"Borges and I" (originally in

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

"Borges y Yo") is a

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the old ...

by the

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 and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

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 ...

. It is one of the stories in the short story collection '' The Maker'' (originally in Spanish ''El Hacedor''), first published in

1960 It is also known as the "Year of Africa" because of major events—particularly the independence of seventeen African nations—that focused global attention on the continent and intensified feelings of Pan-Africanism. Events January * Janu ...

.
publication information and text in English at Northwestern University.

Plot

The narrative hinges on Borges's self-perception as a writer, underscoring the difference between the private self that cannot recognize his ''persona'' or public mask as a famous storyteller. The former insists that he has nothing to do with the task of writing, that only Borges alone imagines the stories and completes the work of setting them down on paper. His determined attempts to fight these claims are useless since he always loses to the celebrated author. Indeed, whatever he does to extricate himself from Borges becomes irrevocably tied to Borges.

Background

Borges was born August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1914, Borges's family moved to Switzerland where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family traveled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

Philosophical implications

Borges's story raises many philosophical questions of Self and epistemology. Viewed through the analytic lens of Bertrand Russell, Russell's knowledge by description, the story explores the interesting concept of knowledge of Self by description (as opposed to the more expected knowledge by acquaintance). This is emphasized by the mention of receiving Borges's mail and reading about Borges in a book. Also, the distinction between persona and Self can be interpreted as a distinction between author and writer. The author would be analogous to the persona and Borges. The writer would be the Self and "I". Theoretically, the writer could be anyone, it just happens to be Borges. With this interpretation Borges is seen to be commenting on the cognitive differences between processing third person information and first person information.
Amherst philosophy lecturer John Perry discusses the differences between the two possible interpretations in depth. Perry, John. “ ‘Borges and I’ and ‘I’.” The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 2 (2007): 1–16. .

English translations

Multiple professional and academic translators have developed English-language translations of the story, the most notable of these being the versions by Andrew Hurley (academic), Andrew Hurley, James E. Irby, Ilan Stavans, and Kenneth Krabbenhoft, all of which have been published in notable collections of Borges's work and Latin American poetry. There are also many amateur translations, as might be expected of a story of its brevity and popularity, and there exist, of course, many disagreements and criticisms over aspects of the text, as with any translation of prose or poetry. Hurley, who is renowned for his 'widely acclaimed' translations of Borges's work, has written an essay on the subject of translating Borges, and what difficulties there are in trying to recreate for an English-speaker the effect that the original Spanish has on a native speaker of said language; he also discusses what is 'lost in translation', and what he could have done better in his own translations, addressing some of the criticisms made against him.

References

External links

*
Borges and I
' (English translation by James E. Irby from ''Labyrinths: Selected Stories and other writing,'' 1964) * Borges and I (English translation by Andrew Hurley (academic), Andrew Hurley in ''Collected Fictions'', 1998)
Borges and I
(English translation by Ilan Stavans from ''The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry,'' 2011) * Borges and I (English translation by Kenneth Krabbenhoft in ''The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology'', 2009)
BORGES’S FICTIONS: EXISTENTIALISM AND THE MEANING OF STORIES
{{Jorge Luis Borges Short stories by Jorge Luis Borges 1960 short stories Fantasy short stories