The Masked Writer

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Roger Caillois

Roger Caillois (1913-1978), a polymath and early champion in France of Borges’s writing, launched the Croix du Sud series for Gallimard in 1952, which introduced a number of Latin American writers to French readers. He co-founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille in the 1930s and spent World War II in South America, sponsored in part by Victoria Ocampo. His books include Man, Play and Games (1958) and The Writing of Stones (1970).
Peering behind the narrative mask of an early story, Roger Caillois discovers an original face in this excerpt from his “Translator’s Postface” to Borges’s Histoire de l’infamie—Histoire de l’éternité, reissued in France by Société Génerale d’Editions in 1971.