Health forced him to pack so much meaning into so concise a set of miniature forms. Only he could write the imaginative tale of what, with his power of imagination he might have done had not bad eyes and uncertain Not only does he draw from the best of his contemporaries but also from such older greats as PoeĪnd the philosophers, the cabalists, the by-gone Greeks of Alexandria. Their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style." They recall Swift, for "the same gravity amid the absurd, the same precision of detail." They also recall Sartre and Camus, Kafka, Pound and Valéry.Īn extraordinarily well- furnished mind, within which Borges moves and from which he draws at will, is obviously one source of his strength. André Maurois, who provides an introduction for one of the two volumes of translation which have just appeared, is sure that these miniatures "suffice for us to call him great, because of their wonderful intelligence, If you want to know Borges, yours must be the effort. The staying power, Borges has written only miniatures-essays, parables, short stories. Except for a few collaborations in which another writer furnished All that there is of him comes in short bits, compressed, concise, graven like a fine intaglio. This may explain in part why he does not give of himself easily, or at length. World, but does not see it, and takes refuge within his own extraordinary mind. An increasing eye illness, growing worse with the years, has blinded this gifted writer to all but light and darkness. Those who heard him amid the crowdedĮnthusiasm of students at the Casa Hispánica got a wistful impression of a giant bound in dusk. To a certain extent the mystery is mitigated. Now for the first time his work appears here between book covers, just after the man himself had appeared at several American colleges, including Columbia. Meanwhile, aspiring students who wrote for literary journals tried to break the barrier by translating bits and pieces.
In his own Spanish, in French, in Italian, but not in English. He began to sound like an Ezra Pound, wrapped by preference in his chosen isolation. Borges was out of town, or in Paris, or indisposed. Visitors to Buenos Aires who tried to plumb the mystery for themselves had little luck. To make himself understood, "an abstruse dweller in an ivory tower"-these are the phrases that the ordinary, including some of his own countrymen, shoot back. On the other hand, arcane, over-subtle, an arrogant intellectual who does not bother
A difficult writer? Too erudite? Only to the ordinary. Say his admirers, is not only the great South American writer but great in terms of any geography. He myth of Jorge Luís Borges has, for at least twenty years, caught at the minds of people interested in Latin American literature.
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