Allow me to introduce you to yet another free ebook
from the World Writers series:
Translated by Ilan Stavans
These poets are:
León de Greiff, Jorge Luis Borges, Dulce María Loynáz,
Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, Santiago Mutis Durán
Amongst other things, I've never had the pleasure of
reading Borges' short essay, Borges and I. I was going to quote from it, but
through the magic of copy and paste, I might as well quote the whole thing:
Borges and I
The other one, Borges, is to whom things happen. I
walk through Buenos Aires, stop, maybe a bit mechanically, to look at the arch
of an entrance way and a grillwork door; I have news from Borges by mail
or when I see his name in a list of professors or in a biographical
dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, the taste of
coffee, and Stevenson's prose; the other shares those preferences but with
a vanity that turns them into an actor's attributes. It would be an
exaggeration to affirm that our relationship is hostile; I live, I let myself
live, so that Borges can plot his literature and that literature justifies me.
It doesn't cost me anything to confess he has achieved a few valid pages, but
those pages can't save me, perhaps because what's good no longer belongs
to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any
case, I'm destined to be lost, definitively, and just some instant of me
will survive in the other. Little by little I cede everything, even though
I'm aware of his perverse tendency to falsify and pontificate. Spinoza
understood that all things want to be preserved in their being: the stone
eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in
Borges, not in myself (if I am someone), but I recognize myself less in
his books than in many by others and in the laborious strumming of a guitar.
Years ago I tried freeing myself from him and went from the mythologies of the
arrabal to the games with time and the infinite, but those games are
Borges' now and I shall come up with other things. Thus my
life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion,
or to the other.
I
don't know which of the two writes this page.
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