The Mystery of Borges' Night 602 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Borges and Cervantes: Truth and Falsehood in the Narration
2009
Jorge Luis Borges’ relation with Cervantes has not been studied enough. In this article, we will see how Borges knew and admired Cervantes, and how Don Quixote was a powerful influence in Borges’ short stories. Borges uses some of Cervantes’ narrative devices (different narrators, the questioning of the narration, the lack of memory…) to undermine the truth of the narration. He does so, like Cervantes, as part of a literary game, but also because it suits his own notions of reality—the questioning of the narrative truth represents the impossibility of understanding reality as a whole, whereas the emphasis on the story as a fiction embodies the idea of reality as a dream.
Romance Studies, 2021
This article examines the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges's 'Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote' (1939) and Miguel de Cervantes's two-part novel (1605 and 1615) in terms of Borges's notion of the apocryphal. With reference to Borges's writings on the apocryphal as a productive form of literary creation and interpretation, particu- larly the way in which he defines the apocryphal in terms of the ‘hidden’ meanings in a text, the article considers Cervantes’s own relation to the apocryphal in his imitation of various literary genres and in his response to Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s apocry- phal Quijote (1614) in the second part of the novel. By analysing the significance of the chapters from the first part of the Quijote that Menard reproduces, as well as Menard’s explicit refusal to repro- duce the prologue to the second part of the Quijote, the article concludes that Menard’s engagement with Cervantean notions of truth, falsehood, and originality (as well as with Cervantes’s own treatment of Avellaneda’s apocryphal Quijote) ironically articulates the apocryphal nature of all ‘original’ literary texts.
Reimagining Cervantes's Don Quixote: A Modern Lens, Through Borges's Vision of Literature
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, held Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the highest regard, often praising it as a masterpiece of world literature. For Borges, Don Quixote was more than just a tale of a misguided knight—it was a profound meditation on the nature of fiction, reality, and the power of storytelling. Both Cervantes and Borges blurred the lines between imagination and the real world, crafting narratives that questioned the very essence of authorship and perception. In their works, the themes of impossible quests, multiple perspectives, and the recursive nature of time serve as a bridge between the two literary giants. This article explores how Borges’s storytelling techniques mirror and build upon the innovations Cervantes pioneered, revealing a shared vision of literature as an endless, transformative quest.
The Author of the Palimpsest Texts or "Scraping Again" the Texts of Borges (1899-1986) Today - Through the Case of Averroes-, 2010
In this paper, we try to understand Jorge Luis Borges' references to the East, especially Islamic thought, by analyzing his short stories, including Averroes' Search and The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald. This paper also attempts to conceptualize Borges' philosophical gesture. It seems that we could reconstruct his deep epistemological insights through the metaphor of palimpsest writing. In this way, it is supposed to answer the question of orientalism in Borges' work and clarify the difference between to be an orientalist and re-appropriating the orient. Finally, this paper critiques the "native orientalism" of Muslim thinkers in the Islamic philosophical context through the case of Borges.
Past Lives of Knives: On Borges, Translation, and Sticking Old Texts
TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 2004
As a rule, translation “nurtures” a text, extends its genealogy across cultural and historical divides. The strange account of this article is perhaps the exception that proves the rule. We’ll see a seventy-year old Jorge Luis Borges put heads together with a young Harvard man by the name of Norman Thomas di Giovanni and “re-write the slate clean,” translate old texts for the purpose of “sticking it” to them, suppressing them, even consigning them to oblivion. The collaboration was a bit of inspired naughtiness that we’ll call “translational infamy.” It had enduring consequences, for the good and bad, on the characters populating Borges’s writings and his private life. This equation of translation and oblivion, we’ll see it play out in Borges’s older fictions, specifically Pierre Menard; in the editorial logistics of his collaboration with Di Giovanni; in the creation—and simultaneous translation—of new fictions (Brodie’s Report); and, perhaps most interestingly, in the details of h...