pedro sabía que estaba durmiendo en su cuarto y que su mujer estaba a su lado. En la oscuridad del sueño, la voz le dijo:  Hará unas cuantas noches, en una esquina de la calle Córdoba, discutiste con Borges la invocación del anónimo Sevillano Oh muerte, ven callada / como sueles venir en la saeta. Sospecharon que era el eco deliberado de algún texto latino, ya que esas traslaciones correspondían a los hábitos de la época, del todo ajena a nuestro concepto del plagio, sin duda menos literario que comercial. Lo que no sospecharon, lo que no podían sospechar, es que el diálogo era profético. Dentro de unas horas, te ...

We played at travelers on the Tokaido Road, from Edo to Kyoto, along with John Saris who saw the rotting remains of thieves crucified along the way; "a most unsavorie passage." We appreciated the art of Lorado Taft and his sculpture of The Blind, groping, reaching. We pondered the serenity of My Golden Yesterdays by Hopvsep Pushman and the other works in the Trees Collection.  We were bemused by the Bicyc-elope. We watched a century (the 17th) discover itself through the writings of its divers inhabitants; Margaret Fell, John Oglander, Harry Oxendin, Thomas Tryon, Leonard Wheatcroft, Ralph Josselin, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Hartlib and Isaac Newton. We marveled at the hidden meanings in the mirrors in Las Meninas by Velazquez and the beauty and splendor of The Paston Treasure. We sampled secrets from the Victoria & Albert Museum - a daimyo's kimono, a glass micro-mosaic table and a low-rider Chevy. We found out more about Don Quixote and the story of Miguel de Cervan...

The Arcanum, The Extraordinary True Story by Janet Gleeson (non-fiction, history of ceramics). Selected Prose John Ashbery edited by Eugene Richie When I got this home, I randomly flipped it open to page 100, which features "A Game of Shifting Mirrors: Jorge Luis Borges" a review by Ashbery.  Not the reason I bought it, which was the essay on De Chirico's novel Hebdomeros ("Decline of the Verbs") on page 88.  The god of coincidence exists. Imaginative Literature by Morris, Walker and Bradshaw  Mainly got this because it is an anthology of poetry and prose from many well known names.  I thought it might be a good book to leaf through for inspiration. It contains Borges' The Man on the Threshold on pg 196. ======================================== April 16, 1967 A Game With Shifting Mirrors by JOHN ASHBERY Review of A PERSONAL ANTHOLOGY by Jorge Luis Borges In the six years since he won the International Publishers Prize, Jorge Luis Borges has been belatedly...

  My Golden Yesterdays by Hopvsep Pushman

The Tokaido Road translates roughly as "eastern sea route" and was the main route connecting Edo and Kyoto. Captain Sherard Osborn, who traveled part of the road in around 1858, noted that: The social status of a person is indicated by the manner in which he travels. The daimyo and people of the upper class travel in norimono, which are roomy enough to allow of a fair amount of ease, and are comfortably furnished. The sides can be opened or closed at will, as a protection against the weather. The length of the pole proclaims the rank of the passenger; if a nobleman, a long pole borne by five or six men at each end; a person of lower rank, a shorter pole and only four carriers. If the occupant is a prince of the royal family, the pole rests on the palms of the hands, otherwise it is borne on the shoulders. Humble individuals have to be satisfied with a kago carried by two porters, which entails a very cramped position. In steep mountain regions everyone, whatever ...

     Menard could have chosen another Iberian literary landmark: El Cid, The Lazarillo of Tormes , or La Celestina . However, these books are contingent on the Spanish tradition, but they are not superior to it; that is, they are part of history, not above it. El Quijote is the ur -text, the fountainhead, the book that gives legitimacy to this tradition. One could imagine Spanish letters without La Celestina ; but Spain itself, as concept and reality, would not exist without El Quijote . -Ilan Stavans  "The Quixote? explains Menard, deeply interests me, but does not seem to me — comment dirai-je? — inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Poe's  ejaculation "Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!" or the Bateauivre or  the Ancient Mariner, but I know myself able to imagine it without the Quixote.  (I am speaking, of course, of my personal ability, not of the historical resonance of those works.) The Quixote is a contingent work; the Quix...

 Both of these stories involve men who at the moment of their death are granted a small personal miracle, to redo a key moment or complete a crucial task. In The Secret Miracle a Jew facing a Nazi firing squad is given one year in which to complete the composition of his drama, The Enemies.  Time stands still for him, en tableau, and he writes and rewrites the drama in his head until he is satisfied.  This is similar in some ways to the trope of 'your whole life flashing before your eyes' at the moment of death. It seems somehow possible that one just might live a lifetime in a fraction of a second. Memory can seem instantaneous, complete, and verisimilar. The recollection of a sensation excites the same feelings as the original sensation did. In dreams our perception and understanding of time is inexplicably altered. In The Other Death, a young peasant, recruited into a civil war in Argentina, in a moment of cowardice, flees from a battle. He lives a spurious lifetime of...

