Borges the Criollo: 1923-1932

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Notes

1 The eight early texts by Borges discussed in this essay are: Fervor de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Privately printed, 1923); Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1925); Luna de enfrente (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1925); El tamaño de mi esperanza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1926); El idioma de los argentinos (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer Editor, 1928); Cuaderno San Martín (Buenos Aires: Editorial Proa, 1929); Evaristo Carriego (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer Editor, 1930); Discusión (Buenos Aires: M. Gleizer Editor, 1932). All quotations taken from these editions.

2 Discusión: the title originally implied a polemical attitude. The essay “Our Impossibilities,” which gave a particularly Argentine tone to the entire volume and which was a series of “quejas” or complaints about Argentina, was removed from the collection in 1955.

3 Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas. Individual volumes of the “complete works” have been appearing, published by Emecé Editores, since the 1950s. A one-volume edition is also available.

4 Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Jorge Luis Borges: a Literary Biography (New York: Dutton, 1978).

5 “Sentirse en muerte” reappears in part “A” (1944) of “Nueva refutación del tiempo” (1946) where Borges refers to it as “el relato ‘Sentirse en muerte’ de mi Historia de la eternidad” (1936) in Otras inquisiciones, 1937-1952 (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952), 204. (Again, Borges conveniently “forgets” to mention the first edition of the text.)

6 I have attempted in these translations of the early Borges only to bring what I thought to be the sense of what Borges was saying to the American reader. Borges’s early style is complex, pedantic (at times), and difficult to reproduce. Thus, what the reader has here is an accommodation, not a genuine translation.

7 Fervor de Buenos Aires, “Las calles,” 9.

8 Borges’s fascination with the caudillo figure may be the result of his father’s influence. While in Europe, Borges’s father wrote, with his son’s help, a novel, El caudillo (1921), which deals with the personality of a rural warlord. In the novel, the caudillo destroys the novel’s urban protagonist, who was to have married the caudillo’s daughter.

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Alfred J. Mac Adam

Alfred J. Mac Adam, longtime professor of Spanish at Barnard College and editor of Review from 1984 to 2004, is the author of Textual Confrontations: Comparative Readings in Latin American Literature (1987) and other books. He has translated a wide range of Latin American authors, including Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alejo Carpentier, as well as Fernando Pessoa.