Essayists From Argentina

"Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal. I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing."

"Well, he wrote a book -- well, maybe here I'm being political -- he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that's rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn't care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn't mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he's on the side of the Communists, I'm against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us."

"This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather."

"Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one."

"I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets."

"Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself."

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic...For Borges, on the other hand, the key to the fantastic resides within the articulation of a new language. His allegories, fictions, poems and essays make a distinction between what language represents and what it wants to represent. Within the border of that which is spoken and that which is not, arises the space that we would call the fantastic, where the unusual does and does not astonish and where magic is also reality."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc."

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."

"Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges is no longer my favorite short story book. I could name dozens I love more and held more dear—but when I read it, at age 12 I think, maybe younger, it blew my mind in a way that taught me that fiction was a territory of freedom unlike any other, where if I’d venture, I’d have immense powers. The possibilities that these stories offer, the sheer power of the imagination displayed here, is unforgettable. And for me to read it in Spanish, to read this kind of wizardry in my language, was just a joy."

"Borges is the only living successor to Franz Kafka."

"As Borges, the Master, said: “When I heard Funes speak, then I had the story.” One has to let the character speak."

"Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges' thought. In "Pascal's Sphere" he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself — the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed — but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno's elation and Pascal's anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges' history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In "The Flower of Coleridge" the coincidence of Valéry's, Emerson's, and Shelley's conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor — the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance — and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such "avatars" point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, "can be all things for all people, like the Apostle." While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as "New Refutation of Time" shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be "refuted." The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges' stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity — God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality — which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities."

"If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author."

"Borges is very accessible to English people. English was his first language, did you know that? His grandmother taught him English before he learnt Spanish, and there is something about his writing that comes over in the English."

"When I met Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer, he became excited and started talked volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, which they often had, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done by Schopenhauer."

"O inventor da literatura virtual, essa sua literatura que parece ter-se desprendido da realidade para melhor revelar os seus invisíveis mistérios."

"(About Pope Francis) remains an enigma of gifts that time and history will reveal. There is still a wealth of qualities that we will discover over time. Pope Francis had a vast theological, literary and philosophical culture. He always presented himself with simplicity, never flaunting his culture, but he was a fine intellectual. Suffice it to say that he was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges, whom he invited to speak at his school in Buenos Aires."

"(What’s your go-to classic? And your favorite book no one else has heard of?) More than any other book, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Labyrinths,” which I discovered when I was 15, showed me what was possible in short prose nonfiction."

"Borges was already considered a sort of genius but “a writer for writers,” nobody else would be able to understand his stories. Or buy his books, for that matter. Much later things changed dramatically, and now his oeuvre is a worldwide reference. One could write forever about this phenomenon. And many many books have been written: Borges and mathematics, Borges and the Kabbala, and so on."

"Borges was very shy and ironic and somewhat self-absorbed. His colleagues admired his writing, of course, but said he was a writer for writers, that the common reader would never understand him."

"He was a walking system of thought. You could see the way his mind worked, since he was offering it so generously-also in a self-centered way, because he didn't care to listen much. He monologued in the most splendid and humorous fashion-he seemed so serious, but was full of wit and naughty humor...The people who surrounded him-the group that visited our home during those years were all great. Borges didn't stand out among the rest; he was so shy. What I do remember are his lectures. I went to every one of them. At times, there would be sudden and long silences; the public suffered, thinking he had lost the thread, but he was simply searching. The minute he opened his mouth again, the exact term emerged like a gem."

"Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of international goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics."

"Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color."

"Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible."

"That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox."

"It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing."

"Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

"The vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud."

"Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius."

"Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor."

"The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it."

"Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeschylus' The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the waters of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true nature of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, Urizen's books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephen Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page."

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings."

"From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite). Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books."

"There is no combination of characters one can make — dhcmrlchtdj, for example — that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god."

"I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand."