🦋 The author speaks
 "I believe the best thing is for an author to intervene as little as possible in his work."
Well this is an exciting find: a lecture by Borges with the stated subject, "Concerning My Stories." I've been reading his stories, and some of his essays and lectures as well, but him talking about writing his stories is a new one for me! New and welcome.
Unfortunately none of the sites where I'm finding this lecture have any information about its provenance.* It's definitely from the late '70's or early '80's (because of which stories he talks about), and I'm guessing it was given in Argentina. Don't know what book it was published in, or if it has appeared in translation -- it is not in Selected Non-Fictions. He discusses four stories: "The Zahir," "The Book of Sand," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" -- he describes these three as variations on a single theme, which seems to me to be stretching it, though I can certainly see the similarities between the first two -- and "The Weary Man's Utopia," which I was surprised at because it had made so little impression on me when I read it** -- I had to scratch my head for a while to even remember what he was talking about. He calls The Book of Sand "my greatest book, if I may speak of greatest books." (I will need to go back to The Book of Sand -- it does not seem to me like his greatest book, but I have only read it once, and at the tail end of reading all his other works.) I found the talk about composing "The Zahir" the most interesting -- he starts out with just a word, "unforgettable," and imagines what it might mean if it were used in a literal sense. Progresses from there to talking about choosing a coin as the unforgettable object, about obsession, about Poe and Lenore, about love and God and insanity.
 * I am also seeing the same piece under the title "The Short Story and I", again with no information about provenance. ...But, aha! Here it is published in Los escritores y la creación en Hispanoamérica, with the following note:
Jorge Luis Borges, "Borges Tells How He Creates His Stories". ...Lecture published in 1978 in the magazine Quimera, #103-104. Transcribed by Amérigo Cristófalo.
** And when he is talking about "The Weary Man's Utopia" he makes reference to a Coleridge line which sounded very familiar as I was reading it -- turns out, it is the line which Pamuk used as his epigraph to The Museum of Innocence.
posted evening of Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges
➳ More posts about Readings
|