I write what others have already written and I comment on it.   I seek to build (or find) a library, an encyclopedia, a map...   Something that will show the way,  something that will be a fortress in the wilderness. I search for Ariadne's thread that will guide me  through this interminable and infinite labyrinth that is life. I search for Diogenes' lamp that will shine a light on Truth and dispel the darkness of fear, uncertainty and doubt. In the quiet moments, in the late hours, in the early morn, I listen in vain for my voice and I hear only echoes and the disquieting thudding of my heart. In the infinite sky of infinite night there are infinite stars, Which kind of infinity looms over me, of time, of space? The infinity that is simply vast and outside knowing, the infinity that shows us how small and insignificant we are, or the more pernicious infinity of endless combination, choice within choice, of endless branching labyrinthine possibility. In the...

I received the copy of Cervantes y el Quijote by J.L. Borges from the Illinois Library yesterday.  Spent several hours tracking down all of the pieces included in this collection.  Many of the obvious choices were available in English in other collections (Pierre Menard, etc).  I had all but one of the poems in English already, but many of the essays were from Argentinian magazines and to my knowledge were not translated yet.  While I work on that, here is an excerpt from Ilan Stavans Quixote, which I read in a day and a half:  6 Quijotismo and Menardismo Another doctrine in the Hispanic world derived from Cervantes’s novel is Menardismo, which is an outgrowth of Borges’s famous story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this tale, written in the style of a book review, a nineteenth-century French Symbolist dreams of rewriting—not copying, but rewriting word by word—El Quijote. And he succeeds in his task: Cervantes’s original and Menard’s rewriting, when ...

Borges the Labyrinth Maker by Ana Maria Barrenechea Edited and translated by Robert Lima New York University Press 1965 Forward to the Present Edition Professor Barrenechea's book has taught me many things about myself. This is paradoxical, not in the common and erroneous sense of a startling statement, but, as explained by De Quincey, in the genuine sense of a truth which at first sight seems to be merely an amusing and false whim. Another way of putting it would be to say that there are many things in an author's work not intended and only partially understood by him; the business of criticism is to ferret them out. As Walt Whitman wrote: "Why, even I myself, I often think, no little of my real life; only a few hints, a few diffused faint clues and interactions I seek for my own use to trace out here." Writers are book tools of the spirit; this is what Bernard Shaw meant when he remarks that the Holy Ghost is the author not only of the Holy Writ but of a...

After considering William Egginton's statement regarding the purpose of fiction, and considering the question of What is True in fiction?, I was searching for works on mimesis, particularly Kendall L. Jackson's Mimesis as Make-Believe that I remember reading years ago, and serendipitously came across The Mirror: A History by Sabine Mechior-Bonnet in the CPL catalog. A quick perusal lead me to the conclusion that this is a fascinating engagement with both the artifact itself and its fabrication, their appearance in literature and art, and their impact on our understanding of the world and our own sense of identity. I was thrilled to see Francesco Colonna's Hypnero-tomachia Poliphili (1499) in the chapter The Renaissance and Looking at Self.                                                        Poliphilio's Vision   W...

From Wikipedia: The elusiveness of Las Meninas , according to Dawson Carr, "suggests that art, and life, are an illusion". The relationship between illusion and reality were central concerns in Spanish culture during the 17th century, figuring largely in Don Quixote , the best-known work of Spanish Baroque literature . More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting". In this respect, Calderón de la Barca's play Life is a Dream is commonly seen as the literary equivalent of Velázquez's painting: What is a life? A frenzy. What is life? A shadow, an illusion, and a sham. The greatest good is small; all life, it seems Is just a dream, and even dreams are dreams.* It is also discussed in Egginton's The Man Who Invented Fiction: V elázquez’s pai...

 From Amazon: Jorge Luis Borges is the hero of this literary whodunit by one of Brazil's most celebrated writers. Vogelstein is a loner who has always lived among books. Suddenly, fate grabs hold of his insignificant life and carries him off to Buenos Aires, to a conference on Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern detective story. There Vogelstein meets his idol, Jorge Luis Borges, and for reasons that a mere passion for literature cannot explain, he finds himself at the center of a murder investigation that involves arcane demons, the mysteries of the Kaballah, the possible destruction of the world, and the Elizabethan magus John Dee's theory of the "Eternal Orangutan," which, given all the time in the world, would end up writing all the known books in the cosmos. Verissimo's small masterpiece is at once a literary tour de force and a brilliant mystery novel.     From Publisher's Weekly: Brazilian author Verissimo's delightful novel s...

  I learned today that there was a recent recompilation of Borges' works released as Cervantes y el Quijote in 2005 by Emece, listing as authors J.L.B., Sara Luisa del Carril, and Mercedes Rubio de Socchi.  It is in the U of I Library collection and I have requested it. There was some skepticism in the Borges discussion groups that there was enough material for a book on Cervantes and the Quixote.  However after making use of the excellent topical index at UPitt's Borges Center, I found the following references to just Miguel de Cervantes : Index: Una vida de Evaristo Carriego, Evaristo Carriego, OC, 115. La supersticiosa ética del lector, Discusión, OC, 202, 203. La postulación de la realidad, Discusión, OC, 218, 219. Paul Groussac, Discusión, OC, 233. Las versiones homéricas, Discusión, OC, 239. Gerald Heard, Discusión, OC, 277. Los traductores de las 1001 Noches, Historia de la eternidad, OC, 409. Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, Ficciones, OC, ...