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The works of the great Argentine writer
Jorge Luis Borges almost defy
classification. His stories often read
like thoughtful essays, his essays like
poems, and his poems like brief
narrations. Borges in conversation
similarly transcends and transmutes our
expectations of the ordinary colloquy.
In the wide-ranging dialogues presented
in this volume, the author's thoughts
are evoked through the perceptive
questioning of Willis Barnstone, John
Coleman, Alastair Reid, Dick Cavett, and
others. The resulting interplay between
Borges and his interview2ers makes
fascinating reading, revealing him as
perhaps the premier conversationalist of
our time.
Borges chats intimately with his
audience. "A crowd is an illusion... I
am talking to you personally," he tells
one group. Candor, wit, and humorous
self-disparagement mark his responses,
as do the Socratic qualities of profound
yet amusing meditation and retort. "When
I wake up," he informs us, "I wake to
something worse. It's the astonishment
of being myself."
With the haunting resonance and
structure of a fugue, the pervasive
themes of Borges' works (or "exercises"
as he chooses to call them) are woven
throughout these evocative
conversations. The nightmares,
labyrinths, mazes, and mystic
experiences that are part of Borges'
creative mythology similarly loom large
in his conversations. Revealed here are
the interests that have continued to
engage the writer-Old English and Old
Norse sagas, his favorite authors
(notably Whitman, Poe, and Emerson), the
Kabbalah-as well as his feeling of what
it is like to be blind, and now, in his
eighties, his thoughts on death.
A dozen of Borges' poems are
reproduced, both in Spanish and in
English translation, followed by remarks
on how he came to write them and what
they mean. Willis Barnstone's remarkable
photographs complete the sensitive word
portrait that emerges in Borges at
Eighty: Conversations.
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