a dream. jorge luis borges.

Flynn just sent me an email. It was wonderful. It was this…

A Dream

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

by Jorge Luis Borges
(translated by Suzanne Jill Levine)

I’m new to Borges, having only recently discovered him after asking of Flynn: “Opinion, Favourite short story writer? Ever??”

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine writer and poet born in Buenos Aires. In addition to his short stories for which he is most famous, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, and a considerable volume of literary criticism, prologues, and reviews, edited numerous anthologies, and was a prominent translator of English, French and German language literature into Spanish (and of Old English and Norse works as well). His blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, and, as a personal integration of these.

J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: “He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.”