Borges at eighty: Conversations - Hardcover

Jorge Luis Borges

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253166268 ISBN 13: 9780253166265

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1982

Synopsis

The works of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges almost defy classification. His stories often read like thoughtful essays, his essays like poems, and his poems like brief narrations. Borges in conversation similarly transcends and transmutes our expectations of the ordinary colloquy. In the wide-ranging dialogues presented in this volume, the author's thoughts are evoked through the perceptive questioning of Willis Barnstone, John Coleman, Alastair Reid, Dick Cavett, and others. The resulting interplay between Borges and his interview2ers makes fascinating reading, revealing him as perhaps the premier conversationalist of our time.Borges chats intimately with his audience. "A crowd is an illusion... I am talking to you personally," he tells one group. Candor, wit, and humorous self-disparagement mark his responses, as do the Socratic qualities of profound yet amusing meditation and retort. "When I wake up," he informs us, "I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself."With the haunting resonance and structure of a fugue, the pervasive themes of Borges' works (or "exercises" as he chooses to call them) are woven throughout these evocative conversations. The nightmares, labyrinths, mazes, and mystic experiences that are part of Borges' creative mythology similarly loom large in his conversations. Revealed here are the interests that have continued to engage the writer-Old English and Old Norse sagas, his favorite authors (notably Whitman, Poe, and Emerson), the Kabbalah-as well as his feeling of what it is like to be blind, and now, in his eighties, his thoughts on death.A dozen of Borges' poems are reproduced, both in Spanish and in English translation, followed by remarks on how he came to write them and what they mean. Willis Barnstone's remarkable photographs complete the sensitive word portrait that emerges in Borges at Conversations.

About this title

About the Author

Jorge Luis Borges (1890-1982), Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer, revolutionized modern literature. He was completely blind when appointed the head of Argentina’s National Library.

Willis Barnstone, professor, poet, and scholar, is the author of eighty volumes, including The Restored New Testament, The Gnostic Bible, The Poems of Jesus Christ, The Poetics of Translation, and Mexico in My Heart: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Oakland, California, and Paris.

Review

One of the collection's most interesting aspects is the interaction of these incompatible elements: the obvious pleasure Borges takes in the opportunity to present himself for public consumption, and his reflexive skepticism about the necessary fraudulence of the writer as personality... The man we see in these eleven interviews is a person made of books, a librarian who often remarked that his idea of paradise was an endless library -- a sort of eternal busman's holiday.

One of the collection s most interesting aspects is the interaction of these incompatible elements: the obvious pleasure Borges takes in the opportunity to present himself for public consumption, and his reflexive skepticism about the necessary fraudulence of the writer as personality... The man we see in these eleven interviews is a person made of books, a librarian who often remarked that his idea of paradise was an endless library a sort of eternal busman s holiday. "

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253166268
• ISBN 13: 9780253166265
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192