“A wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading.” ―Steven Poole, The Guardian
Six incandescent lectures on literature from the patron saint of mirrors, metafiction, and infinite libraries.
For more than thirty years, Jorge Luis Borges’s Norton Lectures went unpublished. Recorded at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, the tapes gathered dust in a library vault until their discovery after his death. It was a twist that the author of Labyrinths would have relished. This volume assembles the recovered materials, offering a priceless window into the Argentinian master’s lifelong love affair with the English language.
This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and erudition of one of the twentieth century’s enduring literary voices. Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms―especially the novel―to literary history, translation theory, and philosophical aspects of communication writ large. Borges here draws on a wide range of literary examples―modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese. He brings characteristic eloquence and inexhaustible enthusiasm to readings of Plato, the Old Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
Whether discussing metaphor, the origins of verse, or his own “poetic creed,” Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and the making of a unique artistic sensibility, This Craft of Verse is a sustained encounter with one of the writers whose place in the twentieth century will be forever remembered.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentinian poet, essayist, and short story writer. The author of Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Aleph, among other beloved collections, he is one of the best-known figures of twentieth-century Latin American literature.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, Nothing Ever Dies, and, most recently, To Save and to Destroy. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and Guggenheim fellowships and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nguyen is Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu is a scholar and writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism in several languages. He previously served as Professor of Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, and Hispanic Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
