''Shakespeare's Memory'' (original Spanish title: ) is a short story collection published in

1983 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. Events January * January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning of the ...

that collects the last stories by

Argentine Argentines, Argentinians or Argentineans are people from Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical, or cultural. For most Argentines, several (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their ...

writer

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo ( ; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish literature, Spanish-language and international literatur ...

, which had been published in diverse mediums, such as the national newspapers ''

La Nación ''La Nación'' () is an Argentine daily newspaper. As the country's leading conservative newspaper, ''La Nación''s main competitor is the more liberal ''Clarín (Argentine newspaper), Clarín''. It is regarded as a newspaper of record for Argen ...

'' and '' Clarín''. It was published three years before the author's death. An English translation of the stories by Andrew Hurley was published in ''Collected Fictions''.

Content

The collection contains only four short stories, making it Borges' shortest collection. These are (original titles in italics): *"August 25, 1983" ("''Veinticinco de agosto, 1983''") *"Blue Tigers" ("''Tigres azules''") *"The Rose of Paracelsus" ("''La rosa de Paracelso''") *" Shakespeare's Memory" ("''La memoria de Shakespeare''") "August 25, 1983", the first story of the collection, is about Borges encountering an older version of himself at the last minutes of his life (it is similar to Borges' previous story " The Other", from the collection '' The Book of Sand'', in which a younger and an older Borges also meet). In "Blue Tigers", the narrator gets hold of a group of mysterious blue stones whose number continuously multiplies and divides when one is not looking (retaking the themes of his previous stories " The Zahir", " The Disk", and " The Book of Sand": a direct confrontation with the inconceivable, in the form of an impossible object). "The Rose of Paracelsus" illustrates the old dispute between

faith Faith is confidence or trust in a person, thing, or concept. In the context of religion, faith is " belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion". According to the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, faith has multiple definitions, inc ...

and incredulity. And finally, the titular story " Shakespeare's Memory" (Borges' last story) is about a man who is given the memory of

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

, enabling him to peer into the playwright's most secret thoughts, but also overloading him to the point of slowly forgetting his own life. Borges got the idea for this last story when, at eighty years of age, he dreamed that a faceless man offered him the memory of Shakespeare in a hotel room.

References

{{Jorge Luis Borges 1983 short story collections Fantasy short story collections Short story collections by Jorge Luis Borges Spanish-language short story collections