For Leopoldo Lugones
by Jorge Luis Borges
The noise of the square is behind me. I enter the Library: I feel the pull of the books like a physical force, and the quiet of this orderly place where time has been magically embalmed and preserved. To either side, the sudden faces of readers lost in lucid dreams are outlined by the light of the “studious lamps” (to use Milton’s figure of speech). I recall that I have remembered this trope before, in this place, along with that other epithet that defines the atmosphere: the “dry camel” of your Lunaraio sentimental and a hexameter from the Aeneid that uses the same figure but goes so far beyond it.
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras
These thoughts bring me to your office door. I go in; we exchange a few conventional but cordial words, and I give you a copy of this book. I think I am right, Lugones, in believing that you did not dislike me, and that you would have been amused to find some of my work to your liking. Nothing like that ever happened, but this time you turn the pages and read a line here or there approvingly, because you have recognized your own voice in them, perhaps, or because faulty execution is less important to you than sound theory.
With this my dream dissolves, like water mixing with water. The vast library that stands all around me is on México Street, not Rodríguez Peña, and you, Lugones, took your life early in 1938. Vanity and nostalgia have led me to fabricate an impossible scene. So be it, I say to myself, for I too will soon be dead, your time will be mistaken for mine, the order of events will be lost in the universe of symbols, and in some way it will be fair to say that I did take you a copy of this book, and you received it.
J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, August 9, 1960
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), known as Jorge Luis Borges, was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, animals, fictional writers, philosophy, religion and God.
Borges' works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to both the fantasy and magical realism genres. The genre of magical realism reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the nineteenth century. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges' A Universal History of Infamy (1935). Scholars have also suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled 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 and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first ever Prix International, sharing the award with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. Borges dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland, and it was there, in 1986, that he chose to die.
His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the "Latin American Boom" and the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
Bio from Wikipedia
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