A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper. Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges’s manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and "thought" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges’s most celebrated stories and essays--"The Aleph," "Kafka and His Precursors," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Emma Zunz," and many others--as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego. As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.
In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature. Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and—until now—hermetic authors of our time.
In Voice-Overs, an impressive collection of writers, translators, and critics of Latin American literature address the challenges and triumphs of translation in the publishing industry, in teaching, and in the writing culture of the Americas. Through personal anecdotes as well as critical analyses, they engage important, ongoing debates over issues of language, exile, cultural identity, and literary markets. Institutions and personalities in Latin American literary translation are highlighted to examine the genre's cultural politics and transnational impact.
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By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study gives us a new sense of Borges' place within the context of contemporary literature.
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